The Internet2 Cloud Infrastructure Community Program (CICP) is a collection of benefits to subscribers of the Internet2 NET+ AWS and NET+ GCP programs. In addition to a regular cadence of open discussion technical calls, we organize specialized webinars, discussions, and technical deep dives. This calendar lists our recent topics.
Unless otherwise indicated, access to the meetings, recordings, and assets are limited to subscribing institutions. If your institution subscribes to one or both of these programs (AWS subscribers | GCP subscribers) click on the asset link and request access. If your institution would like to become part of the NET+ AWS, NET+ GCP, or simply part of CICP, email program manager, Bob Flynn (bflynn@internet2.edu) for more information.
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2024 | ||||
Date | Title | Description | Speaker(s) | Assets |
05/15/2024 | NET+ AWS Strat Call - Lessons and observations from a greenfield implementation using the AWS Landing Zone Accelerator | While Tufts University already had a small legacy AWS presence, the institution was looking to scale this up drastically across the university. The goal was to create an environment that could serve the diverse needs of the entire university community, incorporate relevant industry best practices and security, and keep the management overhead in check through the use of consistent, scalable patterns and automation. Tufts engaged with AWS Professional Services ("Proserv") in order to benefit from their experience working with other customers in higher education and their ability to interface directly with product teams at AWS. The end result is a multi-account environment built on top of the AWS Landing Zone Accelerator ("LZA") for Education. Join your NET+ peers as we hear from Ron Canepa, Tufts Senior System Administrator, about their challenges, experiences and lessons learned.
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04/23/2024 | NET+ GCP Town Hall - Google NEXT Recap | Google NEXT '24 just took place in Las Vegas. It broke previous attendance records and delivered a number of interesting, and even a few exciting, announcements. Google's US Education Practice Lead, Jeff Nessen will walk us through the announcements identified by research and education attendees as the most relevant to our community. This session will provide an opportunity to discuss these announcements, put them into context for you organization, and learn how to act on those you deem worth pursuing. Join us to learn about what is NEXT for Google Cloud.
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04/17/2024 | NET+ AWS Town Hall - Research and Engineering Studio and HPC on AWS | AWS Announced Research and Engineering Studio at Re:Invent 2023. This open source, easy-to-use web-based portal helps administrators create and manage secure cloud-based research and engineering environments. Join Evan Bollig, Ph.D. Principal Specialist Solutions Architect for high performance computing to learn about this exciting tool and about how AWS supports High Performance Computing in the cloud and bring your Research IT colleagues! |
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03/27/2024 | NET+ AWS Tech Jam - Quiz the Users: What Challenges is Kion Solving for You? | At the 2/21 bi-weekly Tech Share, there was a question about how someone on the call was using Kion to do something in their AWS environment. This resulted in enough back and forth about how people were using Kion that we thought it would make a good Tech Jam topic for the month. |
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03/26/2024 | NET+ GCP Tech Jam - Strategies for aggregating network traffic flow logs for all your GCP projects | This quarter's Tech Jam gets into logging and networking. WashU's John Bailey once again finds himself in the hot seat. (More appropriately the "help seat.") Here's what he's dealing with: "We want to gather network flow log data for all GCP workloads (VMs, containers, anything else that can send and receive network packets) across all GCP projects, and send that flow log data to a central location in a single GCP project (that central IT could pay for) where it could then be reviewed by Infosec or moved along to Splunk or another log storage location." Joining us to Jam on these issues are Google security analyst Travis Newshott and networking engineer Kurt Radecki. They are going to dig into John's challenge and talk about:
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03/21/2024 | Introducing the New NET+ AWS Contract with Four Points Technology | Internet2 has announced the availability of a new NET+ Amazon Web Services (AWS) agreement offered in collaboration with Four Points Technology. The new NET+ AWS agreement is the result of community requests and was selected via a competitive bid process involving community members from several public and private institutions. In this webinar Internet2 and Four Points Technology staff will discuss the requirements articulated by the community and the resulting agreement. |
