Introduction¶
This website serves as a documentation root for all ColonyOps Lab Sessions and related materials.
You will find all the information you need here: Lab session assignments, Game manual and more.
The ColonyOps Game¶
All Lab sessions1 are linked into a continuous long-running exercise, which revolves around participating in a multiplayer game that challenges you to learn certain devops concepts in a pleasant and practical way.
You have been assigned a team of fellow students with whom you will take control of a single Colony in the game world.
- You control this Colony indirectly...
- ... by programming the decision logic in the form of a service exposing a HTTP API
- During missions, this logic is called by our game host at the start of each turn
- Collect as many resource as possible (or hinder other Colonies in doing so) so you can grow your Colony in a strategic overworld layer
Goal: become the most powerful Colony
For more details on how the game works, we refer to the Game Manual.
Setup¶
During these Lab sessions, you will be working in three different environments:
- Locally (on your own machine): for developing and testing your Colony logic. We've provided a local test setup using Docker that you can use to run the game locally.
- On a Gitlab server: for version control, CI/CD pipelines, issue tracking and communication with your team
- On a Kubernetes cluster: for hosting your Colony logic and other services required for participating in the game
Lab overview¶
Below are the dates of lab sessions and their respective deadlines so you can start planning your work:
| Lab Session | Date | Deadline | Target group |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lab 1: Getting started | 30/09 | 06/10 | All students |
| Lab 2: CI/CD & Testing | 07/10 | 13/10 | All students |
| Lab 3: SQL & ORM | 14/10 | 20/10 | Main group only |
| Lab 4: Kubernetes | 21/10 | 27/10 | All students |
| Lab 5: Competitive Game kick-off | 28/10 | 03/11 | All students |
| Lab 6: Kafka | 04/11 | 17/11 | Main group only |
| Lab 7: Observability | 18/11 | 24/11 | All students |
| Lab 8: NoSQL | 25/11 | 08/12 | Main group only |
| Lab 9: Test | 02/12 | n/a | Main group only |
| Lab 10: Support (no new assignment) | 09/12 | n/a | All students |
Important
This course is the result of the merging of the courses "Frameworks" and "Devops", which were taught up until 2025-2026. There is a small group of students that have the original "Devops" course in their curriculum. Hence, the Target group column in the above overview.
Students that are enrolled in the original "Devops" course do not need to participate in Lab sessions indicated with "Main group only".
-
With the exception of Lab 9, which is a standalone test. ↩