How Canva Saved Millions in AWS S3 Costs?

A Deep Dive into Cloud Storage Optimization

Imagine having to store 230 petabytes of data — that’s 230 million gigabytes, or roughly equivalent to 57.5 million HD movies. Now imagine the monthly bill for that storage. Scary, right? This was the reality for Canva, the online design tool giant, as they faced skyrocketing Amazon Web Services (AWS) costs. But here’s the kicker: they managed to slash their annual AWS bill by a whopping $3.6 million. How? Let’s dive into this David vs. Goliath story of cloud cost optimization.

The Canva Conundrum: Scaling Success and Spiraling Costs

Since its launch in 2013, Canva has exploded in popularity. With over 100 million monthly active users across 190 countries, creating a mind-boggling 15 billion designs, Canva’s growth has been nothing short of meteoric. But this success came with a hefty price tag — specifically, their AWS storage costs.

Canva’s infrastructure is built on AWS, leveraging services like Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon DynamoDB. But the real storage heavyweight in their stack is Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), where they store those 230 petabytes of data. To put that in perspective, if you tried to store this on…