Community Cloud Conversations
| Conversation | Description | Contacts | Notes |
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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 mailing list | |
| Higher Education Cloud Forum (CF) | The Cloud Forum is an annual gathering hosted by the higher ed cloud crowd that began at Cornell University in 2015. This event brings together the IT professionals who manage cloud computing at many of the top research and education institutions around the country. Attendance is strictly limited because we gather in a single auditorium-style classroom. 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 the cloud computing vendors most widely used by higher education to send representatives, but they do present. They are there to listen and learn about higher ed’s cloud challenges. After 2021 the Cloud Forum left its nest and hit the road with the assistance of Internet2. The 2022 Cloud Forum was held at Washington University in St. Louis and 2023 will be at Emory University in Atlanta. For details see: https://internet2.edu/cloud-forum. |
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| Internet2 Events (I2) | Webinars, workshops, training sessions, and community gatherings all fit within our mission of supporting and expanding the community. Internet2 works to convent the community to help institutions and colleagues share solutions and best practices. These include
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| 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
Click 
in the right column for meeting assets (slides, recordings, etc.)
2024 | ||||
Date | Title | Description | Speaker | Meeting Assets |
4/17/2024 | NET+ AWS Quarterly Town Hall - Research and Engineering Studio and HPC on AWS | AWS Announced Research and Engineering Studio at Re:Invent 2023. This open source, easy-to-use web-based portal helps administrators create and manage secure cloud-based research and engineering environments. Join Evan Bollig, Ph.D. Principal Specialist Solutions Architect for high performance computing to learn about this exciting tool and about how AWS supports High Performance Computing in the cloud and bring your research IT colleagues!
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| I2
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3/27/2024 | CCCG Monthly Call - Modernizing Legacy Architectures in the Cloud | The APTrust is a digital preservation consortium that operates under the University of Virginia Library. They provide a dark archive preservation service for consortium members through custom developed SaaS offerings, which allows members to deposit content and manage their preservation repos across multiple cloud storage locations. In addition, they develop tools to help support member depositing needs. Since inception, APTrust has operated 100% in the Public Cloud, starting on AWS, and is now moving to a multi-cloud environment |
| CCCG
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2/28/2024 | CCCG Monthly Call - Gen3: Advancing Biomedical Research in the Cloud | The cloud can be a complex and daunting environment for biomedical researchers. Data platforms, in particular, can be difficult to manage, especially at scale. To solve this problem, the University of Chicago CTDS developed Gen3, an open source cloud-native platform.
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| CCCG
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1/24/2024 | CCCG Monthly Call - Implementing Cloud Security |
If any of these questions apply – this meeting is for you! We have an exciting meeting to start off 2024 with two excellent presentations focused on implementing Cloud Security in a scalable and supportable manner.
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| CCCG
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2023 | ||||
| Date | Title | Description | Speaker | Meeting Assets |
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| 12/6/2023 | CCCG Monthly Call - Monitoring in the Cloud | Monitoring complex systems anywhere can be complicated and it can be that much more difficult in a hybrid world. In this session we'll hear from 2 schools about their monitoring stacks and how it helps them work in the cloud (and on-prem). Lehigh University is using the Elastic stack and The University of Florida uses the Grafana/Prometheus stack. After a brief presentation we'll have time for an open discussion on monitoring in the cloud. |
| CCCG
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| 11/15/2023 | NET+ AWS Quarterly Strategy Call - How Athletic Departments can use the Cloud to gain an advantage | Athletics departments are swimming in data - photos, videos, ticket sales, demographics, player stats and more. Much of these data are siloed, often trapped in servers sitting under desks. What if that data could be gathered together and analyzed to improve player success, team outcomes, engage fans and alumni, and improve the bottom-line? Join us to learn how the University of Pittsburgh is using AWS to create Fan360 - a database to better understand their university's fanbase, improve marketing, better target alumni outreach, and increase ticket sales. |
| I2
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| 11/7/2023 | NET+ GCP Quarterly Town Hall - HPC on CGP | Google Cloud provides a comprehensive and highly capable platform for scientific and high performance computing. In this session we will provide an overview of the platform, its unique capabilities as well as the partner ecosystem Google has built. Furthermore, we will discuss the substantial impact the platform can have on computationally-driven research across a variety of scientific domains. |
| I2
