Community Cloud Conversation
- CCCG co-chairs: cccg-leads@lists.berkeley.edu (term ends)
- Bob Flynn - Indiana University (reflynn@iu.edu, 2020)
- Jody Couch - UC Berkeley (jody@berkeley.edu, 2021)
- Damian Doyle - UMBC (damian@umbc.edu, 2022)
- Alok Vimawala - University of Michigan (avimawal@umich.edu, 2023)
- Staff/moral support:
- Sean O’Brien (sobrien@internet2.edu)
- Sara Jeanes (sjeanes@internet2.edu)
- CCCG co-chairs: cccg-leads@lists.berkeley.edu (term ends)
- CCCG Slack Workspace - Join here
- Higher Ed Cloud Community Events Calendar
- Monthly Higher Ed Cloud Call
- Format: Meetings alternate between presentations one month to open discussion the next
- Details:
- When: Occurs the fourth Wednesday of the month at 9am PT/12pm ET.
- Where: https://internet2.zoom.us/j/408515294
- Running Agenda/Notes: https://tinyurl.com/EDUCAUSE-CCCG
- Download calendar invitation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NuRKDAq5a7wdudAzTgwxkCnyikEbTxwG/view?usp=sharing (Note for Google Calendar Users: Download the .ics file. Go into the Settings inside Google Calendar. Select Import and navigate to the downloaded .ics file. It should import it into your calendar.)
- Meeting topics:
- 2020
- November 13 - Cornell Cloud Forum 2020 – Research Support - https://blogs.cornell.edu/cloudforum/home/agenda/#november
- October 28 - Topic: Strategies for Controlling Costs in the Cloud
- Description: Teams from Harvard and University of Michigan will talk about ways to save money on cloud computing and their approaches to helping their campuses realize those savings. Ben Rota and Richard Murillo from Harvard and Mathew Chess, Kenny Moore and Alok Vimawala from University of Michigan will be presenting.
- October 9 - Cornell Cloud Forum 2020 – Cloud Community Governance - https://blogs.cornell.edu/cloudforum/home/agenda/#october
- September 23 - Topic: Open discussion
- Description: Lots of community announcements. A pitch for people to join the DevSecOps conversation. Brief mention of the FinOps discussion. What role is cloud playing in back to school and COVID-related work, including storage of testing/tracing data. Short rant about Box security. Discussion of how schools are taking requests for cloud accounts and how they keep track of inventory and what people are doing in their accounts. Lessons and resources shared.
- Recording and Transcript
- September 11 - Cornell Cloud Forum 2020 – Cloud Enablement Success Stories - http://blogs.cornell.edu/cloudforum/home/agenda/#september
- August 26 – Topic: From Zero To Secure Research Hero In Four Weeks!
- Description: University of Pittsburgh IT was approached by one of its leading researchers with a challenge: provide for a secure environment in which research could be conducted on a controlled HIPAA dataset. Oh, by the way, enable access from the internet AND allow people only take specific pieces of data out of the environment AND we need it in a month.
- Presenter: Brian Pasquini, Enterprise Architect, University of Pittsburgh
- recording and slides
- 2020
- August 5 – (non-CCCG) Q&A with IU Box Migration team
- Description: As a number of schools review their storage and collaboration strategies, Indiana University can provide insights from its experience. Indiana University was the first high-profile higher education customer to announce it was moving to Microsoft and Google and away from Box. IU’s early start resulted in many schools looking to learn from their research, successes and failures. IU has received several inquiries from other higher ed schools and is offering to discuss its experience and considerations. As a result, the IU Box migration team put on an infoshare in June covering their process, communications, technical decisions and lessons. The recording of that infoshare, as well as slides and detailed communication plan, can be found at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zZ5YnND9tO-MFreZxsMU4bdq9D6aBw5S?usp=sharing.
It’s one thing to listen to the story, it’s another to chat with the story tellers. In the wake of the infoshare the calls for meetings with the migration team have continued to come. In order to allow this hardworking team to focus on their hard work, we have arranged a dedicated Q&A session for any and all to bring their questions about tools and timing, dependencies and decisions, method and messaging, and so much more. NOTE: We learned our lesson last time and we have a larger-capacity Zoom roof for this call.
- recording, and chat transcript
- Description: As a number of schools review their storage and collaboration strategies, Indiana University can provide insights from its experience. Indiana University was the first high-profile higher education customer to announce it was moving to Microsoft and Google and away from Box. IU’s early start resulted in many schools looking to learn from their research, successes and failures. IU has received several inquiries from other higher ed schools and is offering to discuss its experience and considerations. As a result, the IU Box migration team put on an infoshare in June covering their process, communications, technical decisions and lessons. The recording of that infoshare, as well as slides and detailed communication plan, can be found at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zZ5YnND9tO-MFreZxsMU4bdq9D6aBw5S?usp=sharing.
