Community Exchange 2025 Cloud Track

[Bob Flynn <>]

Apologies for the delay in sending this. I2’s O365 instance spit my message back like a hairball last night. This morning our ever-capable Microsoft whisperers soothed the savage beast and I’m trying again. Have a great day!

Welcome!

Community Exchange 2025 began today with a couple pre-conference workshops, meetings, and Leadership Exchange. The real fun, however, begins tomorrow. I am Bob Flynn, senior program manager for cloud infrastructure & platform services at Internet2. You are hearing from me because when you registered, you indicated that Cloud was an area of interest for you. Over the next couple of days, I’ll be sending you the cloud news and highlights of each day at CommEX.

Day Zero Highlights

I don’t actually have any workshop highlights because I didn’t attend one this year, but I did spend time in the conference area, and let me just say, dress warm tomorrow. It was quite chilly down there today. Hopefully, the events team can persuade the hotel to nudge it up for tomorrow. 

Day One Highlights

The schedule for Community Exchange comes together quite differently than it does for Technology Exchange. With TechEX I pull together a committee of cloud leaders from the community and we comb through the mountains of amazing proposals over the course of a few weeks. We rank them, debating their merits, discussing which might be grouped together, and which might need to be shortened or lengthened till we have cobbled together a track.

 

With Community Exchange, IT leaders are drawn from around the community and assigned tracks and a track flywheel such as myself. While my track team has a little time to review the proposals in advance, we all gather together in person for a couple of days to hammer out the entire CommEX schedule. Sessions are traded across tracks. Each track presents its schedule for feedback from the others, and eventually, the full (tentative) schedule covers a whole wall. 

 

In addition to this being a way to just get the task done more quickly, those extra sets of eyes give us perspective, the so-called view from the balcony. That perspective often questions assumptions, sees larger connections, and points out gaps. That perspective led us to much of the first day’s content in the Cloud track.

 

The first Cloud session of the day was suggested by the CommEX hive mind. The Role of Cloud in Your Data Center Strategy is a panel discussion led by one of our esteemed Cloud Track chairs, Kivanc Oner, CIO at UNLV. Kivanc will be joined by a group of community leaders with very different data center realities and perspectives. I am keenly interested in where this discussion takes us.

 

Put your lunch to productive use. Yes, refuel. Yes, network with colleagues old and new. Might I also recommend you check out some of the lunch roundtables. I’m going to suggest one in particular on a Cloud theme. Our fine partners from Four Points have invited Cloud FinOps experts Strategic Blue to join their lunchtime discussion on that evergreen topic of how to architect, develop, and manage your Cloud work to save. Look for their table at lunchtime today.

 

The second session was a hot topic when we put this together and I don’t think it’s cooled off much since. Strategies for Dealing with Changes to VMWare Licensing will also be a panel, this one led by Internet2 AVP of Cloud and benevolent overlord of the NET+ program, Sean O'Brien. [For the record, my performance review for the year has already been submitted.] Sean is also blessed with a panel of experienced professionals. They will roll up their sleeves, don their hypervisors, and share the thinking behind the decisions their organizations made in response to these changes.

 

Let me wrap up the day with some shameless self-promotion. The final session of the day is Collaborative Cloud Innovation: Harnessing the Power of Community-Driven Solutions in Higher Education. [Clearly I’m taking advantage of I2’s new events system allowing session titles over 40 characters!] Yes, I’m the speaker for that session. Yes, I will be what stands between you and the reception. But I’ve done the math. You can hear about how the community is learning from each other and building Cloud skills, applications, and friendships together, and still make it up to the Sunset Deck for a drink and a thaw. I hope you will join me.

Join the Conversation

Speaking of joining, please join the R&E community cloud conversation. Community Exchange is a wonderful stop on the Cloud conversation superhighway. If you and/or your campus cloud team want to go down that road, you do not have to be in the fast lane. Heck, you can be hitchhiking on the shoulder, and you are sure to get a ride from your peers. In addition to slacking it up on the #cx25-cloud channel to share your questions and ideas in real time, here are a couple of opportunities to come along.

Technology Exchange 2025

Yes, yes, I know we are literally just starting CommEX, but, you guessed it, the Call for Proposals for Technology Exchange 2025 is open. Whether this week’s Cloud track sessions inspire you or compel you to say, “I can do better than that!” please submit a proposal to present at TechEX25 in Denver in December. (It could be warmer there than the session rooms on the 4th Floor.) The TX25 CfP closes on May 9.

The Ultimate Cloud Conversation

The Higher Education Cloud Forum is the premier cloud leadership and strategy conversion in the research and education community. This year the Forum will be hosted by New York University from May 20 to 22. There is no single better place to talk cloud with your peeps than at the Forum. The event is free. It is for members of the R&E community only. As of this writing, there are five seats remaining. Find me here at CommEX if you’d like to talk about it. 

State of the Cloud Survey

Each year, as part of the Cloud Forum, we run a State of the Cloud Survey. It’s a simple snapshot into how much people are using cloud, what aspects of the technology they are using it, how much staff are supporting cloud, etc. The results are shared at the open of the Cloud Forum and then presented at a subsequent CCCG meeting. Over 50 institutions have already submitted this year and we’d like to hit 70 before the survey closes on May 6. Please take part.

Beyond CommEX

Don’t let your involvement in the cloud conversation end with Community Exchange. The Higher Ed Cloud Community is active and supportive. The Cloud Computing Community Group (CCCG) is at the heart of that community with a very active Slack workspace (https://cloudcgteam.slack.com), mailing list, and monthly meetings covering a wide range of topics. To get connected with the CCCG and sessions organized by your peers in the R&E cloud community, check out the Higher Ed Cloud Community site at https://tinyurl.com/edu-cloud-community.

 

Talk to you tomorrow!

NOTE: If you don’t think you can handle three days of my bad jokes and shameless enthusiasm for the work you and your peers in the community are doing with hyper-scale technologies, write to me at and I’ll drop you off the list. You can remove yourself using the instructions in the footer of this email (assuming I’ve configured the list correctly.)

 

Bob Flynn (he/him/his)

Sr. Program Manager

Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services

Internet2 NET+ Services

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