Community Exchange 2025 Cloud Track

[Bob Flynn <>]

Cloud Colleagues,

 

CommEX25 has come to a close. There are thanks to be given and bows to be taken, but before any of that happens, let’s give today’s great content its due. 

Day Three Recap

Sessions

This morning’s Cloud track may have been the most compelling block of talks I’ve seen in a while, and they were on wildly different topics.

• In From Blinky Lights to Cloud Heights: Transforming Your Infrastructure Team for the Cloud Platform Era, Amy McLaughlin (Oregon State University) walked us through an organizational evolution that was was unique but instantly relatable to every school in the room. The presentation spurred great questions and conversation. That discussion really reinforced me how much we can still learn from each other and how important it is to keep these kinds of conversations going. 
• Up next was Scaling AI and Cloud Education with Miami Dade College, AWS Academy, & Vocareum with Dr. Diego Tibaquirá (Miami Dade College). Dr. Tibaquirá outlined their very impressive academic cloud and security training program for students at his institution. He was followed by Chris Ott (Amazon), and David Lin (Vocareum), who described the AWS Academy program delivered on Vocareum’s platform that Miami Dade uses to deliver this ambitious and important training. 
• Rounding out the morning was Adam Sweeny (Indiana University) with Secure Storage - How Indiana University Tackles Cloud Storage Onboarding. The fact that this is an all-too-relatable topic was evident by the crowd it drew. Adam showed off the impressive lemonade the IU team has made out of not one (Box) but two (Google Drive) massive cloud storage migrations they have had to do. He showed a very thoughtful and well-designed process and interface that they have developed to manage the ongoing storage needs in response to years of changes largely out of their control. It really is impressive what they’ve done to serve their users (without making them think too hard). 
• Over lunch, we put on our parkas and went to the Huntington room for a chat about I2’s Cloud Infrastructure Community Program. We had a nice mix in the room of those already participating in the program, those interested in the program, and those who help make the program possible. My personal thanks to all for a great conversation.
• Information Security is a serious and important topic. That said, we almost got run out of the room during Kyle Enlow’s (REN-ISAC) Getting the Most Value from Information Security Assessments when what sounded like a Sawzall began to seemingly cut a hole in the ceiling above my head during his talk. Kyle was undaunted. He described the security assessment process and the best way for schools to think about and leverage them.
• To my knowledge, we’ve not done an unconference at CommEX before. I know we’ve come close at CommEX when we had two speakers cancel last minute due to illness and travel at TX22 in Denver. Way back in October when we set this up, the Cloud track chairs (Kivanc and Hellen) and I thought this might be a good way to flesh out some of the complexity of the topic of research support.
  
  In a normal unconference you gather a bunch of topics and before starting the discussion, attendees vote on which topics to choose. This turned out a little differently. While we made a Google form to collect suggestions and advertised it high and low, apparently you are a shy bunch. No one submitted topics. Luckily, yesterday’s panel on research support, was bursting with topics ripe and ready to be peeled. Unconference MC Lucrecia Kim-Boswell (Stanford) chose two and had them ready for the group to vote with their feet and choose a room for discussion. All but one person wanted to stay in the room to discuss the question “What would an ideal support model for researchers using cloud technologies look like?” Research                 Queen Bee Dana Brunson (Internet2) was kind enough to be talked into moderating. Check out the Unconference for Research Support - Breakout Notes
  
  
• Before I wrap this recap, I have to thank those who took the thankless task of presenting during the last hour of the last day of a four-day event. People were tired. Frostbite was setting in. Many had already taken their power tools and headed home. Still, we had two detailed and informative talks to cap the event. I don’t know of this information and these statistics my jelly brain could recall by this point, but it was interesting.

• Dr. Lili Zhang (Computer Network Information Center (CNIC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)) gave a compelling narrative about the power and importance of collaboration to further science in Advancing Open Science through Research e-infrastructures: The Example of CSTNet and CSTCloud.
• Karan Vahi (USC Information Science Institute) talked about a project I was personally involved in: Results from Cloud Adoption Survey in NSF funded Major Facilities and Mid Scale Institutes. The survey data paint a picture of both the challenges of getting buy-in for cloud technologies and the willingness of researchers and IT professionals to experiment and evolve their thinking.

Visit the COMMUNITY Exchange Program page for a link to a folder with all of the slides that have been submitted. 

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Beyond CommEX

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. Here are a couple of opportunities to come along.

Share Your Story

Believe it or not, the Call for Proposals for Technology Exchange 2025 is still open.  Your CloudIQ was raised by the lessons you learned this week from your peers. Soak it up. Use it. Pay it forward. Submit a proposal to present at TechEX25 in Denver in December.  (We’ll at least pack for hotel weather this time.)

 

Please do not let the potential (and real) budget and travel realities prevent you from submitting your good ideas. Let’s get the proposals in and then we can worry about how to make it happen. There is no telling where creative thinking will take us.  The TX25 CfP closes on May 9.

Attend Cloud Forum

OK, this may be wildly unrealistic for any number of reasons (less than three weeks away, travel budgets cut, one can only take so much cloud goodness in a short period of time before risking an out-of-prem experience), but there are still five seats available for the Higher Education Cloud Forum. If you are at an academic or research institution and you can get to the NYC area, consider it. 

Join the Conversation

Don’t let your involvement in the cloud conversation end with Community Exchange. The Higher Ed Cloud  Community is active and supportive. The EDUCAUSE/Internet2 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.

 

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Well-deserved Thanks

First, let me start by thanking the hotel for not collapsing on our heads during a session. It was close. You had me there a couple of times. But I know you were kidding. Right? Right?

 

Second, let me thank our Cloud track chairs, Hellen Zziwa (Harvard) and Kinvac Oner (UNLV) for being great brainstorming partners willing to debate ideas and think creatively about how to put together the best track possible. They also didn’t complain, at least not to my face, about how much I badgered them to get work done.

 

Next, I must give special thanks to Kari Robertson (UCOP) and Phil Fenstermacher (W&M) for not only allowing me to lure them in to share their expertise on a panel or two, but also pulling out the tuxedos to MC the Cloud sessions along with Hellen and Kivanc. After all, I was busy with my time signs. You couldn’t expect me to do that, too!

 

Next next, I want to thank all of the Cloud track speakers, in fact, all of the CommEX speakers. You bring experience, passion, and, dare I say, wisdom to share. We have all learned from you this week. Your ideas will inspire actions and new ideas, the consequences of which, we cannot predict, but hopefully we will hear about at TechEX or at CommEX next year. Yours are the shoulders upon which we are all charged to stand. 

 

Penultimately, I need to give a low, nay, groveling bow to the Internet2 events team. Not only did they have to deal with last-minute cancellations, arm wrestle the Teamsters construction crews on the 5th floor to show dominance, and shovel attendees out of snow drifts on the fourth floor, but they also had to run a conference and give out socks. They did a masterful job!

 

Finally, I need to thank all of you. Little did you know that when you checked “Cloud” as an area of interest on your registration, you’d be subject to this many bad jokes and this much unabashed cloud boosterism. I can only hope that when you next register for an I2 event, you will have forgotten and fall into my trap again.

 

Respectfully,

 

Bob Flynn (he/him/his)

Sr. Program Manager

Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services

Internet2 NET+ Services

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