The scenarioHigh-Performance School Portal
despite the crisis

During the COVID-19 pandemic, digital infrastructures across Germany reached their limits, but the Educational Organization (PaedOrg) of the Hessian School Portal remained stable. Despite peak loads of up to 300,000 concurrent users, the platform did not experience any outages.

This stability is underpinned by a scalable, cloud-native architecture implemented by WIIT AG on behalf of the Hessian Ministry of Culture, Education, and Opportunities.

Client: Hessian Ministry of Culture, Education, and Equal Opportunity
Project: School Portal Hesse
Project period: October 2020 – present

The ChallengeDigitale Bildung für Millionen

The state of Hesse needed an infrastructure that: could support up to 2.5 million users in the future; could handle unpredictable traffic spikes during school operations; met the highest standards for availability and security; was based on open-source technologies; and was designed to be cloud-native and scalable in the long term.

Dynamic load situations arise particularly in educational settings—for example, at the start of classes or during statewide exams. This challenge intensified significantly during the pandemic.

The solutionCloud-Native Architecture
with automatic scaling

WIIT developed and implemented a highly available cloud architecture for the Hesse School Portal (PaedOrg).

Architecture Highlights

  • Internet-enabled, scalable cloud environment based on open source (Ubuntu)
  • Automatically scaling VM clusters with PHP8
  • Master-slave database setups (MySQL) for load balancing
  • Redis clusters for fail-safe caching and session management
  • Dedicated DDoS protection
  • Load balancers for dynamic load balancing
  • GitLab as the central repository for code and configuration
From the legacy system to a cloud-native platform

A key project objective was to transition the existing platform architecture to a cloud-native architecture. This involved decomposing and horizontally scaling the platform components across multiple data centers, with additional caching for static and dynamic content.

In addition, an ITIL-compliant operational process was established to ensure stable, sustainable, and transparent platform operations. This includes structured incident and problem management, encompassing major incident processes, clearly defined prioritization, and targeted communication.

To complement this, a comprehensive problem management system with root cause analyses and the establishment of a Known Error Database (KEDB) was introduced. The insights gained from this are continuously incorporated into central ticket management and a closely integrated change management process to ensure sustainable bug fixes and ongoing optimization of the platform.

The ResultStability under extreme conditions

Even in exceptional circumstancesExtreme durability

Whether during the COVID-19 pandemic, during nationwide surges in traffic, or even under challenging external conditions such as heavy snowfall—the system never experienced any outages.

Peak load up to300.000
User

Even during peak loads of up to 300,000 concurrent users and a consistently high baseline load, the platform continued to operate reliably and efficiently.

Scalable up to2,5 Million
User

Today, the Hessen School Portal is designed to serve up to 2.5 million users and, thanks to its cloud-native architecture, can scale flexibly and on-demand at any time.

And now you.Take full advantage of
Unlock the potential of cloud-native technologies!

Peak loads, rising user numbers, and increasing demands for security and availability—modern IT must deliver more than ever before. Make your applications ready for dynamic scaling and sustained performance.