diff --git a/content/blog/2023/2023-q1-update/index.md b/content/blog/2023/2023-q1-update/index.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..af1d8726c --- /dev/null +++ b/content/blog/2023/2023-q1-update/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,135 @@ +--- +title: "Community update Q1 2023: Growing our community partner network and our team" +subtitle: "" +summary: "" +authors: ["Chris Holdgraf"] +tags: [] +categories: ["updates"] +date: 2023-04-28 +featured: false +draft: false +--- + +It's a month after the end of Q1 2023, and we'd like to share a belated update about what we were up to in the first quarter of this year (we have good excuses for being late, including new tiny humans, I promise). + +This quarter we grew our engineering team significantly, and started to refine our team processes and structures to accommodate this extra complexity. +We expanded our managed cloud service with new community partners, and made a number of improvements to our technical infrastructure and organizational processes for managing this service. + +Read on below to learn more about what we've been up to! + +## New community partnerships + +We added several new community partnerships to our managed hub service. +We've deployed new hub infrastructure for each of the following groups: + +- Our [University of Toronto Jupyter service](https://act.utoronto.ca/jupyterhub-support/) now has a dedicated R hub. +- We ran an event hub for the [Drakkar Ocean project](https://www.drakkar-ocean.eu/) +- We deployed a hub for the [NASA Visuaslization Exploration and Data Analysis (VEDA) project](https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/esds/veda). +- We deployed a hub for the [QuantifiedCarbon](https://www.linkedin.com/company/quantifiedcarbon/about/) organization. +- We ran an event hub for [OceanHackWeek 2023](https://oceanhackweek.org/). +- We onboarded several new community colleges to our "JupyterHubs Education in Community Colleges" collaboration with [CloudBank](https://www.cloudbank.org/welcome-cloudbank) and [UC Berkeley CDSS](https://data.berkeley.edu/). + +## Service improvements + +Below are a few highlights for ways in which we improved our [Managed Cloud Service](https://docs.2i2c.org) for our partner communities. + +### We simplified our authentication workflow with CILogon + +Authentication services allow us to identify a user when they log onto a hub, which determines their ability to access hub resources. +Previously we had used a combination of [Auth0](https://auth0.com/), [CILogon](https://www.cilogon.org/), or [GitHub](https://infrastructure.2i2c.org/hub-deployment-guide/configure-auth/github-orgs.html) for authentication. + +However, over the past year we've been happy with our use of CILogon so far, especially because of its non-profit status and alignment with many research and education institutions that we work with. +This quarter, we decided to streamline our authentication process by dropping the use of Auth0 and grow our partnership with CILogon. + +💡 _Learn more_ + +- See [CILogon's write up about it's partnership with 2i2c](https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/security-made-simple-with-ncsas-cilogon/) +- See [our blog post about our use of CILogon](https://2i2c.org/blog/2023/cilogon-integration/) + +### We exposed user activity dashboards in JupyterHub so communities know how many people are using the service + +We tend to work with _leaders_ of communities that utilize our service and infrastructure for many others in their network. +For example, a teacher with a classroom of students, or a researcher with a global network of collaborators. + +In these cases, it's useful to track how many users are actively using a platform over various metrics of time. +This can tell you whether your community finds a service useful, and whether this is growing or shrinking. + +We use [Grafana](https://grafana.com/) to automatically generate dashboards of activity for all of our community hubs and clusters. +However, tracking **daily, weekly, and monthly active users** was not part of JupyterHub's core functionality. + +So, we decided to upstream this functionality into JupyterHub and expose it via [the JupyterHub Grafana project](https://github.com/jupyterhub/grafana-dashboards). +All 2i2c hubs now track daily, weekly, and monthly unique active users. +And importantly, anybody else deploying the [Zero to JupyterHub for Kubernetes](https://z2jh.jupyter.org) can use this feature now too. + +💡 _Learn more_ + +See [Yuvi's blog post about this feature](https://blog.jupyter.org/accurately-counting-daily-weekly-monthly-active-users-on-jupyterhub-6fbec6c6ce2f). + +### We made our support process more structured with a new support widget + +We've added a support widget to our [service documentation site](https://docs.2i2c.org). +This will allow users to provide structured support requests directly to our team, allowing us to triage and respond more quickly. + +Here's our support button and widget in action: + +{{< figure src="support-button.png" width=500 title="Our fancy new support button!" >}} + + +### We upgraded Kubernetes across all of our AWS clusters + +[Kubernetes](https://kubernetes.org) is at the core of our cloud infrastructure and scalability. +We use either a shared or a dedicated Kubernetes cluster for each of our community partners, and it is the foundation upon which all of their Jupyter infrastructure rests. + +One