Skip to main content

Future work

The large-scale projects planned for ISC³ — the ones too big to live as an item in Open points / TODOs. Each has its own page here describing the target state and how we get there; nothing on this page is deployed.

What belongs here: a project that changes the shape of the infrastructure (new hardware generation, a service moving off the rack, a new site), spans more than a session of work, and needs a design decision before anyone touches a machine. Everything smaller — a setting to change, a box to patch, a spare to order — is a todo item.

Each page carries its own Status line; when a project ships, its page moves out of this section to where the thing it created is documented, and the outcome is recorded in the journal.

The projects

ProjectWhat it isStatus
ISC³ datacenterThe two-site datacenter (building 19 + 23N307): executive summary, full design and execution plan, and the considered scenarios as the decision record.Plan retained 2026-08-20 — racks and the two R740xd ordered, rack delivery 30 October 2026
ISC GitLabSelf-hosted GitLab for the ~150 users of the programme, virtualised on the production cluster, with CI runners. The install runbook is provisioning/gitlab/install-runbook.md.Design aligned to the retained architecture (2026-08-26); deployment is phase 2
ISC Learn → managed hostingMove the Moodle instance off the self-managed hannibal VPS onto a managed cloud server, so the OS, PHP, MySQL, TLS and base backups stop being ours. Deliberately stays off the rack.Proposal — nothing executed
Exam VDIBrowser-based exam environments for BYOD laptops: SEB locks the student machine, Guacamole delivers per-student exam VMs hosted on carnaval; a non-exam variant gives generic lab desktops. No new hardware.Proposal — not started
Kubernetes on carnavalA 3-node HA k3s cluster in VMs on the playground cluster, all three GPUs schedulable, rebuilt from a template + playbook rather than backed up. Teaching cluster first, edu-ID student access as phase 2.Design agreed — nothing built
Thermal protection & emergency shutdownA layered reaction to over-temperature: warn, shed heat, shut down gracefully — instead of relying only on the component-level hard trip, which did not fire in June 2026.Layer 1 (warn humans) implemented August 2026, the rest not
Service ideasA vetted backlog of candidate services for the production cluster — student-facing (PaaS, JupyterHub, internal LLM…) and admin-facing (NetBox, Oxidized, Healthchecks…) — with the ground rules any pick inherits.Idea pool — nothing deployed