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| 10/10/2023 | CCCG Annual In-person Meeting | CCCG October Meeting to be held at EDUCAUSE Annual Conference 2023 Cloud Computing Community Group (CG) Meeting (Open to All) Join this discussion on the challenges and opportunities associated with cloud computing. Topics will include contract negotiations, vendor relationship management, compliance and legal issues, data privacy and security considerations, identity and access management, service integration, skills and staffing implications, and cloud use cases that enable institutional agility, efficiency, and innovation. https://events.educause.edu/annual-conference/2023/agenda/cloud-computing-community-group-meeting |
| CCCG
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| 9/27/2023 | CCCG Monthly Call - Supporting Researchers in the Commercial Cloud | This month's meeting will be a joint meeting between the Cloud Computing Community Group and Research and Data Community Group. Both communities will join the call to learn about supporting researchers in the commercial cloud. We have 3 panelists lined up to discuss their experiences, challenges, and success in assisting researchers using the cloud for their research. Community members will have a chance to ask questions or share their experiences as well. |
| CCCG
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| 8/23/2023 | CCCG Monthly Call - End-of-Summer/Back-to-School Open Discussion | This month’s Cloud Computing Community Group will be an open discussion session. As we begin to welcome students back to campus and wrap up our summer projects, let’s hold an open discussion session. Talk about exciting projects you did over the summer with cloud computing, what’s on the horizon for the fall semester, and anything interesting with cloud computing you want to speak about. Bring your challenges and your problems, well, only your cloud problems. Most importantly, be there and ready to talk. Our co-chairs will be there to help coordinate the discussions, take notes, and keep the conversations flowing. | CCCG
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| 7/26/2023 | CCCG Monthly Call - Automated Transcription for Social Science Researchers | Social science researchers frequently need audio recordings transcribed for analysis. However, third-party software and services often present both technical and security challenges. In this session a team from Indiana University will discuss the motivation and the technical implementation of the Automated Transcription Service (ATS). This simple and 100% serverless solution leverages cloud machine learning (ML) APIs and other cloud services to provide convenient and secure transcription capabilities for social scientists. |
| CCCG
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| 6/28/2023 | CCCG Monthly Call - Cloud Forum Redux | FinOps Style | Contrary to on premise infrastructure, one cannot simply 'set it and forget it' in the cloud as resources are billed by the hour (or minute!). Out of this paradigm, came a new specialty for IT folks – FinOps (Cloud Financial Management). This month we have wonderful speakers featured at Cloud Forum 2023 presenting on their experience developing and managing FinOps. The number one cloud comment I get from Executives, "I hear everything is much more expensive in the cloud". My response, "Not if managed correctly". Please join us to learn FinOps tips and tricks from renowned higher ed experts.
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| CCCG
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| 6/20/2023 | SkyPilot Webinar | SkyPilot is an open-source framework from UC Berkeley that enables users to run Machine Learning and Data Science batch jobs seamlessly on any cloud, reduce cloud costs substantially, tap into best-in-class hardware on different clouds, and enjoy higher resource availability. In the webinar, we will introduce the concept of SkyPilot and show demos of how to easily launch jobs on any cloud with SkyPilot. |
| COMM
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| 5/24/2023 | CCCG Monthly Call - Using the Public Cloud for Teaching & Learning | This month will feature panelists from our community that have used cloud for teaching and learning. Some have taught cloud in the classrooms, while others have supported faculty in using cloud in their courses. Our panelists will share their experiences, what has worked, what didn't, tips, and tools/services from our partners such as AWS, Azure, and Google to assist with teaching and learning.
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| CCCG
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| 5/11/2023 | Live from the Higher Ed Cloud Forum 23 | 1. Developing FinOps at UT Austin
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| CF & I2
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| 5/3/2023 | Infrastructure & Platform Services - Search for good tooling: RONIN for Researchers - Simplifying the Cloud | In 2021 Internet2 NET+ Infrastructure & Platform Services program manager Bob Flynn put out a call to the community to identify the greatest areas of need for tooling to help them run the major cloud platforms at scale at their institutions. That call included a survey and that survey resulted in our 2022 exploration and ultimate agreement to create a higher ed Kion program. This year we are moving down the list of survey results to revisit RONIN. Please join us for a fresh look at RONIN and help us assess community interest in a NET+ RONIN agreement. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Description: Researchers venturing more and more into using cloud computing and commercial cloud vendors. Many of them do not have experience with system administration or managing cloud services. This can present a challenge to groups who do not have the capacity to hire a cloud specialist to manage infrastructure for them and may lead to less utilization of cloud services.
