Udacity's Expansion into China with Cloudflare
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Asia
Country
- China
- United States
Product
- Nanodegree educational programs
- Cloudflare’s China CDN
- Page Rules
Tech Stack
- Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Sales & Marketing
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Udacity is an online education company that offers 'Nanodegree' educational programs. The company's mission is to make entry-level tech jobs more accessible to people around the world. Udacity's programs have been taken by students from hundreds of different countries, and some of these students have been hired by top tech companies including Google, Amazon, and Facebook. As part of their strategy to democratize education, Udacity aims to penetrate developing markets, with China being a prime target due to its deep cultural values of education and increasing private spending on education.
The Challenge
Udacity, an online education company, aimed to penetrate the rapidly growing education market in China. However, they faced challenges due to strict internet regulations by the Chinese government and slow internet connections throughout the country. Their US-based content was difficult to access for Chinese customers, leading to frustration and potential loss of customers. The main issue was that the loading of assets from their classroom, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), would take several minutes due to throttling of AWS CloudFront nodes to as little as 20Kbps.
The Solution
To solve the challenge of slow asset load times, Udacity needed a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that had a presence in mainland China. They chose Cloudflare, which offers a Global CDN network with 20 points of presence (PoP’s) across mainland China through a strategic partnership with Baidu. By leveraging these mainland China PoP’s, Cloudflare offers the only globally integrated CDN with a China presence, dramatically increasing web performance and security for Udacity and their visitors across China. In addition to a global, scalable network, Udacity required control. Through Page Rules, Udacity has fine-grained control over their use of Cloudflare’s network and security services.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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