TechEX 24 Cloud Curious

[Bob Flynn <>]

Greetings Cloudsters!

 

I received favorable feedback on the multimedia edition yesterday, so I’ll include a couple of images today. Thanks to Gynnel Fernandez and Jan Day I have a couple live “action” shots.

 

Day Two Recap

 

The Presentations - GenAI-Yai-Yai

Today started with a block of five consecutive GenAI sessions. They were all pretty amazing. There haven’t been this many back-to-back home runs in Boston since Manny Ramirez, J.D. Drew, Mike Lowell, and Jason Varitek hit four consecutive home runs off Yankees pitcher Chase Wright in April of 2007 in Fenway Park. 

 

• The University of Florida team came out swinging with NaviGator AI, their custom gateway for the university community to provide access to a wide variety of LLMs.
• Allen Karns from Vanderbilt then demonstrated Amplify GenAI an enterprise AI platform that is not only so polished it looks like commercial software, but it’s open source and ready to download and install for yourself!
• Sean O’Brien and Tiffany Frank from Internet2 (I thought I recognized those names) provided some helpful context around the open-source and commercial GenAI options being bandied about in the R&E community. Community involvement is critical at this early stage of the GenAI conversation. Tiffany talked about the efforts she is leading to coordinate discovery and action in this area. If GenAI is your jam, Tiffany is someone to talk to about getting involved.
• Jim Monek walked us through his efforts to build a chatbot for Leigh University researchers to navigate university policies and stay abreast of research-related opportunities and activities.
• Internet2’s Karl Newell, ever the tech explorer, took us along on his adventures experimenting with the fundamental technical underpinnings of chatbots. He explained the importance of RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) for the creation of engaging and relevant chatbots. Karl left us with some fun examples including his Snarkbot, a chatbot instructed to give the most sarcastic and snarky answers possible. 

 

I followed Karl’s example and Snarkboted myself. Here is the answer to “Who is Bob Flynn at Internet2?”, complete with references.

 

The Parents Come Home Early

Just when you thought the GenAI party was getting going (I mean, Snarkbot? T’yah!) we had to get all serious again. Jim Monek came back and got right up in our architecture with a presentation on building a secure research enclave for the faculty at the Lehigh College of Health. His explanation of the process and stakeholder engagement in addition to the technology painted a realistic picture of what you need to take into account beyond the tools themselves.

 

Jim was followed by the Internet2 Dynamic Data Duo of Nidhi Yadav and Erdene Gankhuyag talking about their Data Benchmarking project for the Cloud Infrastructure Community Program. The project incorporates Penn State’s Cloud Elevation Index (CEI) as well. See the end of today’s newsletter for a little more on information on CEI.

While the Duo did not change into their superhero outfits, Gynnel did manage to get this action shot.

 

In yesterday’s newsletter, I mentioned the frequent references throughout the day of FInOps. I anticipated William & Mary’s Jenn Wheeler would deliver the goods and she did. She showed us the tools and processes she, like Godzilla, uses to stomp through their villages of over-provisioned systems to lay waste to excessive resource use. (OK, so it’s not just me and the late hour. She really did use Godzilla to tell her story.) I sincerely hope I do not need to call upon Mothra to lure her into participating in the January virtual FinOps conference I wrote about yesterday. 

 

Naturally, the marquee event of the day, scheduled for right when the post-lunch food coma was kicking in, was Where in the Cloud Are We? A facilitated discussion about the state of Cloud in research and education by a panel of community luminaries, namely your Cloud Track program committee. The panel was made all the more luminous by the substitution of Virginia’s Damian Doyle* with Lucrecia Kim-Boswell from Stanford. We got brief updates on trends and hot topics in R&E Cloud and these pointers on how and where to get more involved.

• Cloud Computing - EDUCAUSE Connect (email list of the Cloud Computing Community Group)
• Join our Slack Community (Slack workspace of the higher education cloud community)
• Higher Ed Cloud Community Wiki (calendar, recaps, and resources of the activities of the community)
• Internet2 Cloud Infrastructure Community Program (I2’s new cloud engagement program)
• Higher Ed Cloud Forum (Put on by the community for the community, this is the premiere cloud event of the research and education cloud community. Call for proposals for Cloud Forum 2025 closes on December 20!