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| I2
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| 4/26/2023 | CCCG Monthly Call - Automating AWS Orgs and Control Tower | If you are using AWS and have struggled to figure out how to manage your org(s), manage your Control Tower, balance automation and manual processes, then you will want to check this out. Kelly Rivera, Lead Cloud Engineer, University of Wisconsin Madison, knows this stuff cold and has gone down all the rabbit holes that the rest of us merely peek over the edge of. She will share her hard-won wisdom with the community.
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| CCCG
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| 3/22/2023 | CCCG Monthly Call - Cloud Teams | Cloud Teams | Higher Ed Models
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| CCCG
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| 3/1/2023 | NET+ Kion Webinar - Achieving Multi-Cloud Control and the Freedom to Innovate | Whether your institution is starting on its cloud journey and you’re balancing innovation and sustainability, or you are trying to bring some order to years of organic experimentation, it requires practices, planning, and tooling to manage a multi-cloud environment. In this session, we’ll hear from Washington State University and Princeton University as they share their progress on the cloud adoption path and how they are tackling the challenge of ensuring control while providing freedom to users to innovate. NOTE: Both speakers will be talking about the role that Kion plays in these efforts.
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| I2
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| 2/22/2023 | CCCG Monthly Call - Enhancing Public Health Infectious Disease Genomics through Cloud Computing | Infectious disease genomics is a rapidly changing field within public health. The increased need for genetic characterization during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic combined with newly emerging sequencing technologies has led to a wide adoption and application of sequencing approaches across public health laboratories. This in turn has created a need for compute environments that can handle complex bioinformatics workflows and scale to meet a growing need. The Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene (WSLH) has adopted a Cloud based approach that leverages AWS services to build a highly reliable infrastructure that is both cost effective and highly scalable. When combined with Nextflow pipelines utilizing Docker containers the result is a highly reproducible production analysis environment that is capable of supporting a variety of public health goals including infectious disease surveillance and outbreak investigations.
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| 2/15/2023 | NET+ AWS Town Hall: Transform Genomic and Biological Data Into insights with AWS Omics | Amazon Omics helps healthcare and life science organizations and their software partners store, query, and analyze genomic, transcriptomic, and other omics data and then generate insights from that data to improve health and advance scientific discoveries.
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| I2
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| 2/7 and 2/9/2023 | Stanford Technology Platform Assessment and Strategy Peer Discussion | Stanford is currently underway with an initiative to evaluate our IT Portfolio to review drivers, governance, funding, and strategies being used to inform thoughtful cloud deployment models. As part of this effort, we would like to learn from our peers, by collecting data in the form of the questions found in this sheet. Please take a moment to provide your input. While data is being collected, we will be scheduling two one-hour meetings (February 7, 9 12pm ET) for open dialog and collaboration. I am happy to share the methodology, recommendations and results of this effort with those that are interested.
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| COMM |
| 2/6/2023 | CCCG Special Presentation: RNP Presentation on MultiCloud & DevSecOps | The CCCG will be hosting a special presentation on Monday, February 6th, 2023 9am PST/12pm EST. Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa (RNP) is the Brazilian national research and education network (NREN), roughly equivalent to the role Internet2 plays in the US. Not only do they provide secure and high-capacity internet, but they do targeted development services and support innovative projects to further the social good. Their system includes universities, educational and cultural institutes, research agencies, teaching hospitals, parks and technology centers. With this, they benefit 4 million Brazilian students, teachers and researchers.
Seven years ago, when RNP started to work with public cloud, they had a very traditional dev team. Their applications ran on premises and they had very little automation in their development processes. They started to lift & shift systems to the cloud but they did not feel they were really reaping the benefits of the public cloud or of DevSecOps practices. They found it difficult to become a “Cloud Native / DevSecOps” Organization.
It took 4 years and an iterative process to transform themselves into a cloud-savvy, DevSecOps-practicing, actively-learning organization. They would like to share their journey, how they operate now, and the impact these changes have had on their work. In addition to the lessons learned along the way, they will discuss the tools they have developed to support their work and use cases they have applied them to. |
| CCCG
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| 1/25/2023 | CCCG Monthly Call - Getting started with the cloud (Best Practices) | Hear stories from our panelists on getting started in the cloud. Panelists will discuss their cloud journey, lessons learned, what they would do if they had to do it again, and offer some guidance for our community. Afterwards, we will discuss the formation of a Cloud Best Practices Working Group and will seek volunteers from our community.
