April 30 – May 2, 2024 | Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.

The Cloud Forum

From the organizers to the speakers, the Cloud Forum is put on by higher education, for higher education. We’ve received a tremendous response to our calls for speakers this year. It looks like it’ll be another great Forum.

Registration

Convening the Research and Higher Education Cloud Community

The Higher Education Cloud Forum is a gathering for higher education IT professionals to discuss the challenges, potential, and best practices for using hyper-scale computing tools and platforms to support enterprise computing, and academic research, as well as teaching and learning. The event is organized by members of the higher education cloud community for their peers in the higher education community.

After being hosted by Cornell University since its inception in 2015, the Cloud Forum went on the road in 2022. In 2024 that road trip takes us to the West Coast, landing at Stanford University. Now more campuses will have an opportunity to host it and a wider range of schools will more easily be able to attend.

The Cloud Forum Experience

Thanks to its intimate setting and higher education IT’s history of open sharing, the conversations at the Cloud Forum are candid, productive, often quite entertaining, and always informative. We share successes, failures, and lessons learned and float new ideas. We challenge our peers with the problems we are facing in hopes of tapping into the wisdom of the group.

The Forum consists of presentations, panels, lightning talks, and research presentations by faculty working on the major cloud platforms. In 2019 we added a half-day unconference and in 2021 a workshop. After an abbreviated Cloud Forum in 2023 necessitated by our quick pivot to spring, the 2024 Cloud Forum will come back as a full 2.5-day event with a wide variety of formats and topics.

Attendance

The target audience for the Cloud Forum are CIOs, directors of infrastructure, and, of course, cloud enablement leadership and architects. Participants regularly identify the limited size and frank discussions it facilitates as core benefits of the event. Attendance is limited to staff, faculty, and with approval, students from institutions of higher education as well as a few invited guests. The 2024 Cloud Forum venue will limit attendance to 100 participants. To accommodate as many institutions as possible, each institution may send no more than three attendees. We strongly encourage attendance by institutions early in their cloud journey.

Cloud Forum logo

The Spring just got Cloudier
Cloud Forum 2023 in session at Convocation Hall, Emory University
The higher education cloud community visited Convocation Hall on the beautiful campus of Emory University for the 2023 Cloud Forum. Coming only six months after the highly successful 2022 Cloud Forum, the pressure was on. Our presenters and our Emory hosts did not disappoint. Please review the great work presented at the 2023 Cloud Forum.

The 2024 Cloud Forum will convene April 30 to May 2, 2024 at the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center on the campus of Stanford University. This will be a full 2.5-day Cloud Forum with presentations, lightning talks, panels, unconference, and a FinOps workshop.

Want to bring the Cloud Forum to your campus in 2025? Read about hosting the Cloud Forum.
Cloud Forum 2024 host Stanford University
Photo of Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center at Stanford University

Cloud Forum Timeline

  • Nominations for Research Presentations Opens: September 27, 2023
  • Call for Proposals Opens: October 16, 2023
  • Nominations for Research Presentations Closes: November 3, 2023
  • Call for Proposals Closes: November 27, 2023
  • Researcher Notification: December 1, 2023
  • Speaker Notification: January 4, 2024
  • Schedule Posted: February 1, 2024
  • Registration Opens: February 1, 2024
  • Cloud Forum Convenes: April 30 – May 2, 2024