Engineering lab · 2026

EduCenter OS

A cloud-native education platform lab used to practice AWS foundations, K3s orchestration, GitOps synchronization, monitoring, and recovery-aware deployment design.

AWSK3sArgo CDNext.jsFastAPI

Why this is labeled a lab

EduCenter OS is an engineering environment, not a claim of operating a real school’s production platform. It exists to make infrastructure decisions visible and testable around a realistic application shape.

The system question

How should a small team move from manually changing a server to a reviewed delivery loop where desired state lives in Git and the cluster continuously reports health?

Design goals

Separate application delivery from direct cluster access.
Make drift visible and correctable through GitOps.
Define readiness before routing traffic.
Keep monitoring and recovery in the architecture from the start.

Architecture

A small, understandable delivery loop.

The lab favors explicit boundaries over a large platform layer.

01 · Source

Application and desired state stay reviewable

Changes begin in Git, creating a visible history and a place for review before cluster reconciliation.

02 · Reconcile

Argo CD owns synchronization

The controller compares the repository with the cluster and reports drift instead of relying on manual kubectl changes.

03 · Release

Readiness controls traffic

Pods should become routable only after dependencies and health endpoints indicate useful service.

04 · Observe

Metrics answer operational questions

Monitoring is framed around health, saturation, errors, and rollout behavior—not dashboards for their own sake.

05 · Recover

Desired state is reproducible

Infrastructure and manifests are designed so a failed environment can be reconstructed through documented steps.

06 · Limit

Know where self-healing stops

GitOps can correct drift, but it does not replace data recovery, incident ownership, or safe change review.

Representative Argo CD application

spec:
  source:
    repoURL: https://github.com/lakshaywalia666/educenter-os.git
    path: k8s/overlays/production
  destination:
    server: https://kubernetes.default.svc
    namespace: educenter
  syncPolicy:
    automated:
      prune: true
      selfHeal: true

The manifest is intentionally small. Real safety comes from the repository structure, health probes, resource boundaries, secrets handling, promotion rules, and recovery plan around it.