Academic programs and cyber competitions have a unique challenge: big expectations, tiny budgets, and in some cases teams powered entirely by volunteers. Yet students and educators still need to deliver reliable, real-world infrastructure to support hands-on learning and events with huge numbers of concurrent users that make even the most stable systems buckle. This talk will covers the unique challenges faced by academic events as well as the rapid evolution of a completely rebuilt environment due to the having to migrate away from VMWare. We will show how applied the home lab mindset to solve those problems from testing to production. In just slightly over 6 months (which is about 2 weeks of actual volunteer work) we went from supporting one competition concurrently with our old environment to supporting many. This included a huge amount of rebuild and reorganizing of resources, fixing bugs, and pushing the limits of the open source software we used.
During this hour long talk we will cover the technical and organizational journey of rebuilding our competition infrastructure from the ground up after migrating away from VMware. By applying the home lab mindset to real production problems, we transformed an environment that once supported a single event into one capable of running multiple competitions simultaneously. In just over six months, the equivalent of about two weeks of actual volunteer work, we redesigned, rebuilt, debugged, and optimized our systems while stretching open-source software to its limits.
We will share how we planned, designed, and operated this new environment using open-source tools such as TrueNAS, Proxmox, HashiCorp Vault, Vaultwarden, Authentik, Kubernetes, DokuWiki, and MantisBT, along with lessons learned from tools that did not fit our needs, including Zammad and Wiki.js. The focus extends beyond technology to the educational value these systems provide, helping students learn practical DevOps, SRE, and systems engineering skills on real infrastructure. We will also discuss the challenges of volunteer-driven operations and how we improved contributor engagement without hiding the technical complexity that makes the system worth learning.
This session is designed for educators, competition organizers, and students who want to maximize limited resources while maintaining professional reliability and functionality. It shows that with creativity, collaboration, and open-source innovation, academic teams can achieve enterprise-scale results on a student-scale budget.
