FFffdixon1·Nov 25, 2020
I am the Product Manager for BigBlueButton. We have been building out the project for the past 12 years to focus on one market: online learning.
With Covid-19, it has been a pretty intense 2020 for the BigBlueButton project
In 2020, we’ve seen some large deployments of BigBlueButton (100's of servers serving thousands of simultaneous meetings). Such deployments do not deploy a single large core machine; rather, they deploy many individual BigBlueButton servers in a pool (see https://github.com/blindsidenetworks/scalelite). We don't have BigBlueButton structured where you can split across the components on separate servers: the recommended deployment is each server is a self-contained BigBlueButton installation.
There is a large community of users around the world using BigBlueButton. We, the core developers, have been focused on ensuri
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ng that BigBlueButton is solid and scales horizontally. We released 2.2.0 on March 29, 2020 and the current release, as of Nov 11, 2020, is 2.2.29. Those 29 iterations reflect a strong desire by the core development team to respond quickly to the demand and make BigBlueButton the best possible solution for virtual classrooms.
Regarding the packaging, behind the scenes there are a bunch of scripts that I wrote using fpm to build the packages, and it's all non-standard, has grown organically over the years, and needs to be updated.
We had planned to clean up the packaging in 2020 and include it in the core it so others can build and build upon it, but all that got put aside when Covid-19 hit and there was so much demand for the software. Instead, we focused all our development resources on improving the system for end users (security, stability, usability, and features).
We are looking forward to providing standard Debian packaging scripts for BigBlueButton in 2021, alongside making continuous improvements to BigBlueButton.
Our goal remains to make BigBlueButton the best virtual classroom system for online learning.
Regards,... Fred