TechEX22 Preview: Dedicated to the Cloud

By Damian Doyle

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

We are just a month away from the 2022 Internet2 Technology Exchange (TechEX) the first in-person technical meeting Internet2 has held in a few years. I worked with my fellow track chairs Kari Robertson (UCOP) and James Monek (Lehigh), Internet2 staff member Bob Flynn, and community volunteers to vet the excellent submissions and build a full program of compelling sessions that make up the Cloud Computing Track.  

The cloud conversation has moved from “should you or shouldn’t you?” to the importance of approaching and deploying the cloud the right way by leveraging the experiences of your peers to save time and increase success.

To develop the Cloud Computing Track, we worked with the Higher Ed Cloud Forum and the EDUCAUSE Cloud Community Group, pulling together expertise from over 1,500 IT cloud professionals to bring our best to TechEX. These sessions are geared for architects, engineers, and developers — anyone from the seasoned cloud guru to the cloud curious just dipping their toes into the soft, fluffy hyper-scale clouds. 

One of the powerful aspects of TechEX is the cross-track presentations that bring together cloud, research, and security to discuss issues that impact multiple teams and require a common conversation. There will be a workshop directly addressing an issue that stimies so many organizations – handling networking and security natively, and effectively, within the cloud. There is even an AWS Game Day pre-conference event where teams can get some hands-on experience in a friendly competition with other organizations. Where else are you going to get that kind of variety of activities?

With the Higher Ed Cloud Forum occurring a few weeks before TechEX, we are excited to be able to bring some of the best content from that event to TechEx as well. This truly is going to be a tour de force of cloud programming! I could go on and on about sessions on Zero Trust federations, maturing from cloud chaos to standards, bringing your costs in line, understanding the architecture of services we rely on like eduroam, and a lot more. In the end, this is going to be a blast! You should come join us, be part of our welcoming community, and I promise you will learn, laugh, and be better for it.

If you haven’t done so yet, register for the Technology Exchange. If you’ve got any questions, reach out. The power of this community is that it has been built by us, for us, to help us. I’m happy to answer any questions you have, as are my fellow track chairs, and we can’t wait to see you in-person next month to talk about all things cloud. 

Damian Doyle is deputy CIO and senior associate vice president in the Division of Information Technology at University of Maryland Baltimore County.