A makerspace today is focused on turning ideas into physical prototypes by providing resources in terms of tools and infrastructure. In a university, a makerspace provides students with an opportunity to build a portfolio. Students experiment through an entire development life cycle by creating prototypes for each stage of a cycle. It has been shown to be a productive method for learning. To the best of our knowledge, software development is yet to be included in the makerspace concept. In the case of our software makerspace, it is following the same principles as a traditional makerspace for device and mechanical prototyping, but instead provides software development tools. One such indispensable tool is cloud-based infrastructure. A cloud facilitates rapid prototyping of machine learning tools, microservices, IoT data mining, etc. This talk presents their approach to extend the concept of a makerspace to software development using a student developed private cloud. They present the method they used to gather requirements from various researchers and students. They also present the final design and the current implementation of the cloud using Apache CloudStack. Finally, they discuss how other universities could implement their own software makerspace and its benefits. ----------------------------------------- The CloudStack Collaboration Conference 2023 took place on 23-24th November. The conference, arranged by a group of volunteers from the Apache CloudStack Community, took place in the voco hotel, in Porte de Clichy, Paris. It hosted over 350 attendees, with 47 speakers holding technical talks, user stories, new features and integrations presentations and more.

2. Building a Software Makerspace
with CloudStack to Drive Innovation by Improving
Learning and Research Abilities at Universities
Jonas Willén, Pierre Le Fèvre, Emil Karlsson
Cloudstack Collaboration Conference 2023, Paris - 2023-11-24

3. Who are we?
- Master students at KTH
- Cloud part of bachelor’s degree
project
KTH
- Sweden’s largest tech university
- 4 billion SEK yearly budget
- 44 in QS World University Rankings in
Engineering & Technology

4. The vision
[ ]space
Cyber
A.C.T.I.V.E
Zen
Maker
Hub
Entrepreneurial
Social
Pitch
Cloud
Research
Mechanical
I-HeaL
Software
Education
From ideation to materialisation

5. Real makerspaces have tools

6. But what about us?

7. Our solution
KVM
K8s
Deploy API
Frontend
Sys API
Hosts
MAAS

8. Our solution - GPU
KVM
K8s
Deploy API
Frontend
Sys API
Hosts
MAAS
GPU Info

9. Our solution - GPU

10. Why CloudStack?

11. Student experience

12. Researcher experience

13. Difficulties encountered
- Public sector
- Proprietary software
- Marketing and communication

14. Next steps
- Adding new campuses
- IPv6
- Supporting federated machine learning
- Student outreach and information
- Knowledge transfer to future maintainers

15. Wishes for CloudStack
- Improved GPU support
- Template for K8s nodes
- Rancher integration

16. Try our platform - and our code!
github.com/kthcloud
cloud.cbh.kth.se
Test account:
test@cloudstack.com
paris2023