 To the penultimate session of Domain's 202 Workshop. This is kind of a fun 201, sorry, not 202. 202 comes next year. I get looks around the table like, what? 202 is actually only offered every other year, and it's a one-party course. All right, smartasses all around me. So, yeah, today we're going to talk in this session about a question that some of you may keep you up at night. It keeps me up at night. Why reclaim cloud, right? Like, why would you do this thing? What is the cloud? Why are you pushing Docker on me? What's the big deal? We have domain of one's own. What do we need this for? These are all questions that have looped in your brain regularly. I know. Well, this session is going to help you kind of come to terms with that. And to do that, we have two special guests. Alyssa Maranaccio coming from, and I'm doing that right, right? That's the Italian in me putting out the Maranaccio. Is that how you would say it, too? Maranaccio, but close. From Wesleyan, who's an academic technologist, and we'll be talking with us a bit about how Wesleyan has used Reclaim Cloud for a core site that they created. That's an interesting story, so we'll get to that. And I need some time to actually get Tim Clark's full title. So the next guest we have with us is Tim Clark, who's coming to us from Muhlenberg College. And Tim is a senior instructional design consultant. He's got four words in his title. Like, I'm a fan. I've been a fan of both. I'm really excited to have you both with us today. So welcome, and thank you for joining. Thank you. Thanks. So Alyssa, I'm going to start with you because I think I have been on a bit of a Reclaim Cloud, kind of like, how would we say, Crusade? I don't know if that's the right thing to say or, yeah, I don't know. I've been on, I've been on the kind of, I don't even want to say it. I don't have the right words to say. I've been interested in Reclaim Cloud for the last several months, so maybe even years. And one of the things that happened in January that really raised a particularly good use case was Wesleyan was running a course. And I think the course is called Life is Good. Can you tell us a little bit about that course? Sure. So it's a philosophy course called Living a Good Life. And it's actually, it came from a project, a collaboration with Notre Dame. And there's three instructors that run it and it originally started for students in a particular philosophy course, but for the one that we're talking about today, that was actually kind of like a MOOC that we created. Just to make a long story short, there was this campus-wide initiative that came up from the top that we, the president, wanted to create courses that the Wesleyan community, parents and alums could take part of. So courses that are actually being offered on Wesleyan, but kind of a more condensed version. So the Living a Good Life was a course that was running well online and with undergrads. And so that was one that they took and kind of remodeled, we call them mini courses, into a mini course that we were now, for the first time ever, going to offer out to a greater community. And can I ask you, Alyssa, how was the, where did you build that site? And then once you build it, how was the reception when you sent out that invitation? We're laughing because you know. I do know. This is a small hall. It's a disaster that ensues. So the original Living a Good Life site for undergrads was built on WordPress. So we were like, let's just make a copy of it. And we cloned the website and built kind of that condensed version that we were going to, that we were going to release. I think it was like right at the end of December. So we send out that email that goes out to the greater community. We have this open online course you can sign up for. And unknowingly, it was very popular and we had 3,000 registrants in like the matter of hours. So of course, not realizing this, we were on domain of one's own, the WordPress site there. And we were hitting all kinds of resource limits because that, you know, it didn't handle that. And of course, I penically emailed Jim and said, what do we do? Yeah, it was, it was interesting. And again, that's one of those use cases that fell into our lap because here's an instance where you had a domain of one's own, which can manage decent traffic for a class, right? But when you're hit for 3,000 registrants on the fly, it's almost why the cloud elastic cloud was invented, right? To allow for those major kind of spikes of traffic to deal with them and then resolve back. So I think, you know, it was interesting to get that use case to find out you had so much interest in the course. It must have been great. But then obviously the post fact that was, oh, I'm getting 505, you know, resource errors. This is not amazing. So we quickly transferred that site over to Reclaim Cloud, right? I think it was like with a matter of changing some DNS, which we actually had control of, and we could push everything over. And it's just a simple WordPress site, but it was in a WordPress site that at this point had scalable infrastructure that allowed us to basically deal with the resources you needed for 3,000 people to