Offering On-Demand Virtual Machines to Library Users

This presentation recounts a pilot project at UCSB Library to offer on-demand virtual machinesto students, faculty, and staff. Following a survey of campus cloud services, the project teamidentified a need to support digital projects and data science through accessible and easilyconfigurable environments with commonly used software packages preinstalled. Launched inearly 2025, the service is based on Coder, an open-source, self-hosted platform designed formanaging cloud-based software development environments. Through the browser-based Coderinterface, users are able to create and interact with pre-configured virtual machines, which runin an on-premises Kubernetes/Harvester cluster. The talk outlines the architecture of the newCoder workspace service and design choices that have contributed to the project'ssustainability.