Updates and Progress on Cloud Computing at Berkeley [ARCHIVE]

The most salient recent developments have been in focusing our work to align with the Chancellor’s strategy – in the case of cloud computing, especially towards support for scaling up Jupyterhub to meet the needs of the Division of Data Sciences.

Anthony Suen has been instrumental in forging a partnership with IST, and the greater OneIT community – for example this Kubernetes training he and Eric Fraser organized. (The photo above is the cohort that completed the training).

Looking forward over the next couple years, our goal is to tune the focus of the strategy into three main areas:

Foremost, we need to continue our collective work socializing these changes and developing a culture that supports our cloud strategy with associated things like automation. [Cloud strategy: 3.1.9, 3.1.10, 3.3] We also need to retire old services that pull disproportionate financial and staff resources from innovation [Cloud strategy: 1.2, 4.1.5], while building out capabilities and services needed for the future. [Cloud strategy: 2.5, 4.2]

The number one priority will be building a cloud community of practice, to bring together IT staff and explore the possibilities and opportunities to reinvent some of the ways UC Berkeley uses technology. We launched the UC Berkeley Cloud Computing Meetup in March, and created a UC Berkeley Cloud Computing Community of Practice, both of which are widely inclusive for anyone at any level of expertise to join. (Photo below is me kicking off the first meeting of the meetup.)

This cultural work is the first priority, as building momentum and interest at the people level will drive all the other progress.

-Bill Allison, UC Berkeley CTO