take the course. Right. Exactly. And I think, you know, we panically, you hopped on a call and you kind of went over our options. And I think for us, I remember you telling us about, oh, you could go to, you know, Amazon services. Like you're sitting in front of me and telling me you have this service and you're going to support it. You guys are such a fantastic support team. I was like, I'm sold. Let's do it. So we hopped on and did that. And what I really liked about it too is, you know, it can be tough with online courses because how do we know all 3,000, you know, are you just signing up because you're excited or are you really going to take part? So do we really want to pay for this if this many people aren't going to be in it? So I like that elastic model where we're kind of really looking for what we use. You've got the small, you know, server fee. But unless it's like really being used every time it's hit, like that's when you're paying. So that was a, that was big for us that sold us. It was a really good point too, because I remember trying, I think you were on the call with me too, Taylor, because Taylor had just been kind of at reclaim. He's like, what's going on here? I was like, let's try. Right. Like, but like, I think one of the things that was interesting is obviously people, when you're psyched, you're like, we're going to move you to the cloud, but it's variable billing. Right. We can't give you a number. People are immediately like, oh, wait. And if we could give you a number, it would be a large number. Like we have to, by the nature of it, we'd have to overestimate, which just is a waste of your money. So which is the difference between managed hosting. Right. As you're always paying for that top tier, you're always paying for that 32 gigabyte server. Just in the event you hit it at sign up when 3,000 people take it. But then only 250 people actually stick with the course, but you're paying just for the idea of 3,000 people are interested. And I think this is where elastic billing proved in your instance to be great because we looked at about $1.60 a day. And I think you ran it there for three months. So in the end, it was between $80 and $90 to run a kind of highly performant WordPress instance that could deal with, you know, potentially thousands of people have signed up, but they're not always paying for those resources should less take it. It's actually quite nice for the MOOC model. I think if you're doing something like a mini course based on hopefully massive attendance to get your community involved. So I really love that use case. I think it fell into our lap, but I think it's like, why would you run WordPress on the cloud? Often never because it's a blog like mine. No one reads it. There's no resources. Right. Like, you don't have to worry about that. See panels. Great. Used to make it one's own. It's really when you have this highly trafficked resource intensive site that the cloud works quite well. And it was a fairly seamless transition. So that's great. Yeah. And now we have a couple more going on. So it worked out. We found our solution and we're running with it, which is cool. I saw that you did add another site for another course. Yeah. It hasn't launched yet, but we are in the process. I think it's going to be fall though. Well, that's cool. I appreciate you sharing that story. You know, I love it because I think it's like, it fell into our lap as a great use case. So I appreciate that. Tim, you recently wrote, and I hope someone can link to the blog post, which I really loved talking about some of the various reasons as to why reclaim cloud. And I know you have particular examples. You've been playing with ghost and some other stuff. So can you set us up a little bit about why reclaim cloud at Muhlenberg? Sure. So it's really the esoteric projects, I think. You know, we are a domain of one's own institution. It does a great job for 99% of the source of student projects and a lot of the, you know, the vast majority of faculty projects. But occasionally there's something that comes up. That needs another, another stack, you know, maybe it's node or engine X or I don't know. It just depends. Or folks have found a project that's containerized. And so everything that you're going to be doing is going to invoke Docker in one way or another. And reclaim cloud is fantastic. Prior to reclaim cloud, you know, we had done a little bit of this stuff on digital ocean for honors projects or faculty projects. But the things that I think reclaim cloud permits that are a little harder to do either on your institutional infrastructure, you know, the main thing is, you know, all of the, all of the accounts on our campus are basically managed through our central user directory. And so whenever we have a collaborator who's off campus, it's a real problem for them to see anything that we're working on and to actually touch the command prompt. But reclaim cloud, that's really not an issue. So we had a professor who wanted to build an overlay journal and wanted to get into some open academic publishing. There's a lot of different software applications, open source software applications out there that