Scaling hands-on computational biology training to 200+ concurrent users

Paid, hands-on computational biology workshops needed identical, ready-to-use compute environments for hundreds of participants around the world at once. Manual setup did not scale and risked inconsistent, failure-prone sessions.

I automated the deployment of large-scale workshop VM images and instances supporting high-throughput research pipelines for 200+ concurrent users, delivered through Guacamole on Google Cloud with Python and Docker.

• Built reproducible VM images baked with the full analysis toolchain
• Automated provisioning and teardown of instances around each workshop
• Delivered browser-based access via Guacamole for zero local setup
• Load-tested for concurrent usage before each event

• Hundreds of learners ran real pipelines with no local installation
• Environments were identical, eliminating 'works on my machine' issues
• Instructors focused on teaching, not troubleshooting setup
• The program could scale globally without proportional ops effort