Transforming DevOps for Scientific Innovation: Materials Project’s Cloud-Native Journey to 500K Users

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) stands at the forefront of scientific discovery, driving innovations across energy, physics, biology, and computational research. The Materials Project at Berkeley Lab (MP, https://materialsproject.org) is a public initiative supported by funding from the US Department of Energy (DOE) since 2011. The project harnesses the power of supercomputing and state-of-the-art methods to provide open web-based access to computed information on known and predicted materials.

Over half a million registered users from around the world are heavily using the popular platform and its powerful analysis tools to study and design novel materials. This mission demands an IT infrastructure capable of scaling with evolving requirements while maintaining peak performance, security, and efficiency.

In this session, Dr. Patrick Huck, Senior Computing Engineer (CSE5) at Berkeley Lab shares how the Materials Project transitioned to cloud-native technologies as an important cornerstone of its longevity. He will explore how MP runs a microservices-based network architecture on the AWS cloud, and uses Kong to manage access and control traffic to its services. Using containerized environments in an innovative cloud architecture ensures uninterrupted performance for mission-critical applications.

Attendees will learn about how the Materials Project:

• Implements infrastructure-as-code from the ground up to efficiently use its limited cloud computing and human resources.
• Deploys the Kong API Gateway to manage traffic to containerized microservices on AWS Fargate.
• Has developed a custom Kong plugin connecting sessions to an OAuth proxy server.
• Unifies observability in a cloud environment to quickly identify and resolve issues.