Abstract

The Botalista association aims to establish a community of botanical gardens and institutes that share their knowledge and experiences in the field of botany. To this end, the association has developed an IT solution to manage all business processes related to the various activities of a botanical garden. This solution, called Botalista.software, is developed as a web application deployed on a kubernetes cluster as Software as a Service. It is designed to be a community-driven, accessible, and modular tool for the association’s various members. Although it has been in place for three years now, the Kubernetes cluster lacks redundancy for its critical components. Fault tolerance is low, which makes the system less robust. The objective of this project is to propose a new cluster architecture that ensures service availability even in the event of hardware or software failures. To develop this new architecture, I first analyzed the existing solution to identify vulnerable components that needed improvement. Following this study, I designed an architecture without a single point of failure to ensure high availability of all components essential to Botalista, whether hardware or software. This architecture is also designed to be easily scalable, allowing it to evolve according to the needs of the association. To validate its robustness, I deployed the architecture in an environment owned by the school to study its behavior in the event of a failure affecting its various components. Finally, this project concludes with a comparative study between the existing architecture and the proposed one, to determine the most suitable service provider based on financial and environmental considerations.

Results

This project received an honorable mention from the jury and led to my being named the winner of the Swissquote Prize at the HES-SO graduation ceremony in Geneva.

Links

• Thesis (in french): Gradechelor
• Technical documentation (in french): gdario.it/botalista
• Source code: GitLab HEPIA
• Swissquote prize: HEPIA
• Botalista association: botalista.community