How eduki leverages DigitalOcean to support educators

eduki is an online “teacher marketplace” based in Germany that was built to support and connect teachers. Typically, curriculum is distributed in textbooks and teachers adapt lessons to fit their classes. Published curriculum isn’t able to quickly adapt to current events or the needs of specific students, and teachers often find themselves spending hours outside of the classroom coming up with new ways to engage students and enhance lessons.

When the founding team at eduki recognized this need in the education space, they came up with a solution. eduki enables teachers to host the lesson plans they have developed on its platform so that the plans can be shared and sold to other teachers. Educators purchasing plans benefit from time savings and high-quality materials, while the educators creating content are paid for their work and ideas. Teachers leveraging materials from the eduki platform also benefit from curriculums that are up-to-date with the latest news and research.

Taking education digital

Because educators primarily download and print materials for their classrooms, eduki created a platform focused on efficiently hosting and distributing downloadable PDF files. The materials need to be available at an affordable price, and eduki needs to save time and costs on infrastructure in order to pass those savings on to the educators. The team found a cost-effective, simple infrastructure solution with DigitalOcean and launched their platform with 2,000 pieces of content from 100 creators in 2016.

“We only became cash flow positive a few years into the business. Price was very important for us, especially in the beginning. An affordable price doesn’t mean the same for less; it means more for the same price. We can afford to have several staging environments and multiple instances with DigitalOcean.” - Aleksey Kolupaev, CTO, Co-Founder, eduki

eduki’s original application was built on DigitalOcean Droplets as a monolith on Symfony, a high-performing PHP framework. It remained that way in the early years as the company found product-market-fit and enhanced its offering. As the organization transformed into a scaling and growing startup, the team realized they needed an easier and more efficient way to manage their expanding application and began transitioning from their monolithic architecture to a microservices architecture using Kubernetes. Anything new is now built with microservices and the team continues to slowly transition legacy infrastructure from a monolithic architecture to microservices. By focusing on simplicity and efficiency, they’ve been able to maintain their growing infrastructure with one dedicated full-time individual supported by another person part-time.

Sustainable scalability and growth

The platform functions similarly to an e-commerce site with products offered in an online marketplace. Educators are able to visit the site, review content, and purchase a downloadable file. Similar to other e-commerce sites, eduki offers personalized product recommendations and robust search and filter features. All components of the application, including the order generation process, comments, subscriptions, payment methods, and more, are built within containerized workloads. eduki chose DigitalOcean Volumes as their storage solution for backups. The team also hosts multiple staging environments on DigitalOcean Droplets.

“We appreciate DigitalOcean Volumes for affordable and reliable backups. It works really well for us.” - Aleksey Kolupaev, CTO, Co-Founder, eduki

The organization utilizes MySQL as its main database and has ClickHouse DB clusters that are used for product and site analytics. They use RabbitMQ as their message queue while elastic search feeds their search functionality as well as some of their other functionalities like recommending related materials. They also utilize elastic search as their indexing solution.

Bringing eduki to teachers around the world

eduki is rapidly expanding its offerings by incorporating other regions, languages, and more. They now host over one million user accounts. They’ve expanded into French and Spanish materials and plan to continue connecting educators around the world, building a supportive community, and enabling teachers to educate new generations.