It’s no secret that we are making a push to the cloud. As Sharif noted in his last blog post, there are many compelling reasons to do so, financially, technically, and organizationally. However, no one should be under the impression that we are forging ahead thoughtlessly! We need to come together to understand the many implications of this move and how it affects nearly every part of our jobs.
To this end, we convened our first meeting of the ND IaaS Design Governance group. In the room were representatives from system administration, networking, architecture, and information security. On the agenda: a long list of open questions about the implementation, policy, and process of moving into Amazon.
I’m happy to report that we made excellent progress on this list. For the first half-dozen, we either made policy decisions on the spot, assigned ownership to certain groups, or assigned volunteers to learn more and present a recommendation at the next meeting. As we continue to meet biweekly, I’ll spotlight the decisions made on this blog. For now, here’s a glance at the broad topics.
- Designing / managing Infrastructure
- Security Groups
- Account Management
- Key Management
- Multitenancy
- Managing Instances
- Version Control
- Development
- Provisioning Instances
- Deployment Policy / Process
- Tagging / Naming Conventions
- Scripting
- Connecting to ND resources
- Licensing
- Object Ownership
- Budget
- Other
For the full document with sub-bullets and decisions made from the first meeting, see this document (ask me for access). This is certainly a first draft. I can already think of a number of things we should add, not the least of which is how our future change control / RFC process will work.
But things are already happening! Before I left Friday, I stood in on an impromptu design session with Bob, John, Jaime, and Milind.
is this what a think tank looks like?
this could be your next data center
So thank you to everyone on the committee for your dedication and excitement as we move forward!