Future Brains: Fundaments and Saxion work together on the future

It was our honour to design this module, in collaboration with Saxion. Miranda, Infrastructure Engineer at Fundaments, worked hard on this: ‘we would like to introduce Saxion students to Cloud and the new technological developments within Cloud. So this was an excellent opportunity for us to do just that. We set up a fictitious case around the company ‘Future Brains’, a company that specialises in developing online (business-critical) applications for the government. The students will be working on this case for the next eight weeks’.

What does the case study look like?

The board of Future Brains has decided that the IT landscape needs a revamp. During the eight-week module, students will build Future Brains' infrastructure. The first thing they will work on is virtualisation. Miranda: ‘I rolled out 34 environments for the students within the physical environment, containing one vCenter, two ESXi hosts and a router. There are also two LUNs on the SAN for each group. Of course, the groups are completely separated from each other. The students have to connect the two ESXi hosts to the provisioned vCenter and the provided storage LUNs. So the basic installation is already done for them, but the rest they have to do themselves.’ Next, remote working is highlighted: making applications available in a secure way, while not losing sight of the user experience. In the last block, they deal with containers: in fact, from Future Brains, there is a need for fast, predictable behaviour of development code. From being able to run a container, they will also look at a piece of container management. Kubernetes is used for this purpose.

Miranda: ‘We monitor the sub-layer on which the students work on a daily basis. If they encounter a problem where it is likely to be caused by the underlayer, they come to us. They can submit a ticket to our support department, after which it is taken up. Just like in real life! I can also see how far along the students are, and so far I am pleasantly surprised. Some have already linked the storage to vCenter and are now in the process of linking the Content Library. To all the students participating in the module: good job and keep up the good work!’

The image below shows how a group of two students have already linked the storage and are now working on linking the Content Library