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The higher education cloud computing community is an active, thriving, sharing conversation between schools, community partners and individuals. This community focuses on the infrastructure (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) ecosystems. It is built for higher ed, by higher ed. We welcome all to participate with an understanding that the goal is to promote the most secure and efficient use of cloud computing in support of the mission of our institutions. While we welcome the cloud vendors to participate in the debate and sharing of information it is never to be used for sales. 

As the use of hyper-scale computing at community colleges, colleges and universities grows, so do the questions, challenges and lessons learned by each of us. Efforts to share those challenges and lessons and to ask those questions are also growing. This site attempts to bring together those conversations and the resources they produce in the hope that you will engage and encourage your colleagues to engage. Together we will raise our institutions' collective CloudIQ.

Resources

Community Cloud Conversations

ConversationDescriptionContactsNotes
EDUCAUSE Cloud Computing Community Group (CCCG)

The Cloud Computing Community Group provides participants with the opportunity to learn about and discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with the adoption of cloud computing in colleges and universities. Examples of discussion topics include cloud contract negotiation and management, cloud vendor relationship management, IT service management practices, compliance and legal issues, data privacy and security considerations, cloud identity and access management, cloud service integration (cloud to cloud and cloud to on-premise), skills and staffing implications, and cloud use cases to enable institutional agility, efficiency, and innovation. This group meets virtually every month, in person at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference and uses its list and Slack workspace to discuss issues throughout the year.

The Cloud Computing Community Group and Internet2 have long partnered to cultivate the cloud computing conversation in higher education. Beginning with the EDUCAUSE/Internet2 Joint Cloud Working Group, Internet2 has provided infrastructure and logistical support to the CCCG. Internet2 hosts the CCCG monthly calls and their meeting artifacts as well as the Higher Ed Cloud Wiki. 

Monthly meetings

CCCG co-chairs: cccg-leads@lists.berkeley.edu (term ends)

Internet2 staff support:

Join the CCCG Slack Workspace


Join the CCCG Mailing List

Cornell Cloud Forum 2020 (CF20)

The Cloud Forum is an annual gathering hosted by the cloud crowd at Cornell University. Beginning in 2015 this event brought together the IT professionals who manage cloud computing at many of the top research institutions around the country. Attendance is limited to 90 people because we gather in a small auditorium on the Cornell campus. Thanks to the intimate setting and higher education IT’s history of sharing, the conversations are candid, productive and often quite entertaining. We share successes, failures and lessons. We challenge our peers with the problems we are facing in hopes of tapping the wisdom of the crowd.

The event is for higher education, by higher education. We invite each of the main cloud computing vendors to send representatives, but they are not allowed to present or engage in the debate. They are there to listen and learn about higher ed’s cloud challenges.

Naturally COVID-19 has turned everything on its head, including the Cloud Forum. We really wish we could welcome you in person to the Cornell campus. Who doesn’t want to visit Ithaca, NY in the winter? Instead, the 2020 Cloud Forum has been reformulated to take place in monthly segments throughout the school year. There is no cost to attend. Sessions are held on the second Friday of each month through May, at 9am PT/12pm ET, each running for 90 minutes.

Register for Calendar Invitation and Reminders

Internet2 Online Events (I2O)Webinars, workshops, training sessions, and community gatherings all fit within our mission of supporting and expanding the community. I2 Online serves as the virtual gathering spot for programs that help members and colleagues share solutions and best practices.View upcoming or suggest event topics

Organic Community Topics  (COMM)

Anytime a conversation is taking place that would benefit from the involvement of that organization's peers in the higher ed cloud community, we will try to share it here. That could be a request from a number of schools to have another school share what they are doing or one school might have invited a cloud provider in for a demonstration. Whatever the case, if it is information sharing and collaboration at its core (rather than sales) we welcome its inclusion here.

