Cluster Projects

Projects designed to run on and leverage the NST Compute Cluster. These teach distributed systems, infrastructure, and platform engineering.

Project	Starting Point	You'll Eventually Learn
Mini Cloud Platform	Run a container on one node	Isolation, quotas, multi-tenancy, networking
App Hosting Portal	Deploy from a Git URL	Build pipelines, rollbacks, audit logs
Distributed Job Queue	Worker picks task from a list	Distribution, retries, priorities, monitoring
Key-Value Store	HashMap with a TCP interface	Replication, partitioning, consensus
Config & Secrets	Serve config from a file over HTTP	Encryption, versioning, access control, push updates
Cluster Scheduler	Place a task on the least-loaded node	Constraints, affinity, preemption, health checks
Internal Dev Platform	A dashboard listing services	User management, provisioning, templates
Observability Stack	Collect one metric per second	Time-series DB, dashboards, alerting, traces
CI/CD System	Run a shell script on git push	Containers, parallelism, artifacts, deploy gates
Event Streaming	Publish and subscribe to a topic	Partitions, consumer groups, replay, persistence
Distributed File Storage	Store a file across two nodes	Replication, consistency, metadata, API
Batch Processing	Split a file and process chunks	Map-reduce, scheduling, fault tolerance
Collaborative Editor	Two textareas synced via WebSocket	Conflict resolution, CRDTs, persistence, cursors
Multiplayer Game Server	Two players in a shared space	Lobbies, matchmaking, state sync, latency
Chaos Engineering Tool	Kill a random pod	Network faults, latency injection, recovery testing
Debug & Recovery Simulator	A broken config that students must fix	Scenario generation, scoring, hints