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02/27/2024 | NET+ GCP Strategy Call - Best practices for running Google Cloud | Google Cloud Platform offers numerous tools and strategies to not only ensure your cloud environment is performing and properly secured, but that you are making the most of your cloud dollars. Committed Use Discounts can help you reduce the cost of predictable workloads. Subscription Agreements can bring certainty and peace of mind to less predictable workloads giving you room to explore without the fear of runaway costs. NIH STRIDES helps biomedical researchers make that precious research funding go further. Sometimes forgotten in your management of Google Cloud is your GCP account team. If you are not leveraging their expertise regularly to optimize your institution’s cloud work, then you are as good as leaving money on the table. You can bring them in for office hours for project owners, architectural consultations, and even to put on gamified training events like Cloud Heroes. Staying on top of your enterprise Google Cloud organization requires time in the console reviewing a lot of information, but also taking optimum advantage of the programs and people that Google provides. Don’t just sign the contract and retreat into your cave. This session will cover both the basic tools and information that should be regularly reviewed to manage the tech. We will also explain the strategies and opportunities you can use to ensure you aren't wasting money. |
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02/21/2024 | NET+ AWS Strategy Call - Maximizing your AWS Relationship: Don’t leave money on the table | Your experience with AWS through NET+ can and should go beyond access to the breadth and depth of AWS cloud services and solutions. Building a deeper relationship with the NET+ community and your AWS team unlocks opportunities for you, your colleagues, your leadership and your institution. In this session hear from Kari Robertson, Chief Technology Officer, University of California Office of the President about her experience and the benefits that relationship-building with her AWS account team has brought to UCoP. She and the team from AWS will share how you and your institution can engage with AWS to expand your team’s capabilities, gain access to additional resources, participate in custom and invitation-only experiences, and accelerate the impact of your work in AWS cloud. |
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01/23/2024 | NET+ AWS Town Hall - Google Gemini AI: Charting Your Higher Ed Course with the Perfect Model | Ditch the guesswork and unlock the power of Google Gemini AI for your university. This town hall is your blueprint for navigating the diverse capabilities of Ultra, Pro, and Nano - Gemini's dynamic trio of language models and AI Studio to Vertex Studio. |
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2023 | ||||
| Date | Title | Description | Speaker(s) | Assets |
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12/13/2023 | AWS Tech Jam - Murakoshi's Marvelous re:Invent re:Cap | It is that time again! The annual re:Invent re:Cap, a marathon recounting of all the announcements made at re:Invent that are relevant to the research and education community, enumerated, seemingly without intervening breaths, but AWS Principal Solutions Architect Kevin Murakoshi. This year we are upping the stakes. We thought about having a pool to bet on how few times Kevin would stop for breath, but then it was suggested we make One Bingo Card to Rule Them All, combining terms from the keynote watch party bingos we had during re:Invent. There is still AWS swag to be won! You won't want to miss this fantastic send off of the cloud season. |
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12/11/2023 | GCP Tech Jam - Answers About Google's AI Tools | Tech Jams are deep dives into a given issue. This quarter we have John Bailey (WUSTL), Damian Doyle (UMBC), and Walter Wong (CMU) in the hot seat to talk about their experimentation with Google's AI tools and to ask the Google expert about it. That expert will be Charles Elliott, Field CTO for Education at Google. He'll handle whatever they come up with, without a computer assist! We will also be joined by Chris Daugherty, Education Strategy Lead for Google who will say a few words about Google's AI subscription offering. Bring your popcorn, and your own questions, and we'll all learn a thing or two about AI in GCP. |
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11/15/2023 | NET+ AWS Strategy Call - How Athletic Departments can use the Cloud to gain an advantage | Athletics departments are swimming in data - photos, videos, ticket sales, demographics, player stats and more. Much of these data are siloed, often trapped in servers sitting under desks. What if that data could be gathered together and analyzed to improve player success, team outcomes, engage fans and alumni, and improve the bottom-line? Join us to learn how the University of Pittsburgh is using AWS to create Fan360 - a database to better understand their university's fanbase, improve marketing, better target alumni outreach, and increase ticket sales. |
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11/7/2023 | NET+ GCP Town Hall - HPC on CGP | Google Cloud provides a comprehensive and highly capable platform for scientific and high performance computing. In this session we will provide an overview of the platform, its unique capabilities as well as the partner ecosystem Google has built. Furthermore, we will discuss the substantial impact the platform can have on computationally-driven research across a variety of scientific domains. |
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10/18/2023 | NET+ AWS Town Hall - Introduction to Amazon Security Lake | To celebrate Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we'll show how to centralize security data into a purpose-built data lake that's stored in your AWS account. We'll also use modern analytics tools to give a broad view of security posture across an entire organization. |
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10/18/2023 | NET+ GCP Strategy Call - Advisory Board, Google NEXT Recap, and CoLab Bonus | At the end of August, Google held their annual Cloud NEXT conference in San Francisco. The NET+ GCP Service Advisory Board met with Google prior to the conference to discuss issues and priorities raised by the community.
