EdTech platform: 20K to 250K daily users, zero downtime
Yash Korat
Geminate Solutions builds and runs a multi-tenant EdTech platform. It started at 20,000 daily users. Three years later it serves 250,000+ daily active users and peaks at 10M+ requests a minute. White-label brands like Your CA Buddy and Youth Pathshala run on it. This is a platform we operate every day, not a build we handed over and left.
Phase 1: Stop the Monday outage
Everything ran on one monolith. A single database was the transactional store, the cache and the analytics engine at once. Every Monday at 8:00 AM, twenty thousand students logged in inside 90 seconds and the whole thing buckled.
Moved auth to its own service with JWTs and read replicas, so logins never touched the primary database. The Monday slowdown became a 3-second blip.
Put submissions behind a queue with guaranteed delivery. The worst endpoint's p99 latency dropped 80%.
Weekly outages were gone within 90 days.
Phase 2: Scale from 50,000 to 200,000 daily users
Split the monolith into services for auth, content, submissions, reporting and analytics, each owning its own data.
CDN in front of all video, caches pre-warmed before scheduled live sessions, adaptive bitrate for patchy connections.
Reporting moved to its own analytics database. Teacher dashboards went from 14 seconds to under one.
Multi-region deployment. At 200,000 users, p99 latency was better than it had been at 20,000.
Phase 3: One platform, many brands
Row-level security keeps each tenant's data separate. Branding is configuration, so a new brand goes live in days without anyone shipping code.
What we learned
The jump from 50K to 150K users breaks more platforms than 150K to 250K. The first is architecture, the second is engineering.
At scale your database isn't the bottleneck. Your session layer is.
You can't CDN your way out of a login storm. You have to rebuild the auth flow.
Stack: Flutter, Node.js, Python, PostgreSQL, Redis, ClickHouse, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, AWS.
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Posted Sep 28, 2026
The multi-tenant EdTech platform we build and run ourselves. It grew 12x over three years, now peaks at 10M+ requests a minute, and went through three scaling migrations with zero downtime. Your CA Buddy and Youth Pathshala both run on it.
