How My Website Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cloud

transcript

HOW MY WEBSITE LEARNED TO STOP

WORRYING AND LOVE THE CLOUD

EduComm 2010

Playing the role of…

Mike RichwalskyDirector of Marketing Services, John Carroll

UniversityNITLE Technology Fellow 2009-10HighEdWebTech.comTw/FB: mrichwalskyHigherEdCloud.com

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.Stanley Kubrick

What is the cloud?

Use of external infrastructure to solve internal technology issues and needs

Use resources only as you need them Scale up and down quickly and easily Pay only for what you use.

Why the cloud?

Old and busted.

New hotness.

It can cost less to take advantage of external infrastructure than building your own from scratch, especially for short-term projects.

It’s not all or nothing.

The days of custom writing web apps for every single possible scenario are coming to an end. Not because I don’t want to write and support them, but other places and companies can do it way better than I ever could.

10 ways to integrate the cloud

Content Delivery

Speed and reliability Geo-targeting Bandwidth + access are cheap Asset hosting+CMS

Which elements are cloud served?

ImagesCSSjQueryjavascripts

CMS User Assets

On-campus: finite storage Cloud: limitless storage Security for uploaded content Served quickly and efficiently CMS Plugins:

WordPressJoomlaDrupal Module

Ugh. Remember FormMail.pl? Ever write custom ASP or PHP? Custom CGI per form does not scale.

I <3 Wufoo

Give access to campus users to do their own forms

Secure out of the box Branded for the institution Conditional processing

I <3 Wufoo

Continuity across all forms Email, Database, Excel output Payment processing Embed in site or Wufoo url

If you build it…

Offices saw a dramatic increase in student response rates and interest when a form was included with an email.

Continuity is niceThe form they filled out to receive info is the

same form they’ll see when they’re on campus.

Backups

Backup to the cloud

Yes, your IT team do backups More is always better Cloud storage + bandwidth is

inexpensive

Backup WordPress Blog/CMS

Backup your web server to S3

Command-line scripts and tools written in a variety of languagesPHP, Python, Ruby, Perl and more

Control to just backup web content and/or MySQL databases

Zipped up, these are small and cheap to move and store

Command line backups

Media Streaming

But we have have YouTube!

Not every video we create is meant for YouTube.

Fundraising, admissions, on-campus only videos

The cloud gives my video super fast availability and speed across the globe.

Case Study: Allegheny College

Case Study, Allegheny College

Need to provide high quality video experience for fundraising effort

Outsourced video hosting to Amazon S3 Site handled initial load+long tail

Total Cost: $9

Development Sandbox

Spin up a server

Test a plugin, piece of code, new version quickly and easily

If it breaks, no problem. Shut it down and start over.

CMS Derby

Total Cost: $1.10

WordPress Drupal Joomla Umbraco Hippo SilverStripe Typo3

In the course of an afternoon, we tried 7 CMS systems

How did we do it?

Started up pre-built Amazon Servers$0.085 per hour

Started up some Rackspace Cloud Servers$0.01 per hour, no pre-built images.

We wanted to see how easy or hard it was to install, setup, customize and break.

Case Study, Pace University Mahara ePortfolio Platform Testing +

Buildout Started Amazon EC2 server to develop

on before launching production environment on campus

Total cost: ~$60 More info: http://bit.ly/anUCxH

TheCloudMarket.com

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

http://aws.amazon.com

Rackspace Cloud

http://www.rackspacecloud.com/

DNS? Seriously?

DNS is not sexy. At all. But…

OpenDNS and Google DNS refresh faster and easier than on-campus DNS, which is helpful if you’re doing testing, pushing site updates, adding domains, etc.

World’s Largest Focus Group

Mechanical Turk

“Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work.”

What does that mean?

Mechanical Turk

Instant Focus Group

Spend a few dollars to get opinions, research, answers from an audience you can qualify and pay for their work/opinions.

Quicky test a design element, graphic or navigation UI.

HITs are easy to create, via web, API or spreadsheet.

http://mturk.com

Project Management/CRM

Management made easy

Basecamp Wrike Quickbase Zoho

These systems make managing projects across campus and contributors much easier.

Collaboration

“Let’s Use Sharepoint!

Google Docs

This has become an integral tool in our web development group.

Share information, best practices, research

Multiple people can have accessIncluding students who do my research

WordPress use in Higher Ed

Encoding & Crunching Lots of Data

We shoot a lot of video

We encode video for multiple audiences, platforms and devices.

Can do on my desktop Mac, but this is time consuming.

Don’t have access to all codecs Look to the cloud!

Encoding.com

Hey!Watch

http://heywatch.com

Why are these interesting? API Pay as you go

Hey!Watch as low as $0.40 for HD with 2 pass encoding for high quality

Multiple codecs, platforms with just a click

Time saves = win.

Security

Your data and services are only as secure as you make them.

If data and processes on your campus are not secure, your cloud data and processes will not be secure.

Quick Cloud Project Checklist

What is the duration of your project? What type of service do you need

Remember the cloud is better at some things than others

Amount of data you need to move in and outYou often pay for both upload and download

Questions?

Twitter: @mrichwalsky Email:

mrichwalsky@gmail.com

Slides posted at EduComm Site and HighEdWebTech.com