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9/27/2023 | NET+ AWS Tech Jam - All Along the Control Tower | When cloud poet Jimi Hendrix was asked about Control Tower, he voiced the sentiment many of us feel, “There's too much confusion. I can't get no relief.” Two of your NET+ AWS colleagues, Carlos Speranza from University of Utah and Rob Larmon from Loyola Marymount University, will come to the hot seat armed with questions about Control Tower in search of relief. Jimi did add, however, “No reason to get excited” and that’s because AWS’s Jason Moldan, Principal Solutions Architect for Public Sector will be there with all your answers. |
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8/16/2023 | NET+ AWS Town Hall - Generative AI on AWS | The potential of Generative AI (Gen AI) is driving an unprecedented level of investment and excitement from companies around the world. In this talk, you will learn about Gen AI and how Amazon Web Services (AWS) is playing a key role in democratizing Machine Learning (ML) and making it accessible to anyone who wants to use it, including more than 100,000 customers of all sizes and industries. AWS is taking the same approach to generative AI in order to enable every company to innovate faster and reinvent their customer experiences and applications. Join us to hear from Diksha Sharma, an AI/ML Specialist Solutions Architect in the Worldwide Specialist Organization. She works with public sector customers to help them architect efficient, secure and scalable machine learning applications including Generative AI solutions on AWS. |
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7/25/2023 | NET+ GCP Strategy Call - Preparing your GCP Org to Support RAD Lab for Research | RAD Lab (https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/rad-lab) is a Google Cloud-based sandbox environment to help technology and research teams experiment and create cloud environments without the risk of affecting existing infrastructure. It enables users to deploy infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to support specific use cases. Infrastructure is created and managed through Terraform in conjunction with support scripts written in Python. In order for researchers to install and run RAD Lab, assistance is needed by the institution’s Google Cloud administrators. In this quarter’s NET+ GCP Strategy Call, Google Practice Lead for Infrastructure and Application Modernization, Derek Oliver will give us an overview of RAD Lab and RAD Lab UI, then walk us through options for supporting your researchers’ use of RAD Lab in your Org. |
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7/19/2023 | NET+ AWS Strategy Call - Managing change within AWS and the Cloud | We had a great discussion a few weeks ago on the bi-weekly tech call about valuable, actionable topics for us to cover in our upcoming quarterly calls. We took your feedback and put together a calendar for the coming months. As we did so, we realized that the September Tech Jam would fall during the I2 Technology Exchange, but the topic, moving old Landing Zones to modern Control Tower, was too good to skip. Consequently, we are combining it with our planned topic about handling change in AWS services. That gives us a powerful set of topics. We hope you’ll join Kevin and some of his SA colleagues as they help us stay on track with change. |
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6/27/2023 | NET+ GCP Tech Jam - Managing Abandoned Projects in GCP | What’s the state of your GCP Org? Would you be embarrassed to have guests over? Would they see a lot of unsightly project build-up? Maybe even boxes of old projects lining the stairs because you’ve run out of places to put them? Does your Org look like the floor of the kids’ bedroom, with abandoned projects strewn about everywhere? This is why we can’t have nice things. Are you a project hoarder? Of course, you’re not! You want a tidy, clean, efficient, tech-debt-free GCP Org with all those old, abandoned projects taken by the kids when they move out or just hauled off to the dump. Maybe you are not shooting for cover of Better Orgs and Gardens, but you at least don’t want to have to explain to the CISO what all that extra risk is lying around your Org. Join us for the Quarterly NET+ Tech Jam and attack those abandoned projects head on. That’s exactly what Ezequiel Gioia, Systems Analyst in research IT, and Tim Telkamp, Enterprise Infrastructure Manager in central IT, at the University of Central Florida are doing. They will be in the Tech Jam hot seat getting the dedicated assistance of noted Google Cloud Whisperer, Alok Vimawala. Alok will help them exercise those little demons from the UCF GCP Org so they can, well, so they can get on with their lives and stop worrying about them! Join us to find out how to tackle this timeless problem. |
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6/21/2023 | NET+ AWS Tech Jam - CMMC on AWS | Due to popular demand\, we will be talking about securing your environment for protecting CUI, specifically configuring AWS for the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification <https://dodcio.defense.gov/CMMC/> (CMMC). Kevin has invited Scott Friedman and Brian Stucker, two experts on the topic to help us work through it. NOTE: Tech Jams always work best when we have one or two schools currently facing the problem willing to take the hot seat and talk through the challenge. |
