Case Study: Cornell Lab of Ornithology achieves highly available, scalable infrastructure and faster software delivery with Mirantis

Cornell Lab of Ornithology - Customer Case Study

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, a Cornell University non-profit that runs global citizen‑science platforms like eBird and Merlin and stewards some of the largest biodiversity datasets in the world, needed highly available, scalable infrastructure that let developers move quickly while keeping data on campus and minimizing costs. Faced with the challenge of meeting high performance and availability expectations without a full cloud migration, the Lab sought a way to use existing university bare‑metal resources with cloud‑native workflows.

Mirantis delivered an on‑premises private cloud—using Mirantis Kubernetes Engine, Container Runtime, and Secure Registry—so the Lab could deploy infrastructure as code, maintain test‑to‑production parity, and eliminate operational bottlenecks. The result was faster delivery (lead times in hours or minutes), improved reliability and scalability, reduced risk and configuration drift, and an economical, supported platform that positions the Lab to scale citizen science, machine learning, and data visualization initiatives.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology

David Childs

DevOps Engineer