Flight Warehouse

The goal was to provide templates and documentation that let anyone spin up HPC environments in a private cloud, from admin-built team clusters down to personal single-node environments.

What was done

We built Flight Warehouse around Flight Solo, offering ready-made cloud templates for the common cluster types each with step-by-step launch, administration and usage guidance. The templates showed how a single packaged image could be tailored into different environments with cloud-init and the Flight tools, and surfaced the key considerations of workload lifetime, infrastructure costs and collaboration requirements.

What was learnt

We learnt how to package HPC environments as repeatable cloud templates without maintaining an image per variant, how ephemeral and long-lived environments need different defaults around persistence, backups and scheduling, and how much guidance a self-service HPC offering needs to be genuinely usable and cost-aware for both administrators and non-technical users.