In the past week, the fall semester 2025 started! Many institutions have welcomed new students and the rooms are again full of people, full of life. For those starting their studies, it is a time of change, where they develop new habits, possibly move into a new apartment, and most importantly start learning more deeply about their field of interest.
On Switch’s side, the semester start also rhymes with many new edu-ID accounts, and especially on the first day of the semester, a high peak of logins. Last year, many students were unable to log into their edu-ID account, which was a nightmare for the students, the lecturers, but also the edu-ID team that was working to fix it as soon as detected.
This is why it was our highest priority this year to offer a stable and reliable service for this process to be as seamless as possible for new students – and as peaceful as possible for IT administrators, who already have a lot to do these days. Based on last year’s learnings, we have implemented several measures to ensure a smooth semester start for everyone:
- Load testing
Last year’s peak was ~45 logins/s with 1.1M users; with 1.3M users this year we expect ~55 logins/s. Load tests confirmed stable performance at nearly double that level (~100 logins/s for two hours) without performance degradation.
Those load tests were carefully staged on a separate environment, as similar as possible to the production one, but with anonymized data and outside of office hours as much as possible. The results were useful and we plan to repeat load testing regularly from now on. You can read more details about the load testing here.
- Increased redundancy
Usually, login requests are spread over 5 IdP (identity provider) nodes, which ensures an even load on each of them. During load testing, we found that even 4 nodes were enough to handle double the amount of last year’s login rate.
However, just to be on the safe side, we have increased the pool up to 8 nodes, providing greater capacity and resilience for this critical time. During semester start, the CPU load was never more than 25% per node.
- Multi-factor authentication
We have experienced issues with SMS delivery in the past, which is particularly painful when many students have to enter their second factor again, so we added a fallback SMS provider to secure continuity in case of provider issues.
Additionally, in close collaboration with our team, several universities have started enforcing security policies, enforcing the use of authenticator apps (based on standard TOTP), which are more secure and more reliable than SMS as a second factor.
- Active monitoring
Over the course of the past year, we upgraded our monitoring infrastructure to an in-house MLA (monitoring, logging, alerting) stack, tended to by a dedicated platform team. This allows for real-time visibility into all critical infrastructure of edu-ID.
In the weeks of the semester start, we were actively looking at those metrics, to ensure immediate action on our side if any component would have looked suspiciously slow or unavailable.
- Deployment scheduling
Following past experience, we have scheduled no major changes on edu-ID during semester start, thus reducing the risk of overload in case some nodes are disabled for maintenance, or functionality change that may introduce unexpected bugs.
Furthermore, we were also in touch with our main SMS provider to avoid any maintenance window during semester start. Despite the failover mechanism in place mentioned previously, we prefer redundancy also in external providers during this critical time.
Our user base has considerably grown over the past years and we are aware of the responsibility we have to ensure seamless operations for many institutions relying on us. Accordingly, we have taken previous incidents very seriously and improved our system to the best of our ability.
With the above measures in place, we hope to have enabled a smooth experience for everyone during the first days of the semester. We are also happy to get any constructive feedback about the performance of Switch edu-ID. In the meantime, we wish everyone a successful semester!