Modular Squad Training without the paperwork

Fire service squad training is organised in modules. Each unit - theory, practical training, civil protection - has to be recorded individually, with the date and the instructor’s signature. Until now, this was handled on paper and in spreadsheets side by side:

With MTA - Modular Squad Training, Andreas Wegener has developed a platform that brings these strands together. When an instructor signs off a module or someone completes a course, the entry goes to FeuerOn automatically - with no re-entry and no collective list at the end of the year. Every transfer is logged, so it remains clear when each record was reported. Promotions run through the same interface: the platform checks against the applicable regulation who is eligible, prepares the process and reports the new rank back once it has been approved.

The platform is not a single application but a group of services: web interface, API and sign-in service are separate services with two databases behind them. This could not be mapped onto classic web hosting - and for a single developer, a server of his own would have meant maintaining the operating system, security updates and certificates himself.

“With container hosting, my responsibility ends at the image.”

There were also two practical reasons: test, demo and production run on the same images and differ only in their configuration. And if a new version goes wrong, the previous one is running again within minutes.

The platform has to be publicly reachable: participants open it on their phones in the evening. Running a web application firewall of his own was out of the question for Andreas Wegener - “Maintaining rules, tracking attack patterns, evaluating false alarms - that is a profession of its own.”

The platform processes data of volunteer emergency personnel. The municipality is the controller within the meaning of the GDPR, the developer is the processor. Only what is needed for the purpose is stored.

“GDPR compliance is not an extra here but the prerequisite for acceptance - among the emergency personnel whose data it is, and on the public side that has to approve its use. A German provider with a data processing agreement was therefore not a preference, but a given.”

From the finished image to “up and running” took minutes. The separate networks cost a few lines of configuration instead of an afternoon of firewall rules. What helped most was the graphical view of the network with the containers it contains.

The real homework was on the developer’s side: a clean Compose file and clearly separated environment files - what gets checked in, and what belongs in the file with the credentials?

Uncomfortable, and useful for exactly that reason, was the scan of the images for known vulnerabilities, naming the affected CVEs. The consequence: Andreas Wegener has since been building his own patched base images, rebuilt every night so that operating system security updates follow automatically.

And something else has changed:

“One look at the logs makes it instantly clear that not everyone on the internet is your friend. It knocks all day long - automated, indifferent, tireless. That awareness changes how you develop: with every new page you ask yourself what it looks like from the outside.”

Projects like this show us where our container hosting really carries the load in everyday use - and where it can get better. Several suggestions from the collaboration have already been implemented: