CACTI Call August 4, 2020

Attending

  Members

• Tom Jordan, University of Wisc - Madison (chair)  
• Jill Gemmill, Clemson  (vice chair)  
• Margaret Cullen, Painless Security  
• Matthew Economou, InCommon TAC Representative to CACTI 
• Michael Grady, Unicon 
•  Christos Kanellopoulos, GEANT  
• Les LaCroix, Carleton College  
• Chris Phillips, CANARIE  
• Bill Thompson, Lafayette College  

 Internet2 

• Kevin Morooney 
• Ann West   
• Steve Zoppi   
• Nic Roy  
• Jessica Fink  
• Emily Eisbruch  
• Mike Zawacki 

  Regrets 

• Marina Adomeit, SUNET
• Rob Carter, Duke  
• Nathan Dors, U Washington  
• Karen Herrington, Virginia Tech  

Intellectual Property reminder  https://www.internet2.edu/policies/intellectual-property-framework/

Action Items:

• AI Tom J will share these Aug. 4, 2020 meeting notes related to the packaging survey with the Software Integration Working Group and  will chat with them. 
•  AI ChrisP  share recommendations he plans to send out to his community around containers. 
• AI Jessica - help coordinate a quarterly update from CACTI to community on best practices, trends and directions (coordinate with other InCommon governance groups)  

Discussion

Of Interest in the Community

• Some organizations are registering collaborative research portals in InCommon

• EDUCAUSE Security Conference 2021 Planning Committee met  - Jill

• Heather Flanagan did a Twitter livestream, including Mary McKee of Duke
  • focus on differences between healthcare identity management and academic identity management.
  • See Heather’s twitter feed  https://twitter.com/sphcow

•  IDPro: Chris P noted that Heather’s advocacy and the work we are doing with IDPro is making a difference,  having the R&E voice in IDPro is important
  
  
• Azure - ChrisP doing a deep dive on how to get IDP as a proxy, how do you get eduperson in Azure   
  Talk to ChrisP if you are interested  
  
  
• WebID efforts 
• regular calls are spinning up on WebID
• people involved include Heather Flanagan, Leif Johansson of SUNET, Sam Gotto of Google, Jeff Hodges, George Fletcher of Verizon Media, Nic Roy
• It is helpful to get Browser people directly involved in the discussion
• ChrisP: there is some re-creation of existing material
• Looking at older patterns, discussion of 3rd party trust tokens to be implemented in Chrome
• “Must build it it our own backyard” approach
• Leif and Heather posted on Github issue tracker https://github.com/WICG/WebID/issues/25
• Related to SameSite Cookie issue
• Nic will keep CACTI updated on this effort  

• Recruiting & Developing IAM Resources Working Group - Jessica is  working on launching this CACTI-chartered Working Group

Virtual BaseCAMP, July 20-24, 2020, report-out 

• https://meetings.internet2.edu/2020-basecamp/
• 65 community members attended
• Also opened it up to interested Internet2 staff 
• 4 hour chunks over 5  days
• TomJ: It was an interesting and engaging virtual conference
• Hit the level and content right
• Happy to see feedback that attendees got Internet2 and community vibe even in the virtual setting
• Successful engagement
• AnnW: from the evaluations, positive feedback
• 100% of attendees said they’d recommend BaseCAMP to others 
• Nice walkthrough of material at the right level
• Split for 101 and 102 levels worked well
• Breakout sessions at end of the day worked well
• Engagement done during the sessions
• At last session, the ACAMP-style thank you, folks could thank each other verbally or in Zoom chat, there was an outpouring of appreciation 
•  Community is still interested in this kind of info that’s presented at baseCAMP.  Identity Management is of great interest 
• People want to know how the components fit it
• Some attendees were there to learn, not ready to adopt 
• There was one advanced federation session, went into nuances of supporting research, got some pushback, may have been a bit advanced
• Did not see dropoff during sessions
• Zoom breakout rooms worked well
• There was good NIH representation at baseCAMP
• NIST participated
• Canvas was used for the delivery
• Lots of staff work up front, kudos to Dean and Jessica and the team
• It will be less work if this is done again
• Some “tiny” items make a big difference to attendees
• More coordination up front went into curriculum versus an in person conference
• Presenters knew how their session related to other sessions
• What sorts of standing resources should we make available to organizations in onboarding?
• We can potentially make some curriculum available
•  Connecting people to community is key
• Ann: After the pandemic, how should we leverage online conferences, or streaming programs
• Advantage is potentially providing content delivery to more people
• Getting people together Face to Face when possible is still crucial
• It is possible to engage another organization, contract out, to help with curriculum development
• The CACTI-chartered Recruiting & Developing IAM Resources Working Group that is now spinning up may have input

