Future Brains: Fundaments and Saxion collaborate on the future
The new academic year has begun! This also applies to the second-year ICT students at Saxion Enschede and Deventer. Last week, they were presented with a brand-new module themed around virtualization. The goal of this module? To teach students where the future of the Cloud is headed.
We had the honor of shaping this module in collaboration with Saxion. Miranda, an Infrastructure Engineer at Fundaments, worked hard on this: "We want to introduce Saxion students to the Cloud and the new technological developments within it. This was the perfect opportunity for us to do so. We created a fictional case study centered on 'Future Brains,' a company specializing in developing online (mission-critical) applications for the government. The students will be working on this case for the next eight weeks."
What does the case study involve?
The management of Future Brains has decided that their IT landscape needs an overhaul. During the eight-week module, students will build the infrastructure for Future Brains. The first task they will tackle is virtualization. Miranda: “I rolled out 34 environments for the students within the physical infrastructure, each containing one vCenter, two ESXi hosts, and a router. Additionally, there are two LUNs on the SAN for each group. The groups are, of course, completely isolated from one another. The students must connect the two ESXi hosts and the provided storage LUNs to the vCenter. The basic installation has been done for them, but they have to do the rest themselves.” Next, remote work is covered: making applications available securely without compromising the user experience. In the final block, they will work with containers: Future Brains needs fast, predictable behavior for their development code. Starting from running a container, they will then look at container management, using Kubernetes for this purpose.
Miranda: “We monitor the underlying layer the students are working on daily. If they encounter a problem that is likely caused by the underlying layer, they come to us. They can submit a ticket to our support department, which is then handled. Just like in the real world! I can also see how far the students have progressed, and so far, I am pleasantly surprised. Some have already connected the storage to vCenter and are now working on connecting the Content Library. To all students participating in the module: great job, keep it up!”
The image below shows how a group of two students has already connected the storage and is now working on linking the Content Library.
