Knowledge sharing on the uses of cloud platforms in the research and education environment was the purpose of a two-day workshop organised by the EU-funded EaPConnect project and the Italian national research and education network (NREN) GARR, on 21-22 November 2019.
GARR hosted the advanced workshop, dedicated to GARR federated Cloud and cloud applications, in Rome. Following a brief introduction to the activities of the GARR Cloud department, its developments and use cases, the event continued as a round-table, where different techniques were presented and participants were encouraged to discuss and share their different needs or challenges.
The workshop was attended by participants from the NRENs of the Eastern Partnership countries, namely Armenia (ASNET AM), Azerbaijan (AzScienceNet), Belarus (BASNET), Georgia (GRENA) and the Republic of Moldova (RENAM).
The programme featured presentations of case studies by GARR cloud administrators and experts and several opportunities with round-tables to share questions, common challenges and best practices. The ultimate objective was to share the lessons learned in this field and inspire and guide the NRENs who, currently, either are not offering cloud services to their communities or would like to expand their services. For this reason, the interactive workshop presented models suitable to be adapted to the requirements of the different communities.
The main benefit of participating in the workshop was experience exchange. We just started on the deployment of our OpenStack cloud environment and the workshop demonstrated an easy, fast and automated installation process of OpenStack. We discussed many important moments for using this system in many cases. We believe that this workshop will speed up our deployment process and will make it much easier.”
“Learning regarding the monitoring of Cloud infrastructure and services was interesting and informative.”
“The Openstack discussion was particularly interesting since it will be very helpful for our future work.”
The workshop was organised as part of the EAPConnect project’s activities to build skills and capacity within its partner countries, with the greater objective to integrate them in the pan-European GÉANT network, and facilitate collaboration with local scientists, students and academics, also through the deployment of shared services. GARR is also a partner in the project.
