How My Website Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cloud

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

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

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

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

Which elements are cloud served?

Which elements are cloud served?
Images
CSS
jQuery
javascripts

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

Forms
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 <3Wufoo
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 nice
The 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 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

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

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
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

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

ProjectManagement/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 access
Including 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 out
You often pay for both upload and download

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

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How My Website Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cloud

by Mike Richwalsky on Jun 08, 2010

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