can do that. Things like pub pub and Janeway and manifold and so on. And he just wanted to evaluate them. He just wanted to kind of get a sense of what worked best for his particular vision. And so, you know, he's very adept would get things mostly working. And it was really just that last little bit of configuration that presented a challenge. And with something like reclaim cloud, you can actually get the developers involved in these open source projects, set up a meeting, have them come in and not only have full access through, you know, as root or whatever they need to be, but you can, you can flip that around then and they're demonstrating instead of just following you along and telling you click on this, click on that or whatever. So that was, that was to me the, when we worked with the folks from Janeway to have a group meeting so that I could learn, I could help support this, Jeff Pooley is his name, could take over the project and basically never look back. That light bulbs really sort of went off for me as to the potential, as a teaching platform, as a collaboration platform, you can share access at the, at the container level or at the application level, which I think is really interesting. And the ability to clone something with just a few clicks means that you could work in a development environment. You can try out, I don't know, the beta version or whatever and keep your sort of production environment pristine and working along all of the kinds of stuff that you'd expect. And I know that you're a DS106 radio fan and an AzuraCast fan more generally. You've talked to the developer and we use so AzuraCast for those of you who don't know is an open source radio, web radio platform and I don't know what language it's written in. Do you know what language it's written in, Taylor? I actually don't know. It's written in a language. Was language is to be decided. But it actually does, it runs on Reclaim Cloud. We moved it over there. It had been running on DigitalOcean for a while but it's one of the tests we did. But when we did recent upgrades to it and it's running in Docker, we were able to clone it like instantaneously. And that power to clone environments so that if you do anything and it goes wrong and then are able to kind of share it, for example, to your point, we could have shared it with the developer who seems to be very willing to help Buster Neese and really just kind of allow them to get access, show us something, demonstrate something and then move out is a really nice element of Reclaim Cloud is that you can bring in collaborators. I agree not to mention the way in which collaborators can then take it over and then like take ownership of it and pay for it, which I imagine is something that comes up a lot with research and grants and stuff like that. Yeah, that's the billing side I think is another area of a lot of future potential and in a couple of different directions. You're right. Cross-institutional support for grant-funded projects is a real pain honestly because when you're talking about on-premises servers and stuff, who's going to own it? And even taking advantage of some cloud platform as a service type stuff out there, who's going to pay for it, how that's going to work? When your institutional IT is expecting a sort of invoice, it's paid a year in advance in a fixed amount, so a lot of times you don't know how to estimate what these kinds of things are going to cost in support of a project that's a collaboration between a community group and the college, the town gown sort of collaborations and stuff. So that's basically not an issue I don't think with Reclaim Cloud and the way the pricing is structured. That's a big one. But I can think of another example that might be really appealing at a small school like mine. Hit us with it. Okay. So Azure Cast, let's just use that as an example. Let's say that you have a broadcast, a radio broadcasting and production course that you teach, I don't know, it enrolls every two years or something. Maybe you're in the broadcast booth, you're lucky enough to have an on-campus radio station like we do, but you want to talk about internet and streaming radio as a module in the course. Do you have everybody spin up Azure Cast? Well, great. You've got it working. You've got it configured. You've got all your DNS stuff sorted out. Should you have to pay for Azure Cast or run until the next time that course enrolls? Do you have to blow everything away and then go through all of that installing configuration again prior to the class? Yeah, no way. Just pause it. Just hit the pause button. Essentially, it's not going to cost you any money until the next time you need to run Azure Cast. On-off computing, right? The way in which you can turn these environments on and off in the next generation kind of platforms like Reclaim Cloud is so hard for a lamp environment admin to deal with, to understand. I'll say I love that aspect of Reclaim Cloud as well, Tim, that you can just stop an environment and the only thing you'd be charged with at that point is if your account is using over 100 gigs of storage and you pay per gigabyte, but it's pretty inexpensive, right? Agreed. But