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2022 | ||||
| Date | Title | Description | Speaker | Meeting Assets |
| 12/14/2022 | CCCG November/December Monthly Meeting - Review of EDUCAUSE 2022, Cloud Forum 2022, and I2 Technology Exchange 2022 | As we look forward to the new year, your co-chairs are starting to think about 2023 and what our priorities are for the CCCG. Please join us to review and discuss the various conferences in the fall. What were your takeaways? Any sessions worth bringing to the larger community? This will be an opportunity for all our community members to provide feedback for the coming year? What's working? What's not? Trends we should be focusing on? |
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| 11/30/2022 | AWS Control Tower in Higher Education | Please join a discussion about Control Tower in Higher Ed. We’ll focus on the main differences and gotchas for higher ed vs. standard deployments and talk about starting fresh with CT or bringing it into an Org with existing accounts.
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| I2
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| 11/16/2022 | NET+ AWS Discussion - The Role of Cloud in Institutional Resilience |
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| I2 NET+
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| 11/11/2022 | Higher Ed Cloud Forum | The 2022 Cloud Forum was held at Washington University in St. Louis. Each day portions were made available live. Today's content included:
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| CF & I2
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| 11/10/2022 | Higher Ed Cloud Forum | The 2022 Cloud Forum was held at Washington University in St. Louis. Each day portions were made available live. Today's content included:
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| CF & I2
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| 11/9/2022 | Higher Ed Cloud Forum | The 2022 Cloud Forum was held at Washington University in St. Louis. Each day portions were made available live. Today's content included:
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| CF & I2
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| 10/27/2022 | CCCG October Meeting to be held at EDUCAUSE Annual Conference 2022 | CCCG October Meeting to be held at EDUCAUSE Annual Conference 2022 Cloud Computing Community Group (CG) Meeting (Open to All) Join this discussion on the challenges and opportunities associated with cloud computing. Topics will include contract negotiations, vendor relationship management, compliance and legal issues, data privacy and security considerations, identity and access management, service integration, skills and staffing implications, and cloud use cases that enable institutional agility, efficiency, and innovation. |
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| Key Considerations for Supporting Academic Researchers | Researchers are increasingly leveraging computational technologies as a key approach within their research. More and more disciplines are leveraging data, simulation, and advanced analytics to perform their research. Researchers have increasingly complex requirements and expectations as they join institutions and funding agencies are requiring new and more complex data retention approaches. At the institutional level, developing a strategy on how to support the wide range of requirements in a supportable, cost effective, and secure way has become a critical strategic initiative. This session will discuss a perspective on how to support researchers, impacts from the funding agencies and AWS technology solutions.
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| I2O
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| NET+ Kion Service Evaluation and Release | Back in January of this year Internet2 hosted a webinar for Kion (formerly cloudtamer) in response to community demand for a multi-platform cloud enablement tool. (Scroll down to January 11 in this list for details and a link to the recording.) The webinar and buzz it generated led to a NET+ service evaluation and now a higher education agreement. For more read the blog post: Kion Checks the Top Boxes
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| I2O
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| 9/28/2022 | CCCG Monthly Call - Revisiting our failures. | Discussing how we faltered, then picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves off and came back better than ever! NOTE: No Zoom recording so attendees can feel safe to have open discussions. |
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| 8/24/22 | CCCG Monthly Call - Cloud Standards Panel | Panelists discuss the following questions followed by Q&A with the larger group:
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| 7/27/22 | CCCG Monthly Call - Sharing Stanford’s best practices for building out a centralized GCP offering | How do you enable researchers or data analysts across disparate schools or agencies to take advantage of GCP, while providing central oversight, budgeting and governance? See how Stanford addressed this challenge, after various schools across the university started using GCP independently and requested help from Central IT to get billing and oversight under control. Lucrecia Kim-Boswell, IT Director of Stanford University, will walk through the best practice structure their partner setup to manage billing and operations, so that an entire campus can easily access GCP with the help from a small University IT Team. |
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| 6/22/22 | CCCG Monthly Call - Open Discussion | This month's open mic discussion started with some questions EDUCAUSE asked the CG's to post to the community. Those questions, and some of the responses, can be found in the running notes. There was then some discussion about the role of EDUCAUSE in the past and how that has changed and brief mention of Internet2's role supporting the community. Suggestions were made on additional ways to get engaged in the community. |
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| 5/25/22 | CCCG Monthly Call - Secure research enclaves and compliance | This month is all about security and compliance. All of us are responsible for security but bring your security team along today for the presentations and conversations. First will be a presentation from John Bailey at Wash U discussing How to Create Secure Research Enclaves and everything involved in that. James Monek from Lehigh University will also be giving an update on the Health Data Warehouse Pilot he previously discussed, since it has now finished a HIPAA audit and he can discuss how that went. |
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| 4/27/22 | CCCG Monthly Call - Open Discussion | This month is our open mic discussion meeting for CCCG, and we wanted to make sure we curating the finest possible discussion for all of you. To assist, we would ask you to fill out this very, very brief single question poll to let us know how to advertise and focus next week's meeting. I promise, its super quick. If you could fill it out by the end of the day Thursday we would appreciate it. You can select up to 4 topics, and write in your own as needed. CCCG April Meeting Discussion Topics |
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| 4/20/22 | Internet2 NET+ Special Event - Sustainability and AWS: Insights for Higher Education - A NET+ AWS Town Hall | This month, in honor of Earth Day, we turn our attention to the environment. We welcome Hahnara Hyun, Partner Solution Architect, Amazon Web Services to present a session called Sustainability and AWS: Insights for Higher Education. In general, NET+ program events are only open to subscribers, but due to the importance of this work and this message, we are opening this session to the entire research and education community.