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5/22/2023 | NET+ GCP Town Hall - The Cloud Team’s Role in Supporting Teaching & Learning on Google Cloud | Of the major cloud service providers Google Cloud is the most generous and flexible supporter of teaching & learning. It is also the easiest platform, sometimes too easy, for students, faculty and other members of your community to start projects in using introductory credits. This can all result in some nasty project build-up in all those hard-to-get-at-places. Over the next two months we are going to provide strategies for heading off and addressing some of the unnecessary technical debt and risk. This month we are going to walk you through the Google Cloud’s programs for teaching and learning. Most of them are hosted by Google, so knowing when to direct faculty to them will reduce projects in your Org. This is great stuff and you should invite your faculty to attend if you can. Other times circumstances require that the projects be created in your Org. We will give tips and strategies for proactively supporting the faculty and keeping the resulting projects under control. |
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5/17/2023 | NET+ AWS Town Hall - Introducing Amazon Lightsail for Research | The easy button for deploying research capable cloud resources. Amazon Lightsail for Research is a new offering that makes it easy for researchers and students to create and manage a high-performance CPU or a GPU research computer in just a few clicks on the cloud. You can use your preferred integrated development environments (IDEs) like preinstalled Jupyter, RStudio, Scilab, VSCodium, or native Ubuntu operating system on your research computer. In this session, you'll learn how you no longer need to use your own research laptop or shared school computers for analyzing larger datasets or running complex simulations. You can create your own research environments and directly access the application running on the research computer remotely via a web browser. Also, you can easily upload data to and download from your research computer via a simple web interface. This session is for those who support researchers to learn about how Lightsail for Research can accelerate time to science. |
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4/19/2023 | NET+ AWS Strategy Call - AWS Marketplace for NET+ | Due to concerns about 3rd party contract terms, the AWS Marketplace is generally underutilized in higher education. However, a private Marketplace has the potential to be a very valuable addition to your cloud funding, legal, security and compliance strategies, not to mention customer service. In this quarter’s NET+ AWS Strategy Call, we are doing to meet with representatives of the Marketplace team. They would like to hear from you, how they could make Marketplace a piece of your cloud deployment and management strategy. Please join us to help shape the possibilities! |
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3/15/2023 | NET+ AWS Tech Jam - AWSome Authenticating AWS with SSO systems and more! | It is Tech Jam time again. During a bi-weekly Tech Share call in January the suggestion was made to dive into the mysteries and frustrations of the artist formerly known as AWS SSO (now AWS IAM Identity Center). You asked and Kevin responded. He found us a specialist to dig into the topic with us. Come bring your centralized authentication questions! Let’s talk about integrating AWS IAM Identity Center and IAM with tools like Shibboleth, Grouper, and AzureAD for AWS console access. We’ll talk about different authentication, provisioning, and management models for single sign-on in AWS. Speaker: Brad Dispensa is a principal security and compliance specialist for Amazon Web Services in the worldwide public sector group. Brad works as a subject matter expert in the AWS security group and specializes in security and compliance-based workloads. |
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2/28/2023 | NET+ GCP Strategy Call - CMMC | Security Command Center (SCC) and the numerous ill-fitting support plans have been hurdles to robust enterprise adoption of GCP. Together we have been working to improve the situation. Please join the first NET+ GCP Strategy (formerly “Subscriber”) Call of the year to learn about recent developments in the SCC model and to give your feedback on the various support models. |
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2/15/2023 | NET+ AWS Town Hall - Transform Genomic and Biological Data Into insights with AWS Omics | Lee Pang, Principal Solutions Architect, Health AI at AWS presented at our quarterly NET+ AWS Town Hall on AWS Omics. NET+ AWS Town Halls are typically a subscriber benefit, but periodically we open the Town Halls up to share interesting topics. Amazon Omics helps healthcare and life science organizations and their software partners store, query, and analyze genomic, transcriptomic, and other omics data and then generate insights from that data to improve health and advance scientific discoveries. In this session, you can learn how Amazon Omics provides scalable workflows and integrated tools for preparing and analyzing omics data and automatically provisions and scales the underlying infrastructure so that you can spend more time on research and innovation. Amazon Omics supports large-scale analysis and collaborative research. This session is for research decision-makers, researchers, and RCD team members who want to learn how Amazon Omics can accelerate research, support large-scale analysis, and generate insights to improve health and advance scientific discoveries. |
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1/18/2023 | NET+ AWS Strategy Call - Building a CCoE (Cloud Center of Excellence) | On a Tech Share call just before the holidays, the topic of a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) came up. When we had a last-minute speaker illness at TechEx, AWS’s Chris Kuehn was one of the speakers who leapt into the breach and gave a brief talk on CCoEs and the lessons he learned about setting them up when he worked at U of I and then later helping Notre Dame. He has some hard-won wisdom to share and we hope you’ll join us for this presentation and discussion. Please share the invitation with others at your institution. |
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