Fornax Science Console is a NASA-funded, open-source platform that brings compute to astrophysics data and makes production-grade deployments repeatable for teams of any size. We present a "0 → hero" reference stack that uses Terraform (managed with Terramate) to provision an AWS-backed Kubernetes environment (EKS + FSX (OpenZFS)) and Flux for GitOps-based continuous reconciliation. This repeatable IaC enables teams to go from repository to production-ready cloud environment with the same code paths used for day‑2 operations.

The platform couples interactive analysis tooling (JupyterHub) with a full operational observability suite — Grafana for dashboards, Loki and TimescaleDB for logs and metrics — and end-to-end cost visibility and alerting utilizing derived metrics. Platform configuration and operational policies are continuously enforced through GitOps, lowering time-to-first-analysis while reducing operational load by "eating our own dog food."

We also describe an integrated support loop: a deployable Discourse instance that captures troubleshooting and how‑to content as searchable, citable knowledge base to scale user support. Attendees will leave understanding how our open platform can be for building reproducible compute‑near‑data platforms, running GitOps-driven operations, achieving end‑to‑end cost and reliability visibility, and cultivating a sustainable user support ecosystem that scales with the science.