Scalable design for an EdTech Platform
Lets say you have a ed-tech platform that has some basic functional requirements -
- Video streaming (course lectures)
- Student management and progress tracking
- Code editor (like LeetCode)
- Static content pages with text and images
Video Lectures
As video is bandwidth-heavy and latency-sensitive, we should stick to cloud for scalability.
- Store video content in AWS S3 or similar cloud storage
- Implement CDN (Cloudflare, Akamai) to minimize latency and distribute traffic
- Use adaptive bitrate streaming to accommodate different network conditions
Code Execution Engine
Sandboxed code execution, security is a concern
- Use Docker containers to encapsulate user code safely.
- Orchestrate containers with Kubernetes for scaling and failure recovery.
- Implement job queue system (Kafka/RabbitMQ) to control execution flow
- Set resource limits and timeouts to prevent abuse.
Student Progress Tracking
This will be write-heavy.
- Use write-optimized database like DynamoDB or PostgreSQL with indexing.
- Introduce a Redis cache to serve frequent read patterns like “current progress” or “completion rate.”
- Use denormalization to support dashboard views and filtering efficiently.
- Batch writes where possible to reduce database load
Static Content Delivery
For efficient delivery of text and image content:
- Host static assets on object storage (S3)
- Implement CDN with edge caching
- Use image optimization and compression techniques
- Implement lazy loading for improved page performance
Scaling and Monitoring
- Deploy Nginx/HAProxy as load balancers with auto-scaling capabilities
- Implement Prometheus and Grafana for real-time monitoring and alerting
- Set up distributed tracing (Jaeger/Zipkin) to identify performance bottlenecks
- Design circuit breakers to prevent cascading failures during peak loads