Foundations

Cloud connectivity — optimising traffic to Office 365 and remote access to on-prem applications

With the move of large numbers of university and college staff and students to working from home there has been a significant shift in traffic flows across Janet.

Microsoft Azure and Office 365 resourcing issues

As must be clear to everyone by now, there has been a massive spike in demand for public cloud services since the coronavirus outbreak first hit us. Microsoft report that whole countries have gone from zero use of cloud to deliver teaching to…

Are you well-architected?

If you currently work in a UK university or college, then the chances are that somebody, somewhere in your institution is already a customer of AWS or Microsoft Azure. Maybe both? In most cases, that usage of AWS or Azure will be known about and managed by the central IT…

AWS silly season — here we go

The AWS re:Invent annual conference in Las Vegas kicks-off next week, which means we are about to be snowed under by hundreds of new service announcments, product updates and the like. This year, AWS have started this process slightly early, so as not to overwhelm people…

AWS Savings Plans

AWS have announced a new pricing feature called Savings Plans, offering a way of saving up to 72% on your compute (EC2 and Fargate) spend. Even though I suspect that in most cases the realised savings will be lower than this headline figure, there is no doubt that they will be substantial in many…

Working with the Warwick Employment Group

The Cloud Solutions team in Jisc works with a variety of members and customers from across education and the wider public- and third- sectors on a variety of projects and activities. For many, our primary focus is to help them with the strategic planning…

Cloud adoption in UK universities

I spent part of last week at Networkshop47 in Nottingham, a Jisc conference predominantly aimed at…

Playing with Perl-based Lambda functions

Experimenting with AWS Lambda layers and custom runtimes to support writing Lambda functions in Perl.

Alexa, how’s my health?

I’m a great believer in personal ownership of health data and the ability of individuals to store and maintain their…