Upcoming/Past Events

2021

DateTitleDescriptionSpeakerKey
4/9/21Trust and Security
  • The case for avoiding “networking” in your cloud adoption strategy.
  • Securing Security for your Cloud Strategy
  • TLD TL;DR - Trust from on high
  • Panel: Protecting cloud hosted data sets
  • John Bailey - Washington University in St. Louis
  • Shelley Rossell and Cornelia Bailey - University of Chicago, Information Security
  • Sara Jeanes, Adair Thaxton, and Nick Lewis - Internet2
CF20
3/24/21
  • William O'Mullane
  • Igor Sfiligoi

CCCG

Running notes

3/12/21

Google Team-selected Researcher + Community Presentation


  • Disorganized Organizations: Balancing the need for control with distributed IT
  • Leveraging VirtualFlow to harness the power of cloud computing to target COVID-19 proteins via ultra-large virtual screens

Ben Rota – Harvard

CF20 

3/5/21Jupyter on GoogleWe'll have Marc Cohen from Google leading us through the managed offerings from Google, plus folks from UMBC and NYU talking about their Jupyter Hub deployments on GCP, and Burwood talking about how partners can help with Jupyter.
  • Marc Cohen - Google

I2O


Recording coming soon

2/24/21

How Universities are Providing Self-Service Cloud Environments for Researchers 


Internet2 hosted webinar to help Higher Education researchers leverage new self-service, managed, cloud-based solutions.

  • RONIN gives researchers explicit budget control and forecasting so they can use their research budgets effectively
  • RONIN also provides research IT with administrative oversight into researcher spend and control over the security policies enforced across all RONIN users
  • Service Workbench promotes collaboration around data, by enabling researchers to upload and share data sets, and also allows quick access to public research data sets hosted by AWS
  • Service Workbench provides researchers with spend transparency and control by enabling them to see individual workspace costs, as well as spend across projects and organizational units.


  • Parice Brandies, PhD Candidate, University of Sydney School of Life and Environmental Sciences
  • Paul Avillach, Assistant Professor in Pediatrics & Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital
  • Nathan Albrighton, CEO and Founder of RONIN
  • Madhu Bussa, Sr. Solutions Architect, AWS
  • Oren Sreebny, Consultant Internet2 Cloud Programs, Internet2

I2O

2/24/21

Open Discussion

  • Presentation and discussion by Ben Rota from Harvard summarizing results of a recent Research Computing in the Cloud survey. 
  • Discussion on how to fund ongoing cloud costs (storage and compute) for research projects once the grant expires
  • Discussion on the costs associated with AWS Transit Gateway and the types of behaviors and services it enables (or not) at Higher Ed institutions


Ben Rota – Harvard

CCCG


Running notes

2/12/21

Amazon Team-selected Researcher + Community Presentation

  • Managing IaC Code Rot: Terratest in Action
  • Using the cloud to support research access to confidential data: The Administrative Data Research Facility


  • Jason Armbruster, Cloud Architect/Engineer & Wylie Butler, Cloud Engineer – University of Colorado
  • Dr. Julia Lane, Professor at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, at the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress, and a NYU Provostial Fellow for Innovation Analytics

CF20

1/27/21

Cloud Challenges Facing Smaller Institutions

What are the different challenges that are faced by smaller institutions, how do strategic/operational motives differ, how are school designating their staff since they are already wearing so many different hats in many cases. How do we better connect with this community to make sure they are represented in our community?

CCCG

Running notes

1/8/21Cloud Strategy
  • What’s your deal: provider, consumer, or broker?
  • Self Managed vs. Managed Service Provider
  • The Power of Free: A Crisis of Opportunity and how the Cloud Saved Us
  • Infrastructure Analytics at UNCG
  • Panel: Strategic Cloud Decision Making
  • Cornelia Bailey – University of Chicago
  • Kari Robertson – University of California, Office of the President
  • Ryan Frazier – Harvard Business School
  • Nick Young – UNC Greensboro
  • Erik Lundberg – University of Washington – Moderator; Brian Jemes – University of Idaho; James Monek – Lehigh University; Bill Thompson – Lafayette

CF20

2020

DateTitleDescriptionSpeakerKey
12/11/20Microsoft Team-selected Researcher + Community Presentation
  • Patient-specific air flow modeling to support ventilator splitting under dire conditions
  • IAM in the cloud – architecture, cost and benefits
  • Amanda Randles – Alfred Winborne and Victoria Stover Mordecai Assistant Professor of Biomedical Sciences – Duke University
  • Bill Thompson – Lafayette College

CF20

12/2/20Open DiscussionDiscussion around Re-Invent and recent Cloud Forum sessions. Updates on what is happening on campuses around COVID recovery and cloud use to support those efforts. Discussion on cost management and remote training. (No recording this month)

