The higher education cloud computing community is an active, thriving, sharing conversation between schools, community partners and individuals. This community focuses on the infrastructure (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) ecosystems. It is built for higher ed, by higher ed. We welcome all to participate with an understanding that the goal is to promote the most secure and efficient use of cloud computing in support of the mission of our institutions. While we welcome the cloud vendors to participate in the debate and sharing of information it is never to be used for sales.
As the use of hyper-scale computing at community colleges, colleges and universities grows, so do the questions, challenges and lessons learned by each of us. Efforts to share those challenges and lessons and to ask those questions are also growing. This site attempts to bring together those conversations and the resources they produce in the hope that you will engage and encourage your colleagues to engage. Together we will raise our institutions' collective CloudIQ.
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:
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Cornell Cloud Forum 2020 (CF20) | The Cloud Forum is an annual gathering hosted by the cloud crowd at Cornell University. Beginning in 2015 this event brought together the IT professionals who manage cloud computing at many of the top research institutions around the country. Attendance is limited to 90 people because we gather in a small auditorium on the Cornell campus. 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 each of the main cloud computing vendors to send representatives, but they are not allowed to present or engage in the debate. They are there to listen and learn about higher ed’s cloud challenges. Naturally COVID-19 has turned everything on its head, including the Cloud Forum. We really wish we could welcome you in person to the Cornell campus. Who doesn’t want to visit Ithaca, NY in the winter? Instead, the 2020 Cloud Forum has been reformulated to take place in monthly segments throughout the school year. There is no cost to attend. Sessions are held on the second Friday of each month through May, at 9am PT/12pm ET, each running for 90 minutes. |
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Internet2 Online Events (I2O) | Webinars, workshops, training sessions, and community gatherings all fit within our mission of supporting and expanding the community. I2 Online serves as the virtual gathering spot for programs that help members and colleagues share solutions and best practices. |
| View or suggest upcoming event topics |
2021 | ||||
Date | Title | Description | Speaker | Key |
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3/12/21 | Google Team-selected Researcher + Community Presentation |
| Ben Rota – Harvard | CF20 |
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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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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2020 | ||||
Date | Title | Description | Speaker | Key |
12/11/20 | Microsoft Team-selected Researcher + Community Presentation |
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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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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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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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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.
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.
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)
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 Cruz
Title: 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 Illinois
Title: 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/Yb6Hfr
Time Permitting: AWS re:Invent recap