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| I2
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| 3/23/22 | CCCG Monthly Call - Data Lakes | Data Lake in the Cloud - March CCCG Meeting Does your institution have a cloud data lake strategy? Does it look more like a data puddle? Interested in learning how you can deploy a data lake in the cloud to handle and analyze data at scale? As with last month, we encourage you to bring along a buddy. This time bring along your favorite data analysts, scientists, or data architects to share important tips to get a data lake working at your institution. There will be two presentations along with questions, answers, and discussions. "Lessons Learned from AWS Student Data Lake POC", by James Monek from Lehigh University “A Cloud Data Lake Approach to COVID Recovery” by Aswan Movva from University of California, Berkeley
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| 3/21/22 | Internet2 Networking Team - Multi-Cloud Networking Community Discussion | On February 23, 2022, Internet2 attended the CCCG call to talk about their Networking for Cloud services and to query the group about how the future Cloud Connect console will look, feel and work. During the discussion, attendees asked about the multi-cloud environment and asked for additional discussion on multi-cloud. They also touched on how a layer3 "virtual cloud router" solution that doesn't require hair pinning traffic between clouds through your campus or data center could reduce complexity, improve latency, increase performance, and reduce cost. The I2 networking team believes that together we can develop a solution that that meets these goals, supporting your critical cloud workloads. Topic: Multi-Cloud Community Discussion Location: Meeting ID: 959 8407 0917 |
| I2
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| 2/23/22 | CCCG Monthly Call - Internet2 Cloud Networking Tools and open Discussion | Asks:
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| 1/26/22 | CCCG Monthly Call – “IT’S A PILOT! Legitimating experimental work in your cloud” | Has this happened to you? You have a cloud that’s not ready to take payments, or not ready to be used by the masses, or you don’t know how to do things right — but something comes through that you shouldn’t say no to. UChicago has handled these situations with a lightweight pilot framework. Both the cloud people and the user agree in advance, in writing, on what both parties will get from the situation. It has helped to set expectations about the unexpected and ultimately get unstuck. The 2nd part of Wednesday’s meeting be open discussion (so put those topics in the running agenda or bring them with you Wednesday). We look forward to seeing everyone, and I’ve included all the meeting info below again as a reminder.
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| 1/11/22 | Internet2 Infrastructure & Platform Services – Search for Good Tooling – Kion.io | Last summer Internet2 NET+ Infrastructure & Platform Services program manager Bob Flynn put out a call to the community to identify the greatest areas of need for tooling to help them run the major cloud platforms at scale at their institutions. That call included a survey and that survey produced some decent results. In a three-way tie for the top survey response were:
The solutions had to be multi-cloud and pass muster with institutional security and compliance. One tool that was specifically suggested by multiple respondents in these areas was cloudtamer.io. Cloudtamer.io has since changed its name to Kion, but we are still interested to see if their tools will meet these needs. It appears to tick all those boxes from the survey, but will it work for higher ed? Join us to find out. |
| I2O
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2021 | ||||
| Date | Title | Description | Speaker | Meeting Assets |
| 12/8/21 | Special Edition Monthly Call - The Big Lie: Cloud Computing - Bill Wrobleski, Penn State EDUCAUSE 2021 and Cloud Forum 2021 Wrap-ups. What are we planning for 2022? | The Big Lie: Cloud Computing - Bill Wrobleski, Penn State In 2011, I started evangelizing for the Cloud. It’s been 10 years, so the future I promoted has come true, right? I’ll revisit the vision we imagined, what actually happened, and explore the question “Is cloud computing the biggest disappointment for higher education this century?” EDUCAUSE 2021 and Cloud Forum 2021 Wrap-ups. What are we planning for 2022? Co-chairs will provide a brief wrap up of the recent conferences and feedback we received for what the CG should be focusing on in 2022. And yes, we want your feedback before you leave for the holidays, so there will be homework.