CCCG

Running notes

11/13/20Research Support
  • Panel: Getting the Most out of your Public Cloud Research Dollars – An overview of the NSF-funded CloudBank project and the NIH STRIDES Initiative, how they benefit academic researchers and how best to support them.
  • Cloud Research Resources to Simplify the Research Lifecycle
  • Automating the provisioning of HIPAA allied instances with Ansible and Step Functions
  • Cornelia Bailey – University of Chicago – Moderator; Brian DeMeulle – UC San Diego, Nick Weber – National Institutes of Health
  • Joshua Kissee – Texas A&M University
  •  Matthew Chess – University of Michigan; Brandon Swickerath – University of Michigan

CF20

10/28/20Strategies for Controlling Costs in the CloudTeams 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 – Harvard University
  • Mathew Chess, Kenny Moore and Alok Vimawala – University of Michigan

CCCG

Running notes

10/9/20Cloud Community Governance
  • Bringing order to wild free range cloud through inclusive governance
  • Panel: Leveraging the Cloud Community
  • Damian Doyle and Todd Haddaway – University of Maryland Baltimore County
  • Oren Sreebny – Internet2 – Moderator; John Bailey – Washington University in St. Louis; Bob Flynn – Indiana University; Matthew Rich – Northwestern University; Alok Vimawala – University of Michigan

CF20

9/23/20Open DiscussionLots 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.

CCCG

Running notes

9/11/20Cloud Enablement Success Stories
  • Working with Cloud reserved instances to reduce costs
  • Monitor AWS with Grafana 7
  • Cloud Billing
  • OTICA – Platform-on-a-Platform for GCP
  • UCF’s Remote Learning Solution to the Pandemic
  • Notre Dame’s Accelerated VDI Madness
  • Gerard Shockley – Boston University
  • James Monek – Lehigh University
  • Jim Charters – University of Michigan
  • Hans Jacobsen & Alan Ge – Stanford Healthcare
  • Jeff Samek, Robert Connors & Bob Mello – University of Central Florida
  • James Smith & Brandon Rich – University of Notre Dame

CF20

8/26/20From Zero To Secure Research Hero In Four Weeks!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.Brian Pasquini, Enterprise Architect - University of Pittsburgh

CCCG

8/5/21Q&A with IU Box Migration team

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.

  • Adam Sweeny - Indiana University
  • Justin Zemlyak - Indiana University

COMM

Chat transcript

7/22/20Open Topic Discussion with a twist

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.



CCCG

6/24/20Indiana University Box Migration Infoshare

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.


CCCG






5/28/20Higher Ed Cloud Networking & Security Workshop 

COMM











Special thanks for the presentation materials icon by Krish from the Noun Project


    • 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)
    • 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
  • 2019
    • December 16 (combined Nov/Dec event) - Fall Cloud Conference Round-Up 
    • October 23 - Federated Access to Research Data
    • 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
      • Derek Morr (Cloud Solutions Architect) and Greg Madden (Associate CIO for Research) - Penn State University
      • Rob Fathland (Research Computing Director) - University of Washington
      • Marty Sullivan (Cloud Systems Engineer) - Cornell University
      • (notes and recording)
    • July 24 - Open Discussion 
      • Funding for OS teams in the cloud
      • AWS Multi-Tenant vs Multi Account Strategy
      • Creating and tracking a ‘cloud innovation’ fund through optimization
      • How are you supporting researchers in the cloud?
      • Integration Tools
      • (notes and recording)
    • 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
      • Firewalling in AWS: Paul Peterson from Emory talked about networking strategies for their non-research AWS environment. (slides)
    • April 24 - Google Cloud Platform
    • Mar 27 - Open Discussion
      • Performance testing of moving data from one cloud provider to another
      • SSO with AWS and how to federate external users
      • Upcoming AWS webinar series
      • Options for handling cloud training needs
      • Call for (self-)nominations for CCCG co-chairs
      •  (notes | recording)
    • 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)

      1. 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

      2. Title: 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 Illinois

      3. 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
        Resources: “Introduction to Kubernetes” open-source eight-hour 100-level labs: https://goo.gl/uHq6T4  and presentation: https://goo.gl/Yb6Hfr

      4. Time 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
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