openDesk Edu Service Landscape — Your Complete Ecosystem at a Glance
What is the Service Landscape?
Navigating a platform with many integrated services can be challenging — especially when you're evaluating openDesk Edu for your institution or trying to understand how the ecosystem fits together.
The openDesk Edu Service Landscape is an interactive, visual map that answers precisely that question. It shows every service in the openDesk Edu ecosystem, organised by domain, with status indicators, descriptions, and direct access to the main site and documentation.
Think of it as the "CNCF Landscape" for openDesk Edu — but designed specifically for decision-makers, operators, and educators in higher education.
Five Domains, One Platform
The landscape groups services into domain categories, each representing a pillar of the educational digital infrastructure:
🔐 Core Platform
The foundation: Keycloak for unified SSO, OpenCloud for file sync and share, Dovecot + Postfix for mail, SOGo for groupware, Matrix + Element for encrypted messaging, Etherpad for real-time collaboration, Nubus Portal for IAM, managed PostgreSQL + MySQL databases, and MinIO S3 object storage.
🎓 Education & Research
Purpose-built for academia: Moodle and ILIAS learning management systems, JupyterHub for computational research, XWiki for knowledge management, and OpenProject for research project management.
🤝 Collaboration & Productivity
Tools for daily work: Collabora Online for real-time document editing, OpenStreetMap for geocoding, Jitsi Meet for video conferencing, Planka for Kanban task management, n8n + Dify for workflow automation and AI agents, and WordPress for content management.
⚙️ Infrastructure & Operations
The engine room: K3s + ArgoCD for Kubernetes and GitOps, Prometheus + Grafana for observability, k8up for backups, Traefik + HAProxy for ingress, and Ceph CSI for software-defined storage.
🛡️ Security & Compliance
Protection and governance: ClamAV for virus scanning, cert-manager for automated TLS, Kubescape for Kubernetes security scanning, and documented Pentest Reports with remediation tracking.
Interactive Features
The landscape isn't just a static diagram — it's a live, filterable interface:
- Domain grouping — services are colour-coded by their domain
- Status badges — see at a glance which services are Production, Beta, or Development
- Service cards — each service shows key technologies and a short description
- Quick links — one click to the main site or the OpenSpec documentation
- Auto-updated — the landscape reflects the current deployment state
Why Use the Landscape?
For decision-makers, the landscape provides a helicopter view: you can instantly assess the breadth of the platform, understand which domains are covered, and identify which services align with your institution's needs.
For operators and architects, it serves as a quick-reference map of the stack — useful for onboarding new team members, planning integrations, or communicating the platform's scope to stakeholders.
For the community, it's a shared visual language: when we talk about "the platform," everyone can see exactly what that means.
Visit the Landscape
The landscape is open-source and maintained alongside the platform. Pull requests and suggestions are welcome — the source is available on GitHub together with the rest of openDesk Edu.
Last updated: June 2026