The Capstone Project: Part 1 - The Blueprint for Global Scale

Congratulations. You have reached the final module of Kubernetes: From Beginner to Advanced. You have mastered the theory (Modules 1-13) and built the foundational projects (Module 14). Now, it is time to put your skills to the ultimate test.

The Mission: OmniVision AI

You are the Lead Kubernetes Architect for OmniVision AI, a startup building the world's first real-time AI Video Generation platform. Your users are global, your data is sensitive (HIPAA compliance is required), and your compute costs are massive.

The Requirements:

Global High Availability: If AWS US-East-1 goes down, your European users should not even notice.
Zero-Trust Security: No single component should trust another by default. Every byte must be encrypted.
Elastic Scaling: You must scale from 10 to 1000 GPU nodes in under 5 minutes when a new viral video is being generated.
Developer Self-Service: Your data scientists should be able to deploy new models without asking the DevOps team for help.

In this first part of the Capstone, we will design the Architecture and Security Blueprint. This is the most critical phase—if the foundation is weak, the cluster will crumble under load.

1. The Global Architecture: Multi-Cloud Federation

We will not rely on a single cloud provider. We will build a Federated Fabric.

Primary Cluster (West): Amazon EKS in us-west-2.
Secondary Cluster (East): Google GKE in us-east1.
Management Plane: Azure Arc (Module 13.4) providing the "Single Pane of Glass."

graph TD
    User["Global User"] -- "Anycast DNS" --> GTM["Global Traffic Manager"]
    
    GTM -- "Route to Latency < 50ms" --> EKS["AWS EKS (Oregon)"]
    GTM -- "Route to Latency < 50ms" --> GKE["GCP GKE (Belgium)"]
    
    subgraph "Cluster A (AWS)"
        EKS -- "Sync State" --> DB1["PostgreSQL HA"]
    end
    
    subgraph "Cluster B (GCP)"
        GKE -- "Sync State" --> DB2["PostgreSQL HA"]
    end
    
    DB1 -- "Cross-Region Replication" --> DB2
    
    Vault["HashiCorp Vault"] -- "Global Secrets" --> EKS
    Vault -- "Global Secrets" --> GKE
    
    style EKS fill:#f96,stroke:#333
    style GKE fill:#9cf,stroke:#333

2. Security Blueprint: The Seven Layers of Defense

For HIPAA compliance, we must implement Defense in Depth.

Network Layer: Istio Service Mesh (Module 12.3) with STRICT mTLS enabled Cluster-wide.
Identity Layer: Workload Identity (Module 13.2) for GCP and IRSA (Module 13.1) for AWS. No static keys allowed.
Data Layer: Encryption at Rest (Module 10.5) for all etcd data and cloud-managed disks.
Governance Layer: Kyverno (Module 12.4) Validating Webhooks to ensure every pod has a hipaa-compliant=true label.
Runtime Layer: Pod Security Standard - Restricted (Module 10.3) enforced on all application namespaces.
Supply Chain Layer: Trivy (Module 10.4) scanning in our CI/CD pipeline, blocking any image with a "High" or "Critical" CVE.
Access Layer: Microsoft Entra ID (Module 13.3) for all cluster administrators. No admin.conf files on laptops!

3. Storage Design: The Data Gravity Solution

Video generation produces massive files (GBs). Moving these between AWS and GCP would cost a fortune in egress fees.

The Strategy:

Local Cache: Use Local NVMe SSDs (Module 13.2) on the GPU nodes for high-speed model weight loading.
Regional Buckets: store generated videos in an S3 bucket in the same region as the compute.
Global Metadata: Use a Cross-Region PostgreSQL (Module 14.3) to store the links to the videos, while keeping the physical video data regional.

4. Scaling Strategy: The "Zero-Latency" Warm Pool

Standard HPA is too slow for real-time video generation.

The Capstone Scaling Plan:

Baseline: Keep a minimum of 20 GPU nodes always running.
Predictive Scaling: Use a CronJob to scale the cluster to 100 nodes every morning at 8:00 AM (when user activity spikes).
Over-provisioning: Create "Pause Pods" (Module 8.3) with low priority that claim 20% of the cluster capacity. When a user requests a video, their pod "Evicts" a pause pod, getting a node instantly with 0ms wait time.

5. Next Steps

You have the blueprint. You have the security plan. You have the scaling strategy. In Part 2 of the Capstone Project, we will move to Implementation: Writing the Helm Charts, setting up the GitOps pipeline, and deploying the core OmniVision services.

Your Thinking Exercise:

Before moving to Part 2, ask yourself: "If the connection between my AWS cluster and my GCP cluster is severed, can the European users still generate videos?" (Hint: Think about where the Database and the Model Weights live).

6. SEO Metadata & Keywords

Focus Keywords: Kubernetes capstone project AI, multi-cloud K8s architecture design, HIPAA compliant Kubernetes cluster, Istio zero trust blueprint, global traffic management Kubernetes, EKS and GKE federation.

Meta Description: The ultimate test of your Kubernetes skills. Design a global, high-availability, and HIPAA-compliant AI platform using multi-cloud federation, zero-trust security, and advanced scaling techniques. Start your Capstone Project today.

The Capstone Project - Part 1: Architecture and Security