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| 11/18/21 | Live from Cloud Forum 21 - Presentations | Cost is always a concern when moving from the traditional capex model on prem to the opex model in the cloud. Declan Fleming and Jessica Respicio from UC San Diego will share what they learned about cost (and business) optimization from their experience with cloud at UCSD and CloudBank. In our final presentation, Penn State’s Rick Rhoades will share how pandemic hiring challenges and an innovative talent-sharing program led to surprising success and unexpected outcomes. See the Cloud Forum Agenda for descriptions, slides and recordings. |
| CF & I2 TechEXtra21
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| 11/18/21 | Live from Cloud Forum 21 - Researcher (Amazon) | Researcher presentations are a highlight for Cloud Forum attendees each year. The researchers are asked to focus on their research, not the underlying cloud technology, though that does sometimes poke through. These talks are meant to remind us cloud professionals of the importance of the work we do each day. This year’s researcher nominated by Amazon is Professor Eric Venner, Associate Professor, Division Director for Bioinformatics from the Human Genome Sequencing Center – Clinical Lab at the Baylor College of Medicine with a talk titled “Implementing Genomic Medicine at the HGSC.” |
| CF & I2 TechEXtra21
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| 11/17/21 | Live from Cloud Forum 21 - Researcher (Microsoft) | Researcher presentations are a highlight for Cloud Forum attendees each year. The researchers are asked to focus on their research, not the underlying cloud technology, though that does sometimes poke through. These talks are meant to remind us cloud professionals of the importance of the work we do each day. This year’s researcher nominated by Microsoft is Dr. Travis Osterman of Vanderbilt University Medical Center with a talk titled "Lessons Learned from VUMC’s First End-to-End Cloud Project." |
| CF & I2 TechEXtra21
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| 11/17/21 | Live from Cloud Forum 21 - Presentations | The maintenance and lifecycle of data is a never-ending challenge. In our first presentation we’ll hear about research into how schools are dealing with the seeming end to unlimited cloud storage being done by Internet2’s Oren Sreebny. Oren will be joined by Helen Hockx-Yu who will share how Notre Dame is approaching the problem. In our second presentation, Ken Bigelow and Venkat Mahadevan from the University of British Columbia will explain their efforts to make use of cloud computing easier for their research community. See the Cloud Forum Agenda for descriptions, slides and recordings. |
| CF & I2 TechEXtra21
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| 11/16/21 | Live from Cloud Forum 21 - Researcher (Google) | Researcher presentations are a highlight for Cloud Forum attendees each year. The researchers are asked to focus on their research, not the underlying cloud technology, though that does sometimes poke through. These talks are meant to remind us cloud professionals of the importance of the work we do each day. This year’s researcher nominated by Google is Luigi Marchionni, Associate Professor of Pathology at Weil-Cornell Medicine. Professor Marchionni’s talk is titled "A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Big Data Based Biomarkers." |
| CF & I2 TechEXtra21
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| 11/16/21 | Live from Cloud Forum 21 - Lightning Talks | The first day of the 2021 Cloud Forum's online content kicked off with nine (9!) lightning talks from the National Institutes of Health, University of Chicago, CloudBank and Internet2. For details, slides and a recoring of the talks see, the Cloud Forum agenda. |
| CF & I2 TechEXtra21
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| 10/29/21 | EDUCAUSE 2021 Face to Face meeting | Join this discussion on the challenges and opportunities associated with cloud computing. Topics will include contract negotiations, vendor relationship management, compliance and legal issues, data privacy and security considerations, identity and access management, service integration, skills and staffing implications, and cloud use cases that enable institutional agility, efficiency, and innovation. |
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| 9/22/21 | Cloud FinOps | Cloud costs keeping you up at night? Are you wondering how to keep costs from running out of control? What practices should you put in place now to stay on top of the cloud spending game? A group of higher education cloud professionals with expertise in cost optimization and cloud financial best practices met regularly through the spring and summer pooling their expertise in an effort to create a list of tips and techniques for making the most of your cloud dollars. In this session they shared those pearls of wisdom with you, their colleagues in higher ed cloud. Find their slides, full tip sheet, presentation recording and more on the session resource page. |