- July 22 – Open Topic Discussion with a twist
- Description: Many in the community are taking part in the Higher Ed Cloud Networking & Security Workshop series. At the start of that series, attendees brainstormed a number of questions for the cloud vendors. Among those questions were many that were better suited as a discussion between members of the community. July would normally be an open topic discussion. We are keeping with that in spirit, but we are going to seed the conversation with a selection of questions from the list.
- recording and chat transcript
- June 24 – Indiana University Box Migration Infoshare
- Speakers: IU Box Migration Team
- Description: Switching cloud storage platforms can be challenging, especially when petabytes of data are involved. Indiana University has begun the process of switching from Box to Microsoft and Google for end-user cloud storage and is looking to share its experience and learn from the community. Topics will include IU’s motivations for a move, selecting a migration vendor, when to leave the legacy storage up or take it down during a migration, how to handle loss of features when changing platforms, what communications challenges universities will face, and how COVID19 complicates a storage migration.
- recording, slides, communication plan and chat transcript
- May 27 - Open Topic Discussion - Add your topics to https://tinyurl.com/EDUCAUSE-CCCG.
- April 23 - (non-CCCG) Google Anthos presentation to Stanford cloud team.
- April 22 - UNCG Cloud Cyberinfrastructure Innovation Lab
- Speaker: Jeff Whitworth, the Associate Vice Chancellor of Enterprise Infrastructure at UNC Greensboro
- Description: UNC Greensboro is exploring an idea to help catalyze adoption of cloud infrastructure for research and in the classroom across the entire university by creating a Cloud Cyberinfrastructure Innovation Lab. The lab is focused on institutional adoption of cloud infrastructure - something that can be challenging for a R2 and traditionally liberal arts institution.
- recording, chat transcript
- https://cci-lab.uncg.edu/
- April 8 - The Role of Cloud Computing in Higher Ed’s COVID-19 Response (Part 2)
- Join us! Download calendar invitation: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FqvpOwRq6jPqqBEsNNEGwrQ1IRMt3Ei7 (Note for Google Calendar Users: Download the .ics file. Go into the Settings inside Google Calendar. Select Import and navigate to the downloaded .ics file. It should import it into your calendar.)
- recording, chat transcript and notes
- March 25 - The Role of Cloud Computing in Higher Ed’s COVID-19 Response (Part 1)
We had over 100 people on the call. The conversation was great. Many schools shared their experiences of transitioning to online teaching, WFH and general community support and several provided helpful resources.
- recording, chat transcript and notes
- February 26 - Open Topic Discussion
- A lot has happened in the HED cloud world since our last open discussion. Add your topics to https://tinyurl.com/EDUCAUSE-CCCG.
- Topics covered:
- Community event updates
- RFPs for hosting ERP in the cloud
- How to address negative attitudes about using public cloud
- What are you doing to bring public cloud to the classroom?
- Cloud-based VDI experiences
- recording and notes
- January 22 - Data-driven Cloud Planning
- Topic 1: Whether Forecasting: Informing Migration Choices with Metrics
- Speaker: Brendan Bellina, Lead IT Architect, UCLA IT Services, Systems Services
- Description: Migration of applications to the Cloud is now a foregone conclusion for many institutions in Higher Ed. The first applications to leave the ground may be obvious or pre-determined, but after that initial rush of success of the few, what can be used to inform the bulk of the daunting effort that remains? Faced with a commitment to migrate 40% of the workload of over 400 applications within a 12 month period, UCLA developed a metrics based scoring and benefits spreadsheet tool to help inform and support the prioritization of application migrations. This presentation explains those metrics, the controls for scoring, and demonstrates the functioning of the tool.
- Topic 2: From Operational to Predictive: Evolving from a Traditional Data Warehouse to an Analytics Hub
- Speaker: Damian Doyle, Assistant Vice President, Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions, UMBC
- Description: In 2018, UMBC embarked on creating a new analytics-focused data warehouse with highly-performant real-time data ingestion pipelines using primarily native AWS tools. This session will outline the progress made leveraging AWS tools as well as open sourced products to establish the event-based ecosystem. We hope these methods can be used as a model for other campuses, as well as highlight the long-term benefits of re-architecting critical systems and processes in the cloud to accelerate innovation.
- Slides and recording
- Topic 1: Whether Forecasting: Informing Migration Choices with Metrics
- August 5 – (non-CCCG) Q&A with IU Box Migration team
- 2019
- December 16 (combined Nov/Dec event) - Fall Cloud Conference Round-Up
- October 23 - Federated Access to Research Data
Dr. Craig A. Lee, Chair, NIST Public Working Group on Federated Cloud (lee@aero.org)
Khalil Yazdi, Chair, Open Research Cloud Alliance (khalilyazdi@outlook.com)
- Slides, notes and recording
- EDUCAUSE 2019 Face to Face meeting (Chicago, October 16, 2019)
- September 25 - Open Discussion
- Early survey results
- EDUCAUSE F2F
- CCCG Leadership transition
- August 28 - Supporting Research in the Cloud - Round 1: The Human Bridge
- July 24 - Open Discussion
- June 26 - Cloud Community Events and Activity
- Recap of Cloud Networking Workshop put on by U Michigan, U Minnesota and Internet2 (Alok Vimawala - UMich)
- Update on Cornell Cloud Forum 2019 (Sarah Christen - Cornell)
- CCCG Engagement Channels (Bob Flynn - IU)
- CCCG Engagement Team (Jody Couch - UCSC)
- (recording and slides)
- May 22 - Open Discussion
- Announcements
- Cloud Forum dates: November 6-8, 2019
- Reminder: CFP for 2019 Cornell Cloud Forum closes June 1 https://bostonu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bCyJsiOkPsm3tAh
- #cloud_jobs channel added to CCCG Slack Team - post your cloud jobs there!
