Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Modernizing Legacy Infrastructure: KIT’s Journey to Container‑Powered Research
Business overview
The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is a leading German research institute specializing in climate and environmental sciences. As part of the Helmholtz Association—one of Europe’s largest scientific organizations—KIT plays a key role in shaping research infrastructure across Germany and the broader European research community. Beyond publishing traditional scientific papers, KIT is driving a shift toward product-oriented research outcomes. The institute develops operational tools such as dashboards, decision support systems, and web portals that support real-world use cases—from environmental forecasting to climate resilience initiatives. As research becomes increasingly data-driven and collaborative, KIT must ensure its computational environments are reproducible, portable, secure, and accessible to scientists who are not infrastructure specialists.
“In the past, we had to go to Africa and install research tools on a server there and in most of the cases that never really worked because then something crashed and the people were gone. With Portainer, we just take a container and put it somewhere else.”
Challenge
1. Limited Infrastructure Resources
Like many research institutions, KIT faces a shortage of dedicated infrastructure personnel. Scientists often needed to manually SSH into servers to start, stop, or manage containers—an approach that required technical expertise most researchers did not have.
2. Reproducibility Requirements
Scientific credibility depends on reproducibility. When publishing research, KIT must guarantee that results can be replicated in the same context. Managing dependencies and runtime environments manually made this difficult and risked inconsistencies across projects.
3. Collaboration Across Research Centers
As part of national and European initiatives like NFDI and EOSC, KIT collaborates across distributed research centers. Harmonizing infrastructure across institutions was necessary to enable knowledge transfer and shared workflows.
4. Security and Access Control
KIT needed to integrate container management into Germany’s research-wide OAuth authorization framework while ensuring granular permissions—allowing users to start or stop containers only within approved environments.
5. Portability and Real-World Deployment
Historically, deploying research tools in international environments was unreliable. Tools had to be installed manually on remote servers, and once deployed, failures were difficult to diagnose or fix. The institute needed a portable, transparent deployment model that worked across hybrid cloud and on-premise infrastructure.
Solution
KIT adopted Portainer to simplify and centralize container management across its hybrid infrastructure, leveraging Docker Swarm and container registries to standardize deployments.
Simplified Container Management for Scientists
Portainer’s user-friendly interface eliminated the need for complex command-line interactions. Researchers can now connect to a container registry, pull the latest image, and deploy containers without SSH access or deep Docker expertise. This democratized infrastructure access and reduced dependency on specialized IT staff.
Standardization and Reproducibility
By packaging research environments into containers and managing them centrally through Portainer, KIT ensures that published results are reproducible. Containers encapsulate all required dependencies, creating consistent execution environments across research teams and institutions.
Secure, Federated Access Control
Portainer integrates with the national OAuth-based research authorization framework. This allows KIT to securely onboard users from across the research network while applying granular role-based permissions to control container actions and environment access.
Infrastructure Harmonization Across Centers
Portainer provides a centralized platform that supports collaboration and infrastructure harmonization across research centers. Scientists can deploy the same containerized tool in different locations without worrying about underlying infrastructure differences.
Real-World Portability
With container portability enabled by Portainer, research tools can now be deployed reliably anywhere. Instead of manually configuring remote systems, KIT can package a container and deploy it to another research center or external partner with consistency and transparency.
Results
✔ 10–15% Increase in Project Funding Impact
Improved reproducibility and product-oriented research outcomes—enabled through containerization—positively influenced research funding potential.
✔ Infrastructure for 10,000+ Researchers
KIT operates within the Helmholtz Association, supporting more than 10,000 researchers, with the potential to scale container management to 40,000–50,000 researchers across Europe.
✔ Thousands of Lives Impacted
KIT’s portable forecasting containers have supported international weather services, contributing to improved flood prediction and disaster response capabilities—demonstrating tangible real-world impact beyond academic publication.
✔ Reduced Infrastructure Burden
By centralizing container management, KIT reduced reliance on scarce infrastructure personnel and enabled scientists to manage environments independently.
✔ Harmonized, Secure Hybrid Infrastructure
Through standardized container deployments, OAuth integration, and RBAC controls, KIT established a secure and scalable hybrid infrastructure capable of supporting national and international research initiatives.
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