K8s Services
ARDC's Kubernetes service offering involves engaging the Australian research community in the adoption of Kubernetes to deliver cloud native research platforms. The core pillars of the service are community engagement via the ARCOS community; consultancy and support for platform research projects; training and implementations for researchers and research software engineers.
Containers and Kubernetes Services
Community Engagement
Australian Research Container Orchestration Service (ARCOS) is a community, driven by various national institutions with the aim of establishing a national Kubernetes service and promoting use of containers in research. The community adopts a four tier approach:
Community awareness raising - Large member profile spanning 30+ Australian institutions.
Best Practices - Sharing case studies and other documentation.
User Support - running a container registry and providing ongoing user support.
User Experience - Events and training.
The ARCOS community is a way to listen and gather feedback from the community in providing Kubernetes service which addresses their needs.
Training
As part of the ARDC's Kubernetes service, we aim to up-skill the Australian research community in using containers and Kubernetes.
We provide training to research software engineers and researchers:
Self-paced Kubernetes tutorials on Nectar Cloud.
Regular introductory training on containers and Kubernetes to researchers and the advanced version on Kubernetes.
Selective upskilling of ARCOS community members and eResearch project members by providing Linux Foundation’s training and certification vouchers.
Ongoing Support
ARDC offers ongoing support to research projects using Kubernetes and ARDC’s Magnum Service, a container orchestration engine. The ongoing support includes following activities:
Answering questions
Providing troubleshooting assistance
Fixing bugs
To raise a support ticket
send us an email at: support@ardc.edu.au, OR
Consultancy
We recognise Kubernetes as a way to make research projects scalable and cloud native. Hence we provide free consultancy to research projects in adoption of Kubernetes.
We gather requirements by listening to your project needs and guide you to a successful cloud-native transformation by adoption of Kubernetes.
If you have a running project, we analyse the current architecture, implementation, and software stack to create migration or optimisation plans.
Finally, we help you manoeuvre through development, staging and production stages of your project.
We have a team of specialists with experience in successfully guiding research projects.
If you have a research project in mind and are looking at the possibility of hosting it on Nectar Research Cloud, fill in the contact us form on the ARDC website.
Implementation
What do we offer ?
We ease the burden of Kubernetes administration for research projects, by offering a web based GUI (Nectar Dashboard) to create Kubernetes clusters.
Kubernetes clusters comes preconfigured with features such as volume storage and load balancers, backed by mature OpenStack services such as Cinder and Octavia.
Researchers can start using Kubernetes straightaway, without wasting effort on building Kubernetes clusters.
Example research platform projects hosted on Nectar Research Cloud:
For a comprehensive list, please visit "Digital Services Hosted on ARDC’s Nectar Research Cloud."
In addition to Kubernetes offering, ARDC provides platforms implemented on K8s targeting researchers.
