Linux/Ubuntu systems management and deployment

We are an NGO registered in Kenya, Canada, and the US that provides turnkey digital learning systems to schools in rural Kenya and Eastern Africa. We have been in operation for 8+ years, with over 80 schools in place, and with a well-documented impact on school and student performance. You can learn more about us here: https://areseducation.org.

The objective of this volunteer opportunity is to develop a deployable, configuration-controlled Linux environment. The environment will be deployed to 80 to 100 offline systems located in physically remote locations (rural African schools). Each system will be connected to a Wi-Fi broadcast node and used to run a web server accessible through LAN only. These systems will have similar but not identical hardware components. Many systems are already in situ, so strongly desired that the environment can be initially deployed via imaging the system’s swappable SSD. Following this, the systems will be upgraded on a yearly basis via an inexpert technician traveling to the physical site of each system. Due to the physical inaccessibility of the system and the lack of outside internet access, upgrades must be as simple and quick as possible. Strongly desired that the upgrades are atomic and deliverable via usb stick. Initial experimentation suggests that ostree would be a perfect solution, but open to other methods.