Packaging - CACTI / Component architects discussion on community requirements for packaging (Tom)

• Background: CACTI notes of June 23, 2020: https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/x/gxUOCg 
• Packaging Surveys from 2016 and 2018: https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/x/CwuVBQ
• Bill: proposed survey looks good, comment on AWS, call out the particular service
  • Self hosted versus using Amazon AWS
• ChrisP: oblique ask on how to do sustainable configuration
• Survey targeted to how do you deliver
• Assess maturity of market space
• Not much on config management, on how not to mess up on the next Docker update
• People need to learn more on the techniques: Version control, change management, etc.
• Term “DevOps” does not appear in the survey
• Reflect on the Jim Jokl packaging survey from a few years back?
• Matthew: need to ask about those using a manual process to build the containers
• People/orgs using older Shib versions
• Capture info on those at a more beginning level
• ITAP requires some advanced level of infrastructure that some lack
• Need to ask about the “We Don’t Do This Yet, need additional guidance” people/organizations
• SteveZ:  
• six years ago there were discussions in which some community members said “we can’t be ready, “ for containers
• But in most cases the community shifted to the container approach successfully
• InCommon changed advocacy for how people onboard
• Tried to match learning curve in the community
• Providing education and training
• BillT: Lafayette is farther along in the Docker journey, the Shib Docker container is not hard to deploy
• Grouper project sketches out adoption maturity levels
• Install the Grouper v2.5 container maturity level -1 quick start
• Install the Grouper v2.5 container with maturity level 0 manually
• Install the Grouper v2.5 container with maturity level 0 using installer
• Install the Grouper v2.5 container with maturity level 1 manually
• BillT: in the survey is too much “niche” technology mentioned?
• Background for this packaging survey is that CACTI decided to do this after a discussion on how to operate in different environments. 
  • Try to focus the community via cookbooks etc.
• ChrisP: survey is for predicting where I want to be and see how well I hit the target
• And to see the wisdom of the masses
• But we may not see any one approach
• We may need to express a preference 
• ChrisP:  in same boat as Matt regarding deployment level.   Trying to get partners to update their Shib, some doing patches to VMs
• Automation and delivery cycle around Docker should be included in survey
• CACTI / InCommon should express opinions for optimal approach
• SteveZ:
  • things optimize to what is being sought
  • We can lead the witness in the survey process to get people on the right track
• Some hypotheses are being tested through the survey and this will help the working groups
• Christos: Matthew suggests to open up to other possibilities. In same camp with Matthew and Chris.. Some of the survey questions are asking about advanced options that don’t apply
• SteveZ: 
  • We did a packaging survey twice in last 6 years.  
  • Some orgs don’t want to share info on their infrastructure. 
  • Had hoped for BEACON quality feedback, but some orgs feared privacy invasion.
• NEXT STEPS
  • Take this feedback to Software Integration Working Group.
  • To be sure the survey is meeting their needs but also make it more inclusive / expansive. 
  • Need a broader context / goal
  • Need to try to capture where the community is, what they are running. 
  • Ask the Software Integration Working Group to propose a more inclusive survey.
  • AI Tom J will share these Aug 4, 2020 meeting notes related to the packaging survey with the Software Integration Working Group and  will chat with them. 
    
    
•  AI ChrisP  share recommendations he plans to send out to his community around containers. 
• ChrisP: there is an underwater item on all these — secret management (be it certs, saml private keys, passwords to dbs etc)


To Be discussed next CACTI call, TomJ will start discussion on the CACTI mailing list

1. Quarterly Update to Community - Are there new technologies / issues to which we should be calling the community's interest? (All)
2. Solidifying our position with regard to a centralized "Higher Ed Registry" and next steps (Tom)

Parking Lot

1. (From June 9, 2020 call) TomJ  - Add as an agenda item for a future CACTI call: Operationalizing containers

Next Meeting: Tuesday, August 18th, 2020