- Firewalling in AWS: Paul Peterson from Emory talked about networking strategies for their non-research AWS environment. (slides)
- Announcements
- April 24 - Google Cloud Platform
- Evolution of GCP at an Office 365 University – presentation by John Bailey, WUSTL
- With Great Integration Comes Great Responsibility (a.k.a. GCP at a G Suite School) – presentation by Bob Flynn, IU
- Google CAB GCP Track
- News from Google Cloud Next
- Tech bulletin: Don't fear the mystery folder. Unexpected visitor due to Google change https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/cloud-platform-projects. - Ananya Ravipati, IU
- IU GCP configuration document https://iu.box.com/s/5h6zj9l5dawie8crigc8m1v647kksw20
- Internet2 NET+ GCP contract - Sara Jeanes, Internet2
- (notes | slides & recording)
- Mar 27 - Open Discussion
- Feb 27 - Open Discussion (notes)
- Jan 23 - Cloud Q & A for Small Schools (recording and resources)
- 2018
- Dec 5 - Excerpts from the 2018 Cornell Cloud Forum (recording and resources)
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 CruzTitle: Using AWS CLI with Shibboleth and Duo https://github.com/techservicesillinois/awscli-login
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 IllinoisTitle: 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
Resources: “Introduction to Kubernetes” open-source eight-hour 100-level labs: https://goo.gl/uHq6T4 and presentation: https://goo.gl/Yb6HfrTime Permitting: AWS re:Invent recap
- Nov 1 - Open discussion at in-person meeting at EDUCAUSE Annual Meeting
- Oct 24 - Open discussion (see notes)
- Sep 26 - Funding models for new cloud paradigms (speakers: David Seidl- Notre Dame, Ben Rota - Harvard)
- Aug 22 - Notre Dame and the Cloud - Over the past three years, Notre Dame University has moved more than 80% of their IT infrastructure and services to Amazon Web Services (AWS). On this month's Higher Education Cloud Collaboration conference call, leaders from Notre Dame University will provide an overview of their move to AWS, and will share their lessons learned and advice for other institutions.
- Limit of recorded history
- Dec 5 - Excerpts from the 2018 Cornell Cloud Forum (recording and resources)
- CCCG Slack Workspace - Join here
- What Campus Leaders Need to Know About Cloud Computing (2011)
- A Vision for cloud - and Earth-based services at UC Davis (2011)
ECAR
(ECAR) Cloud Strategy for Higher Education: Building a Common Solution (2014)
(ECAR) Total Cost of Ownership for Cloud Services: A Framework (2015)
ECAR Cloud Service Working Group
- Google Docs
- Preparing the IT Organization for the Cloud (series, 2015-2016)
Spotlight on Cloud Computing Series
- Community-Generated Documentation
- Documentation for Cloud Computing and Data Science (U Washington)
- Documentation for Cloud Computing and Data Science (U Washington)
Platform-Specific Resources
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Resources
AWS Official Resources
AWS Getting Started Videos for Education
Lambda, API Gateway, and Microservices
Getting Started with Serverless Architectures Webinar
Video: several best practices at ~38 min mark
Building Serverless Backends with AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway Webinar
Video: deeper dive into Lambda and API gateway
Whitepaper: overview of AWS microservices and interaction between them
- Controlling Access to API Gateway
- Lambda Limits
- Lambda deployments
Fully managed with AWS Code Pipeline
Most complete option for modeling and automating your deployment steps
Leverages Code Pipeline (workflow automation), Code Deploy (build, test, and package your code), S3 (store code package), and CloudFormation (deployment)
Partially managed with AWS CloudFormation (blog entry with S3 integration)
Primarily focused on deploying your code instead of using the console
- Blog entry on using Jenkins if you already have an environment
- Apache Spark and EMR
Best Practices for Apache Spark on AWS Webinar
Video: a discussion about storage options and best practices with EMR at ~32 min mark
- Using spot instances with EMR
- Transit VPCs
re:Invent 2016 Sessions
Unofficial Resources
Going multi-cloud with Google Cloud Endpoints and AWS Lambda
Solution Guides
Case Studies
Training:
- Free Coursera courses for GCP (includes QwikLabs credits) - request form
- Training center site