Scaling BigBlueButton

Bringing education to every corner of the world

We believe every student should have access to education regardless of where they live. We build elegant solutions that enable instructors to coach, teach, and inspire students online to reach their full potential.

We built the world’s most popular open-source web conferencing system: BigBlueButton.

BigBlueButton

A web conferencing system designed for online learning. It has everything you would expect in a commercial system including real-time audio, video, screen sharing, slides, polls, shared notes, whiteboard, and breakout rooms.  Thanks to the open-source license, anyone can setup their own BigBlueButton server.

BigBlueButton’s popularity has made it the default virtual classroom for
many major learning management systems (LMS) including Moodle Cloud, Sakai, Canvas, Jenzabar, and D2L.  And thanks to our global community, BigBlueButton is available in over 25 languages (including Mandarin and Cantonese).

A typical BigBlueButton server can handle about 150 concurrent sessions.  But what if your school needs to support 1,500 concurrent online students in virtual classes? 

BigBlueButton HTML5 Client

Scaling BigBlueButton with Scalelite

Blindside Networks has released a flexible open-source load balancer, designed specifically for BigBlueButton, that evenly spreads the meeting load over a pool of BigBlueButton servers.

The load balancer, called Scalelite, makes the pool of BigBlueButton servers appear to the front-end as a single (very scalable) BigBlueButton server.

For documentation on how to setup, configure, and administrate Scalelite, along with full source code (under the AGPL licence), see the GitHub project at Scalelite.

“As long-term users of BigBlueButton (with Moodle), when recently faced with the need to rapidly move our University's entire learning delivery online, we immediately enlisted the help of the amazing team at Blindside Networks. Their incredible support and responsiveness meant that in just a few weeks we were able to implement a highly scalable BigBlueButton server cluster powered by Blindside Networks' open source load balancer. This solution now delivers world-class learning to thousands of our students every day. Working with Blindside Networks has truly been a fantastic experience, and their services come with the very highest possible recommendation.”
Roland Sherwood
Manager, Educational Technologies Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

Next Steps

Many schools are faced with challenges of teaching students who are prevented from attending class due to the Coronavirus.  BigBlueButton and Scalelite are complete open source solutions that you can setup on your own.  See our Scalelite GitHub project and links for community support.