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| 8/26/21 | Special Edition of Monthly CCCG Call - | We are excited to announce that for this month’s call, the Research Computing and Data CG will be partnering with the Cloud CG! The call will be held on Thursday, August 26th from 1-2 pm ET.In this call, we will discuss top use cases for cloud for research. We will first hear from you on what your top use cases are, and what services you are keeping on-premise. We will then explore how to manage distributed costs associated with cloud usage. We will discuss models and resources used to support researchers using the cloud, as well as the level of support provided at different institutions. Please download and import the following iCalendar (.ics) files to your calendar system. Monthly: https://educause.zoom.us/meeting/tJUkd--oqTsuGNEfXHMKLyvcD6yYJuG03tBR/ics?icsToken=98tyKuCppzssGtOVtBuCRowcHYigM_TwtmJbjY14mifNLgt_exX1ErRbC5hqN4iD Join Zoom Meeting https://educause.zoom.us/j/91906070425?pwd=SHJnZUNYVnVWa3Z2aTJ3Tm45MUNVdz09 Meeting ID: 919 0607 0425 Passcode: 243359 | CCCG | |
| 7/28/21 | NET+ GCP Summer Camp: Running the Institution on Cloud Power | IT professionals are always looking for the best tools for the job. An ever-increasing number of those jobs can be done more efficiently or effectively with cloud tools. In the final NET+ GCP Summer Camp session of 2021 we will hear about a range of uses, from the operational, to the strategic, to the meta.
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| I2O
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| 7/28/21 | Making better teams with diverse hiring and retention | Diverse teams are better teams! This month’s Cloud Computing Community Group is an opportunity to share principles of diverse hiring and retention. This session will be a moderated panel discussion about what everyone, from leadership to established IT professionals, can do to be supportive of new and diverse professionals entering the workforce, but also to actively seek them out. After our panelists share their stories, we will have time to discuss audience member’s ideas. Please share this invitation with others who may be interested.
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Moderator
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| 7/21/21 | NET+ GCP Summer Camp: The Power to Change Lives | The uses of hyper-scale computing power are limited only to the imaginations of those leveraging it. Nowhere is this more evident than in the work of our researchers. This NET+ GCP Summer Camp session will showcase two very different but undeniably impactful research projects made possible with the hyper-scale compute power and tools of GCP. Join us to learn about:
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| I2O
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| 7/15/21 | NET+ Palo Alto Networks: Cloud-native security for workloads and SaaS applications | Another great community effort has led to the evaluation and release of a higher-ed negotiated service agreement for a toolset widely-popular across higher ed. In this case it's the NET+ Palo Alto Networks "Cloud-powered security for .edu" offering. Peek (or jump) into the ongoing series of NET+ Palo Alto Networks community town hall meetings in July to learn about their security tools. | I2O
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| 6/23/21 | NET+ GCP Summer Camp: Teach the Cloud, Teach Using the Cloud | There are all kinds of reasons we strive to provide safe, powerful and easy-to-use cloud computing environments for our institutions. Few are more important or have broader impact than teaching and learning. Join the NET+ GCP Summer Camp session to hear three great stories of how GCP is being used in the classroom to teach:
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| I2O
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| 6/23/21 | Open Discussion |
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| 6/10/21 | NET+ CloudCheckr Premium Webinar | Whether you are multi-cloud or focusing your efforts on one, support tooling for cost and security tracking are increasing helpful and increasingly important. CloudCheckr provides cost management, asset inventory, security & compliance monitoring, and resource utilization tracking across your multi-cloud environments, giving not only centralized visibility into your cloud at the enterprise level, but also putting tools in the hands of individual researchers, departments and developers. See CloudCheckr in action and hear what your peers who evaluated the service think about it. |
| I2O
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| 6/2/21-6/4/21 | Higher-Ed DevOps Conference | On the afternoons (1-5 EDT) of June 2-4, the Higher-Ed DevOps Conference will be meeting to share training, best practices, and more. If you are faculty/staff of any InCommon institution, you are welcome to join us… for free! Check out the agenda. | COMM
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| 5/26/21 | New NET+ Services Introduced to Meet Higher Ed Community Needs | 20 schools collaborate with Internet2 to vet and release four new NET+ services to the community.
