Offering On-Demand Virtual Machines to Library Users
This presentation recounts a pilot project at UCSB Library to offer on-demand virtual machines to students, faculty, and staff. Following a survey of campus cloud services, the project team identified a need to support digital projects and data science through accessible and easily configurable environments with commonly used software packages preinstalled. Launched in early 2025, the service is based on Coder, an open source, self-hosted platform designed for managing cloud-based software developer environments. Through the browser-based Coder interface, users are able to create and interact with pre-configured virtual machines, which run in an on-premises Kubernetes/Harvester cluster. The talk outlines the architecture of the new Coder workspace service and the design choices that have contributed to the project’s sustainability.