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Re:What Jamie Wong did at Khan Academy by spicyj on Thursday August 23, 2012 @02:45PM (#4424137)
At Khan Academy, we actually have terabytes of data; some of our tables have close to a billion rows.

Our backend does much more than just serve static files -- you'd think that we don't have to do much but we keep track of video and exercise progress, summarize progress by user and by coach, provide video recommendations, host a Q&A system with notification support, award badges in real-time while avoiding costly datastore queries, handle mailing lists and email subscriptions, and have support for having a public profile to show off your progress, among other things.

We handle hundreds of requests per second and it's really nice to not have to think about scaling very much -- with any other solution, we'd be doing a lot more system administration.

Re:What Jamie Wong did at Khan Academy by danmux on Thursday August 23, 2012 @03:17PM (#4424324)
Wow, my bad! Thanks for pointing that out. If you scale my numbers up that would be costing you $60,000 per month. If you are doing recommendations you are probably processing significant amounts of data as well. I guess theres no way we could know the commercial arrangements, but It surely cant be the same as your average small time developer.
Re:What Jamie Wong did at Khan Academy by dylanvee on Thursday August 23, 2012 @07:58PM (#4425534)
We also use Hive on Amazon Elastic MapReduce to do some of our analytics.
Re:What Jamie Wong did at Khan Academy by theodpHN on Friday August 24, 2012 @07:01AM (#4427049)
Is KA billed standard public rates for GAE usage, or is this donated by Google?