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| I2O
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| 5/26/21 | Higher Ed Case Studies of Power and Agility in the Public Cloud |
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| 5/14/21 | Unconference | Community-driven conversations on:
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| CF
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| 4/28/21 | Open Discussion |
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| 4/9/21 | Trust and Security |
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| CF
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| 3/24/21 | Using Cloud for Research at Scale
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3/12/21 | Google Team-selected Researcher + Community Presentation |
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| CF
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| 3/5/21 | Jupyter on Google | We'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. |
| I2O
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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.
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2/24/21 | Open Discussion |
| Ben Rota – Harvard | |
2/12/21 |
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| CF
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| 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? | ||
| 1/8/21 | Cloud Strategy |
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| CF
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2020 | ||||
| Date | Title | Description | Speaker | Key |
| 12/11/20 | Microsoft Team-selected Researcher + Community Presentation |
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| CF
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| 12/2/20 | Open Discussion | Discussion 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 | |
| 11/13/20 | Research Support |
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| CF
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| 10/28/20 | Strategies for Controlling Costs in the Cloud | 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. |
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| 10/9/20 | Cloud Community Governance |
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| CF
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| 9/23/20 | Open Discussion | 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. | ||
| 9/11/20 | Cloud Enablement Success Stories |
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| CF
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| 8/26/20 | From 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 | |
| 8/5/20 | Q&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. |
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| 7/23/20 | Higher Ed Cloud Networking & Security Workshop - Workshop Capstone: Peer Architectures | Presentations from three peer institutions, each presenting their architectures and best practices on one of the three platforms. Panel discussion, Q & A, Workshop wrap |
| CF
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| 7/22/20 | Open 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. | ||
| 7/9/20 | Higher Ed Cloud Networking & Security Workshop - Google Responses to Workshop Attendee Questions & Challenges | This session of the Cloud Networking and Security workshops features Google's team answering the questions and challenges compiled by community participants during the May 28 session. | CF
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| 7/7/20 | Higher Ed Cloud Networking & Security Workshop - GCP Security and Networking Training | This session of the Cloud Networking and Security workshops features Google's overview of GCP security and networking tools and best practices. | CF
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| 6/25/20 | Higher Ed Cloud Networking & Security Workshop - Amazon Responses to Workshop Attendee Questions & Challenges | This session of the Cloud Networking and Security workshops features Amazon's team answering the questions and challenges compiled by community participants during the May 28 session. | CF
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| 6/24/20 | Indiana 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. | ||
| 6/23/20 | Higher Ed Cloud Networking & Security Workshop - AWS Security and Networking Training | This session of the Cloud Networking and Security workshops features Amazon's overview of AWS security and networking tools and best practices. | CF
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| 6/11/20 | Higher Ed Cloud Networking & Security Workshop - Microsoft Responses to Workshop Attendee Questions & Challenges | This session of the Cloud Networking and Security workshops features Microsoft's team answering the questions and challenges compiled by community participants during the May 28 session. | CF
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| 6/9/20 | Higher Ed Cloud Networking & Security Workshop - Azure Security and Networking Training | This session of the Cloud Networking and Security workshops features Microsoft's overview of Azure security and networking tools and best practices. | CF
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| 5/28/20 | Higher Ed Cloud Networking & Security Workshop - Capturing the Questions, Listing the Challenges | Structured discussions to articulate the challenges faced by IT Pros when configuring, securing and managing enterprise cloud environments trying to meet the diverse demands of a higher education institution. | CF
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| 5/27/20 | Open Topic Discussion | |||
| 4/23/20 | Google Anthos presentation to Stanford cloud team | COMM
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| 4/22/20 | UNCG Cloud Cyberinfrastructure Innovation Lab | 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. |
| CCCG
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| 4/8/20 | The Role of Cloud Computing in Higher Ed’s COVID-19 Response (Part 2) | |||
| 3/25/20 | 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. | ||
| 2/26/20 | Open Topic Discussion |
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| 1/22/20 | Data-driven Cloud Planning |
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| 12/14/2022 | CCCG Nov/Dec Meeting |
| CCCG | |
Special thanks for the presentation materials icon by Krish from the Noun Project
- 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)