Modern research environments often face increasing demands for agility and reproducibility, hindered by traditional, monolithic software architectures. This talk explores the transition to cloud-native computing by leveraging containers and Kubernetes to create portable, consistent computational infrastructures that decouple applications from underlying hardware. By adopting these technologies, research teams can ensure their workflows operate identically across diverse environments, from local development machines to production-grade clusters, thereby eliminating the notorious "works on my machine" problem.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research has deployed an internal Kubernetes based platform called CIRRUS and has been working to further modernize application development and deployments by promoting CI, CD, and GitOps practices. By implementing automated testing and declarative infrastructure management, teams can drastically reduce manual errors and accelerate the deployment of new methodologies. Ultimately, embracing these methodologies empowers researchers to focus on scientific discovery rather than logistical bottlenecks.
