Real Student Projects
You'll find that theory only gets you so far. What actually builds confidence? Working on infrastructure challenges that mirror what you'd tackle in a production environment. Our students design complete virtualization solutions from scratch, debug containerized applications under pressure, and document their work the way professionals do.
Recent Student Work
These projects came from students at different stages of the program. Some were first attempts at containerization, others involved complex multi-host deployments. Each one solved an actual problem.
Hybrid Cloud Migration
Camilla Thornberg moved an existing monolithic application into containers, then built a deployment pipeline that works across both on-premises and cloud infrastructure. The documentation alone took three weeks.
Multi-Region Failover System
Oskar Vestergaard designed a virtualized environment that automatically shifts workloads between Sydney and Melbourne data centers. He spent weeks testing failure scenarios and tuning response times.
Development Environment Automation
Freya Magnussen automated the entire setup process for development teams. Instead of three-day environment builds, her solution provisions consistent environments in under an hour using infrastructure as code.
How Projects Actually Work
You won't start with a blank screen and panic. Each project begins with a problem brief that outlines requirements, constraints, and success criteria. But here's the thing—there's no single correct solution.
Your mentor reviews your design decisions before you build anything. They'll point out potential bottlenecks, security gaps, or scalability issues. Then you build, test, break things, and rebuild. That cycle happens multiple times before you submit final documentation.
And the documentation matters just as much as the technical work. You'll explain your choices, diagram your architecture, and write runbooks that someone else could actually follow. Because that's what the job requires.
Henrik Bjornstad
Senior Infrastructure Architect"I push students to justify every decision. Not because I want them to second-guess themselves, but because in production, someone will always ask why you chose that approach. Better to practice those explanations now."
Project Development Path
Most students complete their first significant project within eight weeks. Here's how that timeline typically unfolds, though your pace might differ.
Requirements Analysis
You'll spend the first week understanding what the project actually needs. This means reading the brief multiple times, researching technologies, and sketching potential architectures. Most students underestimate how long this phase takes.
Design Review
Before writing any configuration files, you present your design to a mentor. They'll challenge your assumptions and ask about edge cases you hadn't considered. Expect to revise your approach at least once during this two-week phase.
Implementation Sprint
Now you build. Over three weeks, you'll configure virtual machines, write container definitions, set up networking, and implement monitoring. You'll hit roadblocks. The important part is documenting how you worked through them.
Testing and Documentation
The final two weeks involve breaking your own work deliberately to see how it fails, then documenting everything. Your submission includes architecture diagrams, configuration files, test results, and a complete operations guide.
What Students Say About Project Work
I rewrote my container orchestration setup four times before it passed review. Frustrating? Absolutely. But those iterations taught me more about Kubernetes than any tutorial ever could. Now when something breaks at work, I actually know where to look.
The documentation requirements felt excessive at first. But during my first week on the job, I had to explain my infrastructure decisions to three different stakeholders. Suddenly all that practice writing clear explanations made perfect sense.