June 23, 2021

Welcome to the NET+ GCP Newsletter. I don’t believe we’ve done one before, so this is a bit of a test launch. It’s going to be compact, brief, and hopefully very informative. Let me know how you like it, what you’d like to see more of, what you’d like to see less of. Send your feedback to bflynn@internet2.edu.

Events

Summer Camp by Redhola Muzny from Vecteezy

GCP Summer Camp

This one is red hot because the first Camp session takes place today (6/23) at 11 am PT/2 pm ET. If you missed out on earlier announcements, there is still time to register and attend. Today’s topic is a showcase of teaching and learning use cases. You absolutely want to check these out. Naturally, we will make recordings available later, but we’ll hope you’ll join us live. Go on, register now. The rest of the newsletter will be here when you get back. 

NET+ GCP Subscribers Call

The next GCP Subscribers call is currently scheduled for Tuesday, July 6 at 11:30 am PT/2:30 pm ET. I am going to push that back a week to Tuesday, July 13 (same time) because all of the Googlers are off that week. (Nice, huh?) If you have topics you would like to see discussed, let me know and I’ll add them to the agenda. If they would benefit by having Googlers in the conversation, I’ll make those invitations. Send me your suggestions and requests at bflynn@internet2.edu.

News and Notes

Are You Making STRIDES?

Businessman Facing Obstacles by Thanakorn Kotpootorn from Vecteezy

I hope your campus is working to make STRIDES available to all of your NIH-funded researchers. Wait, you aren’t familiar with STRIDES? Wha?? OK. No shame in that. Go read this. It’s not long. We’ll wait. Alright, so you want to get moving with STRIDES, but there are...issues. No worries, tell us what they are. We want to help you be a star for your researchers. Take a couple of minutes (no more than five, really) to fill out this STRIDES Adoption Barriers survey so we can help you remove them.


Big Fish Eat Little Fish by Icon0.com from Vecteezy

The Training Landscape

If you watch the online cloud training space you will have noted the purchase of Linux Academy by A Cloud Guru in 2019. Now comes word that A Cloud Guru is being acquired by Pluralsight. The NET+ GCP program has been working with Pluralsight for our Professional Cloud Architects training cohort. They've been great partners. Maybe this will make them even better to work with going forward. Stay tuned.

Opportunities to Get Involved

Help Us Get Creative with Teaching

Online Classroom by imajin noasking from Vecteezy

I am working with the team supporting faculty for teaching and learning. Think curriculum, compute credits for class, Qwiklabs credits, etc.. We are looking to brainstorm with some faculty who teach using GCP (or would like to) and cloud teams who want to develop programs to make it easier for faculty to do so. If you or someone you know would be interested in giving us feedback, possibly piloting some things on your campus, please email me at bflynn@internet2.edu. 

Jigsaw by Graphics RF from Vecteezy

What Services Are You Missing?

A school does not succeed with GCP alone. Shocking, right? In order to make cloud a success at your campus, it takes a solid platform but also management and security tools, training, code repos, unit testing tools, and more. Well, I want to know what you are using and what the community would get behind for new NET+ services with better contract terms to match our collective effort. I’ve spelled this effort out in the first of a series of blog posts. Take a minute to read the post and share your thoughts.

Resources 

Business Open Mind Concept by monsterjoke from Vecteezy

Accelerating Student Success with AI

Long-time friend of the higher ed GCP community, Jesus Trujillo Gomez, has written a nice article about Google’s services to help institutions increase student success. It’s a quick but informative read.

Platform/Service Comparison

If you have come to GCP from another cloud platform or you are trying to speak GCP to your AWS colleague (and need a translator) or maybe you have to manage all three platforms and you’d like your head to stop spinning for just a moment. Check out this new cross-platofrm product map put together by the Google team.

Platform Conversion

Not quite religious conversion, but close. While this is technically an Event, it was an event in the past so I’m calling it a Resource. Feel free to edit your copy of the newsletter if you disagree. Back in April the Googliata held a couple of Cloud OnAir sessions, one each for AWS professionals moving to GCP and Azure professionals moving to GCP. They cover a lot and are quite informative. You may just be coming to GCP and have a frame of reference from another platform. These will help speed your journey.

Not Your Grandma’s GCP Cheat Sheets

OK, so maybe your grandma was the kind of GCP dev who didn’t need cheat sheets, but if she did, you can bet they would have been the purplish ink on white paper and smelling of mimeograph fluid kind, not these fun and amazing works of art by Google developer advocate Priyanka Vergadia. While you are on her site, check out the About tab for other excellent resources. (And kids, if you don’t know about mimeograph machines, go ask grandma.)

From the Slack-o-sphere

If you aren’t on the Cloud Computing Community Group Slack workspace you are missing out on the higher ed cloud conversation with your peers. (Jump over to https://tinyurl.com/edu-cloud-community to find the latest join link.) Here are a couple of tips that popped up recently in the #google channel.

ThanksThank You by joezhuang from Vecteezy

Content

Thanks to the people who have suggested content for this issue (whether they realized it or not) including:

  • Alice Kamens
  • Joey Avraham
  • Eric Stravaalsen
  • Nick Young
  • Oren Sreebny

Images

Thanks to the good people at Vecteezy for the artwork, specifically:

  • momentbloom for Business Startup
  • Icon0.com for Big Fish Eat Little Fish
  • Redhola Muzny for Summer Camp
  • Thanakorn Kotpootorn for Businessman Facing Obstacles
  • imajin noasking for Online Classroom
  • Graphics RF for Jigsaw
  • monsterjoke for Business Open Mind Concept
  • joezhuang for Thank You