Like many startups, Coursera began its data storage journey with MySQL, a familiar and industry-proven database. As Coursera's user base grew from several thousand to many millions, we found that MySQL provided limited availability and restricted our ability to scale easily. New product initiatives and requirements provided a perfect opportunity to revisit our choice of core workhorse database.
After evaluating several NoSQL databases, including MongoDB, DynamoDB and HBase, we elected to transition to Cassandra . Cassandra's relative maturity, masterless architecture (for availability), tunable consistency, and stable low-latency performance made it a clear winner for our needs.
Learn more about what it takes to transition from SQL to Cassandra in this talk.
Daniel Chia - Coursera, Inc.
As one of the early engineers of the company, Daniel Chia drives the infrastructure team to build platform capabilities that enable new features, ensuring site performance and reliability, and the curation of Coursera' service-oriented architecture. He was one of the two engineers that worked on Courser's first version of the peer feedback system that allowed students to provide feedback to one another on assignments they did. Chia now leads the adoption and development of Cassandra, Scala and all service-oriented infrastructure at Coursera.
