Community Exchange 2025 Cloud Track

[Bob Flynn <>]

Greetings, Cloud People! 

 

I hope you are enjoying CommEX so far. It is such a great place to catch up with old connections and make new ones. It is a constant whirlwind for me. At every turn there is either a long-time colleague, someone I know virtually but have yet to meet, or someone new who is willing to talk cloud, or just discuss the dessert choices at lunch. We are a friendly bunch, and I thank those who are open to a conversation. By all means, if you want to talk cloud, pull me aside. It’s how I get my jollies. But be forewarned, I am likely to try to recruit you to attend Cloud Forum, join a working group, or submit a proposal for TechEX25. I am a firm believer that everyone has something to contribute. 

Day Two Recap

Sessions

Wednesday’s cloud track was all over the place, both thematically and physically. I was running all over the building, but I found gems wherever I went. Let me tell you my favorites.

• Bridging the Gap: Aligning Expertise and Infrastructure in Research Support - Yet another panel lights up the Clouds. A wonderfully diverse set of perspectives from Lucrecia Kim-Boswell (Stanford University), Hellen Zziwa (Harvard University), and Scotty Strachan (Nevada System of Higher Education), expertly moderated by Dana Brunson (Internet2) who clearly had a few thoughts of her own on the topic. :-) My takeaway was that this group barely broke ground on the topic. There is much more to till. Luckily we have an unconference session dedicated to this topic tomorrow. (See below.)
• Don’t tell the boss, but I jumped track briefly to attend Savings at Scale through FinOps in the Exhibitor track. I was disappointed to miss the Innovating for Impact by UNLV’s Carrie Trentham, but I had to support my Four Points and Strategic Blue peeps who have been a real boost to the NET+ AWS program since they signed on at last year’s CommEX. I know James “Smithy” Smith from Strategic Blue says everyone working in the cloud is doing FinOps, but that’s like saying if I wear tennis shoes I’m an athlete. I mean sure, the potential is there, but there is some work involved. Anyway, if your organization (technical, business, and leadership) is not learning about and actively practicing FinOps, call me and I’ll do it for you as long as I get to keep all of the savings. (A hat tip to Phil Fenstermacher for covering for me in Carrie’s session. I look forward to a summary.)
• After lunch, Shruthi Sreenevasa Murthy (St. Louis U) took to the big stage for Driving Innovation and Efficiency: SLU’s REDCap Journey from On-Prem to Cloud and told a great story about how one impactful project has initiated a cultural change, both in the IT and research organizations at her institution. Kudos for her calm delivery in that cavernous room!
• The last session of the day was Herding Cats: Corral Your Cloud Program. Eric Epps and Tim Morgan (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) told of their ambitious efforts to clean up a weedy and overgrown multi-cloud environment that had grown organically for years and was in need of at least domestication, if not full-on spaying. (Did I mix enough metaphors for you there?) It really was a very relatable topic and elicited some good questions and discussion. 

In the Hallways

After today’s session, the Program Committee met to discuss how things are going this year and how we might improve next year. Before the meeting, I polled some attendees for their thoughts. I’m pretty sure there will be a conference survey, but please consider your feedback about the Cloud track. I’ll include a link to a short survey in tomorrow’s final installment.

Day Three Highlights

It’s funny how the Cloud has been growing day-by-day. We had three sessions on Tuesday, five today, and eight tomorrow. If this event went through Friday, we’d need to distribute time turners to get to everything. Thankfully, we have worked it out so that will not be necessary. 

 

I feel confident all of the sessions will be good. Here are a few I’m particularly interested in and why. 

• From Blinky Lights to Cloud Heights: Transforming Your Infrastructure Team for the Cloud Platform Era – I love the name and I’m a sucker for anyone sharing their experiences around cloud staffing strategies.  
• Secure Storage - How Indiana University Tackles Cloud Storage Onboarding – I was personally part of this seemingly-never-ending saga when I was at IU and I want to know how it’s going. More than that, Adam Sweeny is a great presenter. I try to never miss his talks.
• Cloud Infrastructure Community Program Listening Session – I’m going to unabashedly promote my lunchtime session here for a few reasons. 1) You are going to eat lunch anyway, come eat lunch with me and talk cloud. 2) The subjects most consistently rated as the most important at these events are networking and building community. This will be the biggest lunch table you’ll have to sit around and do just that. 3) This is really cool program that has been made better through community input. I want to hear from you.
• Unconference on Research Support – I trust by now most people have attended an unconference. Ideas of what to discuss are proposed. Everyone votes. The top ideas become the topic of discussion. As the panel today showed, there are many approaches to supporting researchers who want to leverage the cloud. Come talk about what does work, what might work, what doesn’t work, and why. Submit your questions or ideas for discussion topics at https://tinyurl.com/CX25-Unconference by noon Thursday and then join the conversation.
• Results from Cloud Adoption Survey in NSF-funded Major Facilities and Mid-Scale Institutes – One final bit of log-rolling. For the past couple of years I’ve been involved in the CI Compass Cloud Working Group. We discuss the opportunities and challenges around cloud adoption at these key organizations that provide a vital background to a lot of research. We recently ran a survey of that community and my colleague Karan Vahi will present the results.

In the Hallways

Most of us move through the conference venue on a mission to get from point A to point B. There are all these pesky tables with people wanting to, I don’t know, talk to us about some cool thing worth sharing, but there never seems to be the time. Well, I am cherry picking one of those topics to ask for your thoughts (and time) because many of us are entering a period when coming to meetings like this will be harder but the need to continue our professional development and that of our teams will not diminish. 

 

Internet2’s CLASS program is working to fill that need. We are looking to identify what topics you need to learn about and find ways to get that to you as quickly as we can. The first part of that process is to identify the topics. Please take a moment to weigh in on this very brief survey. We’ve listed about a dozen ideas we’ve gathered so far. Tell us whether they are relevant to you. What other topics would benefit you? Please let us know.

 

That’s all for now. Have a great Thursday at CommEX25. Please stop me and say hello!

 

Bob Flynn (he/him/his)

Sr. Program Manager

Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services

Internet2 NET+ Services

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