Educational Digital Infrastructure
Collaboration and Research Services for Higher Education
openEDU is an open-source digital workplace for higher education institutions: a complete, self-hostable suite of integrated services — from Collabora and CryptPad for documents, to Jitsi and BigBlueButton for teaching, to Ilias and JupyterHub for course operations. This site is its documentation and knowledge base.
The architecture section explains how the platform is designed and operated: identity and authentication, networking and traffic flow, storage, security, and capacity planning — written from real deployment experience, not marketing. The components section documents every integrated service: what it does, why it was chosen, and how it is configured.
Everything here is open source — source code on request — and openly documented. The blog tracks the project's progress — infrastructure decisions, compliance work such as BSI IT-Grundschutz, backups, and honest comparisons with alternatives like SCS, Proxmox, and La Suite. If your institution is evaluating a sovereign alternative to proprietary cloud suites, start with the architecture overview.
A one-line config change in the app repo's compose file let a routine deploy recreate the production Dgraph, SIGKILLing it and contributing to a data-loss incident. Why stateful services are pets, not cattle, and why --no-deps is a deploy-line that saves weekends.
A conservative analysis of a federated, open-source email and collaboration platform for 2.8 million students, modelled on Germany's federal education structure with one instance per Bundesland.
Data sovereignty is decided at the backup layer: openEDU protects critical services with k8up and a 3-tier model (RPO/RTO/retention) on S3, verifies restores in production, and honestly shows what is still missing – 29 RWO PVCs await CSI snapshots.
Interested in deploying openEDU at your university? We'd love to hear from you.
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