Harvard
Our vision is to make it easy for the Harvard Community to realize the transformative benefits of the Cloud through enabling adoption and providing common services that are secure, cost-effective, and reliable.
University of Central Florida
UCF IT will follow a cloud first methodology for all new IT services and solutions.
Existing services and applications will be evaluated for migration to cloud services when any of the following factors apply:
- Aging hardware
- Unsupported application version
- Major upgrade or migration
- Maintenance renewal
- Increasing cost
While we will prioritize cloud solutions over traditional infrastructure, “cloud first” does not mean “cloud always”. Current requirements or constraints will dictate when the cloud makes sense. Our goal is to align with strategic objectives but not introduce unnecessary risk. When needed, we will utilize our off-site private cloud resources for those services where public cloud doesn’t make sense or add value. We will limit on-campus infrastructure to only what’s absolutely necessary based on very specific use cases.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) will be the cloud model of choice whenever possible. We will seek to streamline all custom-designed solutions using our trusted cloud provider Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings where available and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) when needed.
This strategy will enable us to make the most efficient use of UCF IT resources by reducing complex solutions, shifting more risk to our vendors, and taking advantage of their expertise and specialization. As a result, we can offer a better solution to our customers.
Notre Dame
The University looks to the OIT to provide excellent service to our students, faculty, and staff. By leveraging the capabilities of cloud services, we can contribute a greater percentage of the OIT's organizational focus on initiatives which most closely align with the core mission of the University.
Our new strategy for campus will be to go "Cloud First" - looking for cloud-based solutions that meet the University's needs as the first step. A dedicated project team is also working to migrate the physical servers in Notre Dame's data center into a data center in the cloud that provides reliable, stable, fast, and flexible service.
2018 Cloud Forum Lightning Round Highlights
Three of the favorite presentations from the 2018 Cloud Forum were invited back to give their presentations again. Recordings and their slides can be found linked.
Title: Ouch! Commonly Overlooked (or Surprising) Cloud Costs
Description: “Wait … that costs how much?” How do you prepare stakeholders for cloud-related charges that were provided ‘for free’ while on-premise? What new charges exist in the Cloud? What are the associated costs? Most importantly, who is going to pay them?
Presenters: Kari Robertson and Glenn Blackler - UC Santa Cruz
Title: Using AWS CLI with Shibboleth and Duo
Description: How can higher education give our faculty and staff convenient access to AWS tools without leaving behind a mess of long-lived secret keys? We’ll demonstrate a University of Illinois plugin to the AWS CLI which authenticates against Shibboleth with Duo and manages short-lived credentials, making it easy to be secure.
Presenter: Chris Kuehn - University of Illinois
Title: Kubernetes: Container Orchestration at Scale
Description: Kubernetes is a resource scheduler that started as a Google project. Now it is the primary container scheduler being adopted across the spectrum of both cloud and on-prem based deployments. With an extensible scale-first architecture it’s easy to see why its adoption has outpaced other solutions such as Docker Swarm and Mesos. The goal is to present on the architecture of Kubernetes and basics of running Kubernetes at scale.
Presenter: Jeff Sica - University of Michigan