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The October 2nd AWS NET+ Tech Share covered collaborative projects, disaster recovery solutions, and cloud migration experiences. Here's a summary of the key discussions.

Recent Highlights and Upcoming Events

Collaborative "Barn Raisings"

The group continued to discuss the proposed "barn raisings" – collaborative sessions where community members get together with AWS experts to build out a solution in their environment. Here are some potential sessions that interest the community:

  1. Indiana University's Audio Transcription Service: A tool that could benefit many institutions dealing with audio content.
  2. Secure research environments: A crucial need for institutions handling sensitive data.
  3. Arizona State University's PDF accessibility project: Addressing the important issue of document accessibility in higher education.

Disaster Recovery and Migration Insights

James from Old Dominion University sparked a discussion on AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS) experiences. Tommy from AWS explained that DRS, formerly CloudEndure, offers block-level replication from source to target, with both migration and DR options.

Rob from Loyola Marymount University shared valuable insights on using AWS Application Migration Service (MGN): While generally effective, MGN presented challenges with edge cases.

Gerard from Boston University (BU) added historical context, noting past issues with VMware agents and instance sizing during migration. These experiences highlight the ongoing challenges in cloud migration and the importance of careful planning.

SAP HANA in the Cloud: Balancing Performance and Cost

Gerard from BU raised a question about running SAP HANA in AWS. Currently using an on-premises solution across two data centers, they're exploring AWS as part of a tech refresh. Some participants with past SAP HANA experience shared how this is a big undertaking and would be interested to hear the outcome of it. Solutions Architects on the call recommended Gerard to talk to his dedicated AWS SA to loop in an SAP HANA specialist from AWS to discuss potential migration plans and their forecasted cost.

Data Lake and Account Management: A Holistic Approach

Max from Wayne State University (WSU) shared insights on their ongoing Data Lake project and AWS migration. His and his team’s work are mainly greenfield efforts, e.g. creating a new AWS Organization, setting up Control Tower, designing VPCs, and even building an integration for account provisioning with Grouper and EntraID.

For many folks on the call, this was a trip down memory lane, reminiscent of when they had to migrate their first set of workloads into AWS. We hope that the collective wisdom and experience of this group can help teams like Max’s navigate their AWS migration more smoothly and avoid common pitfalls

Control Tower in Academic Settings

Ethan from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) inquired about experiences with decommissioning AWS Control Tower. Someone from a quantum computing course in CMU had set up Control Tower in their AWS environment. While no direct experiences were shared, the discussion pointed to AWS documentation and highlighted the growing use of AWS in course settings.

While initially talking about Control Tower, this conversation highlighted similar adoption of an uncommonly used AWS service: AWS Braket. Both CMU and BU have a quantum computing course which uses AWS Braket. BU claims that the course was well received.

Conclusion

The October AWS NET+ Tech Share demonstrated the higher education community's commitment to collaborative problem-solving and knowledge sharing. From exploring joint projects to discussing the intricacies of cloud migration and specialized use cases like SAP HANA, the discussions reflected the complex and evolving nature of cloud adoption in academic institutions.

Be sure to check out the other blog posts we've written. As always, feel free to send any feedback to tmanik[at]internet2[dot]edu.