Add blog post for Q1 2023 update

content/blog/2023/2023-q1-update/index.md

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+---
+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/) and [CILogon](https://www.cilogon.org/) 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 %}}

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 <div class="about-us">
 
-> 💡 [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:[email protected]) 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.