Presented at EduComm 2010 on June 8, 2010.

1. How My website Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cloud EduComm 2010

3. Playing the role of… Mike Richwalsky Director of Marketing Services, John Carroll University NITLE Technology Fellow 2009-10 HighEdWebTech.com Tw/FB: mrichwalsky HigherEdCloud.com

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

5. 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.

6. Why the cloud?

8. Old and busted.

9. New hotness.

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

12. It’s not all or nothing.

13. 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.

14. 10 ways to integrate the cloud

15. Content Delivery

16. Content Delivery Speed and reliability Geo-targeting Bandwidth + access are cheap Asset hosting+CMS

17. Which elements are cloud served?

18. Which elements are cloud served? Images CSS jQuery javascripts

19. CMS User Assets On-campus: finite storage Cloud: limitless storage Security for uploaded content Served quickly and efficiently CMS Plugins: WordPress Joomla Drupal Module

20. Forms

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

23. I <3 Wufoo Give access to campus users to do their own forms Secure out of the box Branded for the institution Conditional processing

24. I <3Wufoo Continuity across all forms Email, Database, Excel output Payment processing Embed in site or Wufoo url

26. 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 nice The form they filled out to receive info is the same form they’ll see when they’re on campus.

27. Backups

28. Backup to the cloud Yes, your IT team do backups More is always better Cloud storage + bandwidth is inexpensive

29. Backup WordPress Blog/CMS

30. Backup WordPress Blog/CMS

31. Backup your web server to S3 Command-line scripts and tools written in a variety of languages PHP, 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

32. Command line backups

34. Media Streaming

35. 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.

36. Case Study: Allegheny College

37. 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

38. Development Sandbox

39. 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.

40. CMS Derby Total Cost: In the course of an afternoon, we tried 7 CMS systems $1.10 WordPress Drupal Joomla Umbraco Hippo SilverStripe Typo3

41. 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.

42. Case Study, Pace University MaharaePortfolioPlatform Testing + Buildout Started Amazon EC2 server to develop on before launching production environment on campus Total cost: ~$60 More info: http://bit.ly/anUCxH

43. TheCloudMarket.com

44. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud http://aws.amazon.com

45. Rackspace Cloud http://www.rackspacecloud.com/

46. DNS

47. 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.

48. World’s Largest Focus Group

49. Mechanical Turk “Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work.” What does that mean?

50. Mechanical Turk

51. Mechanical Turk

52. 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

54. ProjectManagement/CRM

55. Management made easy Basecamp Wrike Quickbase Zoho These systems make managing projects across campus and contributors much easier.

58. Collaboration

59. “Let’s Use Sharepoint!”

61. Google Docs This has become an integral tool in our web development group. Share information, best practices, research Multiple people can have access Including students who do my research

62. WordPress use in Higher Ed

63. Encoding & Crunching Lots of Data

64. 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!

65. Encoding.com

66. Hey!Watch http://heywatch.com

67. 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.

68. 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.

69. 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 out You often pay for both upload and download

70. Questions? Twitter: @mrichwalsky Email: mrichwalsky@gmail.com Slides posted at EduComm Site and HighEdWebTech.com