of the biggest challenges with managing an ongoing cloud service is keeping the underlying infrastructure upgraded. +This brings in new stability and functionality, but also often involves manual steps and toil. +This quarter, we upgraded each of our AWS JupyterHubs to [Kubernetes 1.24](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/CHANGELOG/CHANGELOG-1.24.md) and will continue this effort with other providers in the coming quarters. + +### We streamlined our hub uptime checks to be more efficient + +The best kinds of failures are ones that your operations team recognizes and solves before any users run into the problem themselves. +We use the [Google Cloud Platform HTTP uptime checker](https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/uptime-checks) to [run regular uptime checks for each of the community hubs that we use](https://infrastructure.2i2c.org/topic/monitoring-alerting/uptime-checks.html#simple-https-uptime-checks). +This allows us to get quick alerts if any of our community hubs is down for some reason. + +We made several optimizations to this process so that we can more efficiently monitor hub uptime and trigger alerts to our engineering team if action is needed. + +## Organizational updates + +We made a number of broader improvements to our team processes and policies, and even got a shout-out from a few community partners! + +### We defined organizational principles around engaging in healthy ways with open source communities + +2i2c interacts with many open source communities throughout its work, due to the fact that the majority of the improvements we make are done via **upstream contributions**. +We define [several key open source communities](https://compass.2i2c.org/organization/mission/#key-stakeholders) that we interact with, and we needed a philosophy and set of practices to ensure that our relationship with them remains healthy and supportive. + +💡 _Learn more_ + +Check out _[Principles and considerations for ethically accepting funding for open source](https://2i2c.org/blog/2023/open-source-funding-principles/)_ for our first take on this, and [our Open Source Strategy](https://compass.2i2c.org/open-source/strategy/) page for our current team policies around this. + +### We responded to a NASA RFI on "Scientific Data and Computing Architecture to Support Open Science" + +NASA recently put out a Request for Information around open science and open source infrastructure: [NASA RFI NNH23ZDA005L: Scientific Data and Computing Architecture to Support Open Science](https://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/solicitations/summary.do?solId=%7B78AA81B6-A7B9-D934-20F8-7B3151DA59A2%7D&path=&method=init). +We responded with some of our ideas around how to build more open, inclusive, collaborative scientific communities with cloud infrastructure and open source tools. + +💡 _Learn more_ + +[Check out our submission, "Building the open source stack"](https://zenodo.org/record/7662828#.ZFEROBXMKrN). + +### We added two new team members and a new team role + +Our [Open Engineering Team](https://2i2c.org/organization/#faces) continues to grow! +We added two new team members to help improve and manage our cloud infrastructure service: [Erik Sundell](https://2i2c.org/author/erik-sundell/) and [Pris Nasrat](https://2i2c.org/author/pris-nasrat/). + +As our team has grown, we have also had to manage more complexity in communicating and coordinating across a globally-distributed team of engineers. +To help us manage this system, we've [created a new Engineering Manager Role](https://compass.2i2c.org/engineering/roles/engineering-manager/) and promoted [Damian Avila](https://2i2c.org/author/damian-avila/) as our team's first engineering manager. + +### OpenScapes wrote up a blog post about our cloud service collaboration + +We got a nice shout-out from Luis Lopez at the OpenScapes project, describing the benefits of the cloud service that we run for their communities. +Check out his blog post: [The why, what, and how of our NASA Openscapes cloud infrastructure: 2i2c JupyterHub and corn environment](https://www.openscapes.org/blog/2022/11/17/nasa-earthdata-cloud-infrastructure/#cloud-optimized-data-formats). + +## Onward to Q2 + +Many thanks to the 2i2c team, our partner communities, our funders, and the many others that have provided us support and guidance. +We hope that this update provides a helpful idea of our priorities and major efforts, and we look forward to giving you a new update in Q2! + +{{% about-us %}} diff --git a/content/blog/2023/2023-q1-update/support-button.png b/content/blog/2023/2023-q1-update/support-button.png new file mode 100644 index 000000000..53d296899 Binary files /dev/null and b/content/blog/2023/2023-q1-update/support-button.png differ diff --git a/layouts/shortcodes/about-us.html b/layouts/shortcodes/about-us.html index dd892e0c5..b9c6a2d03 100644 --- a/layouts/shortcodes/about-us.html +++ b/layouts/shortcodes/about-us.html @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
-> 💡 [Sign up for our mailing list](http://eepurl.com/hjHbff) for updates about 2i2c. +> 💡 Follow our work! [Sign up for our mailing list](http://eepurl.com/hjHbff) for updates about 2i2c. > [Send us an e-mail about collaborating or partnering](mailto:hello@2i2c.org) on a project. > See our [Service Documentation](https://docs.2i2c.org) or our [Team Compass](https://compass.2i2c.org) to learn about our service and organization.