 

This group exudes community engagement (and maybe a need for a nap)!

 

Wednesday’s last session was more small plate dishes than a wrap. (See what I did there?) Lucrecia’s session Serving Up TPAS: A Flavorful Take on Stanford's Technology Platform Assessment & Strategy Effort presentation not only made the bad food joke before me, but it also described their multi-pronged (like a fork) approach to creating structure and process around Stanford’s countless systems, applications, and software systems. 

 

Thursday in the Cloud Track

Thursday’s sessions cover a lot of bases, from hybrid cloud, to security to data protection, archiving and integration. I find them all interesting, but given the way too late hour, I’m going to pick one from the morning and one from the afternoon to shout out to.

• Creating a secure, modern, automated file transfer service in the cloud for legacy applications/vendors  - The hyper-scalers provide a wide range of tools. Sometimes they just do what you need right out of the box. Other times you need to bend them to your will to better serve your need. It sounds like the UMBC team has done the latter here to create secure tooling for sensitive data.
• Saving the data hoarder from themselves. How the Getty protects data - The J Paul Getty Trust is an active participant in our cloud community, but they are driven by a very different set of needs than most organizations in the R&E community. I am looking forward to hearing about their unique data needs and how they are leveraging cloud to address them.

 

Full Thursday Schedule

 All Thursday sessions are held in Salon C/D (4th Fl) unless otherwise indicated. NOTE: This is a different track room than Tuesday and Wednesday.

 

9:00-9:25	OnPrem HPC Bursting to AWS
9:50-10:20	REFRESHMENT BREAK
10:20-10:45	Containing an Application
10:45-11:10	Creating a secure, modern, automated file transfer service in the cloud for legacy applications/vendors
11:20-12:10	Did AWS Stick the Landing (Zone Accelerator)?
12:10-1:40	LUNCH
1:40-2:30	Security in the cloud: research, monitoring, automation, compliance, and more (Salon H/I 4th Fl)
2:40-3:05	Saving the data hoarder from themselves. How the Getty protects data
3:05-3:30	Simplify to Amplify: Re-Architecting for Preservation in the Cloud
3:30-4:00	REFRESHMENT BREAK
4:00-4:50	System-Wide Cloud-Native Data Integration at Project Kitty Hawk with AWS

 

 

Did You Know?

SaaSiness is Close to Godliness?

At the 2024 Cloud Forum Penn State’s Rick Rhoades gave a presentation (slides | recording) on a concept he called the Cloud Elevation Index or CEI. The CEI is a way to evaluate cloud workloads to determine their efficiency and maturity of use of cloud native practices. It operates on the premise that the farther you move away from bare metal (IaaS) and toward SaaS the more optimized your use of the cloud. Personally, I quibble with the assertion that serverless currently is the highest level of cloud efficiency, but that’s mainly because I don’t think of SaaS as cloud.

 

At any rate, Penn State has shared the CEI code and concept with the community so we can kick the tires and improve it. I2’s Data Benchmarking has built it in. Others are beginning to see how it measures up against their data. Starting in the spring of 2025, Rick and I will be pulling together a working group to turn CEI into a community project. If this topic interests you and you’d like to help us improve the tool, please reach out to me.

 

Lost and Found Again

I am overjoyed to announce the reunification of Josh Thomas and his baseball cap thanks, in large part, to this august publication and the efforts of our readers. I now turn to you again to help reunite this black blazer with its owner. It was found under the front row table in Salon E. It has been turned over to the registration desk and can be claimed there. 

 

 

Final Words (escape me)

*Damian Doyle had to leave early for some bougie party, but he left us this. This was on the last slide he put in the Where in the Cloud Are We? deck. I invite you all to reflect upon it. Send your thoughts and interpretations directly to him. He alone holds the explanation. (Assuming there is one.)

 

 Make the most of your last day at TechEX24. Make connections, share contact information, make plans to talk about something you learned.

 

 

Bob Flynn (he/him/his)

Program Manager

Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services

Internet2 NET+ Services

 || 812.558.0323