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The January AWS NET+ Tech Share meetings brought together members from across the research and education community to discuss cloud migration strategies, training initiatives, and innovative approaches to managing AWS resources. Here's what you need to know from our first meetings of 2025.

Community Updates and Events

Several significant events marked the beginning of the year:

Institutional Highlights

Loyola Marymount University's Migration Journey

LMU shared their ambitious migration plans, including:

  • A large-scale migration involving 100 servers, split between general infrastructure and Banner system
  • Partnership with AWS, including direct support from the AWS team and the Migration Acceleration Program
  • Strategies for managing the migration with a lean team

University of Virginia's Service Catalog Initiative

UVA is developing a Service Catalog for AWS resources, specifically designed to help students familiarize themselves with AWS services. While Research and Engineering Studio (RES) implementation is currently on hold due to cost considerations, the team continues to explore alternative approaches for providing AWS learning environments.

Northwestern University's Infrastructure Improvements

Northwestern implemented a slick solution using SNS and Lambda to clean up feeds from logs, along with deploying a new Terraform project. They've also enhanced their security monitoring by implementing CloudTrail log integration with Splunk.

Training and Development Initiatives

The community identified several key areas for future training:

  • Cloud infrastructure for networking and security teams
  • Data lake implementation and management
  • FinOps training for both IT business office staff and developers
  • Container migration strategies for VM teams
  • SkyPilot framework implementation

Of particular interest is SkyPilot, an open-source framework from UC Berkeley's Sky Computing Lab that enables cost-effective multi-cloud management for machine learning and data science workloads. The Internet2 CLASS program is collecting these ideas and others. If you have more or if you’d like to maybe write and teach one of these topics, reach out to class[dot]internet2.edu. 

Managing "Free Range" AWS Accounts

Several institutions shared successful strategies for bringing independently managed AWS accounts under central IT governance:

  • Boston University implemented a service catalog approach with a 98% success rate in centralizing AWS accounts
  • Texas A&M University developed an email filter system to monitor new AWS account creation
  • Baylor College of Medicine established a procurement system flag to notify the cloud team of cloud-related purchases

Research Computing Solutions

The community discussed various approaches to supporting research computing needs:

  • Three common researcher profiles were identified:
    1. Basic compute and storage needs (suitable for LightSail)
    2. HPC requirements
    3. Advanced data processing needs requiring native AWS services
  • Several institutions are exploring sandbox environments and credit systems to support rapid prototyping while maintaining oversight
  • The community showed interest in exploring Vocareum's AWS account deployment feature as a potential solution for sandbox environments

Looking Ahead

The community continues to evolve its approach to cloud computing, with a focus on:

  • Developing more comprehensive training programs
  • Improving account management strategies
  • Enhancing support for research computing
  • Implementing cost-effective solutions for educational environments

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.