Grace
All projects
School project2024

Building a datacenter

With five classmates, we designed a complete datacenter, from the network up to monitoring and disaster recovery.

Why we built it

This was our fourth-year cloud project at ESEO: build the infrastructure a real organisation could rely on, and make it secure, automated and resilient.

Architecture

Infrastructure diagram: an OPNsense firewall, a router and a switch, and four VLANs for web servers, databases, administration and backups, monitored by Zabbix, with Gitea backups in Azure and Zabbix alerts in Microsoft Teams.
Four VLANs behind an OPNsense firewall: web servers, databases, administration and backups, all monitored by Zabbix. Backups go to Azure, and alerts reach the team in Microsoft Teams.

What we built

  • Configured routers and switches to manage traffic and keep connectivity reliable.
  • Set up LAMP and Tomcat servers to host the web applications.
  • Deployed and configured an OPNsense firewall to protect the internal systems.
  • Added load balancers and a reverse proxy to spread traffic across the servers.
  • Automated deployments with Vagrant and Ansible, and tests with Squash.
  • Monitored the systems in real time with Grafana and Zabbix.
  • Set up redundancy, backups and a disaster recovery plan to keep services available.

Outcome

A datacenter built to stay available: redundant services, backups stored outside the site, monitoring with alerts sent to the team, and a tested plan to recover from a major failure.