Jupyterhub in AWS for Instruction: It’s only temporary, unless it works… – Live Session

Conference Session

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Description

Our presentation covers an overview of how a partnership between CS and CAE has been providing instances of Jupyterhub notebooks for instruction over the past several years. We will discuss how we have implemented the notebooks using AWS, structured load balancing and integrated with Canvas courses. There will be some demos of the tools we’ve used including terraform, helm and an alternating pair of A-B AWS instances for production and testing environments. We will conclude with a brief chat about future work items we are still figuring out and look for discussion with the community about best practices.

Familiarity with the concepts of cloud services, AWS especially, would be very helpful. Some familiarity with the concepts of containers and CI/CD pipelines will also help.

Attendees will become (more) familiar with cloud resources, learn about innovation in instructional support, discuss when projects take off at the university and stop being “pilots”. They will also learn about ways that people can work across various units in the university and facilitate inter-departmental cooperation.


Presenter Information


Original Logo from Wikipedia Commons. Image created by Mandy Morrow.

Provisioning Infrastructure as Code via Gitlab and Terraform

Description

Our presentation will focus on how our team used Terraform, an Infrastructure as Code tool, and Gitlab to fully automate the provisioning and deployment of the Residency App, a serverless application that collects data from prospective college applicants and helps to determine their residency status.

Key points that we will cover:

  • Terraform basics
  • Bootstrapping a terraform provisioning plan
  • Integrating Terraform with Gitlab CI/CD
  • Handling multiple application environments, such as QA and Production
  • Service account credential handling in Terraform and in the Cloud

We would like our audience to be able to get a basic sense of the work involved in provisioning and deploying a cloud-based application using an Infrastructure as Code strategy and the CI/CD tools available at UW.


Live Q&A Drop-Ins

Friday, June 3rd, 12:45-1:15pm

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Securing your AWS Web Resources

Description

This is a brief overview of how you can use features in AWS to protect web resources. It will include several examples of how to architect for resilience against the unknown and varied threats that attack us daily.

Attendees will learn about each feature of AWS can be used to protect web resources.


Live Q&A Drop-Ins

Friday, June 3rd, 12:45-1:15pm

Join the Zoom Event


Presenter Information


Original Image by VIN JD from Pixabay. AWS logo added from AWS website.

AWS DynamoDB via Clojure

Description

Low-friction integration with AWS DynamoDB via Clojure is possible! This session will provide observations on the way these technologies fit well together. I’ll talk about why this is low friction- specifically the tradeoffs in data qua data vs object-oriented models, and that faced with a similar problem a similar technical solution might be a good fit.

The intended audience is one with basic programming familiarity; the point is to appreciate the shape and fit of the technologies, to appreciate that a working solution works, and why it works, and what features make more or less friction in the integration.

(Note: There is no Live Q&A for this session)


Presenter Information

Why DNS Automation is Amazing

Pre-Recorded Session


Live Q&A

Friday, June 4th, 11:00 – 11:30 am


Description

API enabling your DNS server will let you do awesome things! See why having API access to DNS for all necessary parties enables automation on a level we’ve only previously dreamed about. We were manually doing certificate renewal for 1800+ certs, but after implementing Infoblox API + AWS Cert Manager + Wiscweb we have 1800+ Automatically renewed SSL Certificates FTW. And this pattern can be used by anyone! This session is perfect for people who have or host websites, or run DNS servers.


Presenter Information

Interop Update – What’s Here, and What’s Coming

Pre-Recorded Session


Live Q&A

Friday, June 4th, 1:30 – 2:00 pm


Description

Get an update on the Interop Initiative including new infrastructure services and capabilities, and plans for the coming year. Learn about the new tools and approaches that are coming online, and how they impact data access and integration.


Presenter Information

Building CI/CD Terraform Pipelines In Azure DevOps

Pre-Recorded Session


Live Q&A

Friday, June 4th, 2:00 – 2:30 pm


Description

Azure Devops provides a platform for executing IaC pipelines. We will explore using GitOps to automatically trigger terraform build pipelines in dev, staging, and production environments. We will also explore the automation of Azure Image creation and the automation of vm patching. Learn how to automatically take infrastructure as code from a development environment to staging and production environments through Azure DevOps Pipelines and GitOps. This session is perfect for people in DevOps who are interested in automating their IaC development and deployment cycles.


Presenter Information

Badger Analytics: Modernization of the Analytics Environment at UW-Madison

Pre-Recorded Session


Live Q&A

Friday, June 4th, 1:00 – 1:30 pm


Description

This session will provide a technical look at UW-Madison’s new institutional data warehouse using the platform Snowflake, branded Badger Analytics, hosted by the ETL developers within the Office of Data Management and Analytics Services who were integral to bringing Badger Analytics to life. They will share the story of the modernization of the environment, the project’s progress to date, the architecture, benefits, and how the modernization has revolutionized the work they do and freed up capacity through speed and automation. This practical session, by technical professionals for technical professionals, will provide details about the technologies and how they have been leveraged to provide value and unlock previously unimagined capabilities. Learn about the potential to leverage this modernization for the benefit of other units and divisions within the UW-Madison community.

This session builds on last year’s presentation by Cathy Lloyd, chief data officer, about cloud data warehousing for UW-Madison’s institutional data and the overall analytics strategy.


Presenter Information

checkQualys – Building Container Scanning Automation

Pre-Recorded Session


Live Q&A

Friday, June 4th, 2:30 – 3:00 pm


Description

This presentation discusses the Qualys Container Security scanner GitLab integration. DevOps is quickly changing the way that organizations build and deploy web applications such as Docker containers. With container technology, build workflow needs rapid release cycles and continuous deployment. By integrating automated security testing into the development tool chain workflows, developers can identify security issues associated with containers early in their build process. We will discuss the scripts and source code for tools to provide access to the Qualys container vulnerability scanning system through GitLab CI/CD jobs. This integration into a GitLab project allows developers to trigger a Docker container image scan pipeline on the image of their choosing. Any vulnerabilities found will be posted as a GitLab issue in the project from which it is executed. This integration uses a pre-configured VM for the GitLab runner that obtains access to what it needs via AWS IAM roles. This allows any developer with a project on the same GitLab instance to incorporate the Qualys scanner job by including a GitLab CI/CD template in their own gitlab-ci.yml file without having to set up access to the Qualys API for themselves. At the end of the presentation, participants will be able to learn about the architecture, scripts and source code, sample reports as well as setup instruction documentation and on-going improvements.

The architecture, scripts and source code, sample reports as well as benefit of container scanning, setup instruction documentation, and on-going improvements.


Presenter Information