also, it's 100 gigs. You have to get there first. But I will say I've played around with many different cloud services before Reclaim Cloud even existed and gotten down even the road of writing my own scripts to, all right, I'm going to do this and then create a backup and destroy the server and redeploy it to try to approximate what you can just do with the stop button. And I did do it, but it was a big waste of time. It was a lot of work just to do something that seems like it should be simple. Here's another really exciting element. And you touched on this in your post, Tim. And we already kind of touched on it a little bit with AzuraCast is the thing that's really got me excited about Reclaim Cloud is it is esoteric. It is kind of the next generation sandbox. All that's true. But there's a bunch of open source tools out there, media tools, whether it be stuff like PeerTube, which is an open source clone of YouTube. Jitsi, which is a really beautiful open source kind of like Zoom or video conferencing tool. AzuraCast for the web radio. You have a very ghost, which we are loving for the Reclaim Roundup. You have a really new tool set of these next generation tools that you can actually explore and play with. At a fairly given that it's on and off, given you only pay for the resources you use, it's not a super expensive toolkit, kind of like C-Panel through Bluehost wasn't back in the day when we started using WordPress on campus in 2006, right? Like there is some parallels between those early experimentations 16 years ago and cloud-based computing, container-based computing, whether in Reclaim Cloud or anywhere now. And I think one of the things I'm super excited about this year is to try and be a somewhat of a, you know, a translator, right? A kind of like your post speaks to that, trying to get educational technologists thinking about what's possible within the realm of possibility, not having to be a programmer or a sysadmin or a developer. I'm super excited about that prospect. We're going to be doing a flex course in July around containers and dockers to get people on the ground floor thinking about what's possible. And for me, you mentioned it in your post again, Tim, which I think was really comprehensive and a great read for anyone else interested is, you know, there's a lot of bespoke one-off tools like data set or data visualization tools and we can go down the list that are very useful for a one-and-done, you know, cost you 30 cents to run it as part of an experiment for a course. And I'm super interested in like that kind of use-as-you-need computing to support faculty and students in their quest to do work in whatever way, right? Yeah, I mean, I teach a class that uses QGIS, which is an open-source geographic information system. And one of the things that I would like to see is getting QGIS in a virtual desktop environment in the marketplace because you can burn the first two or three class sessions in the semester just getting QGIS installed on everybody's Mac or Windows or whatever, you know, we've got a lot of students, I wouldn't say a lot, but we have a fair number of students who prefer to work off of a tablet and there's no way you're going to get that application to run on something like that, right? That's the device of choice that they have. So if you can build these sort of virtual desktop environments with a click, basically, and for not a lot of money, right? Each student just carries their own account in lieu of a textbook or something like that, or it's built departmentally, however you work that out, and they have their environment up and ready to start jumping into the real material instead of sort of finagling their software at the end of the first class period or the second class period whenever you get in there and start working on that stuff. And so just in terms of preserving instructional time, I think that that's huge. And that's just a tiny sort of scratching the surface about these kinds of things. I love that. And if I'm not wrong, Taylor, you've been playing with a little bit of that. I mean, you've been kind of doing some exploration of Reclaim Cloud, and I know one of the things you've been exploring is that idea of having a series of applications that students could just run through a kind of setup. What is the tool? Yeah, it's called chasm workspaces. And that I did a little stream on it not that long ago. I blocked it too. There's a blog post. I mean, it's a pretty short blog post. It's mostly just the stream. But what it was is pretty much what Tim is describing, which is that it lets through a web browser, you use desktop applications. And in the case of chasm, they have to be Linux applications. But I've never used QGIS. I've heard of it before, but I've not personally used it. But it does say it runs on Linux. So that maybe could be possible, right, to use a platform like Reclaim Cloud to have a chasm or something like chasm maybe to stream out that application running for a user to use. I mean, that use case is something that higher ed IT departments are doing a lot for Windows applications. And it's expensive platforms typically that do it. But they'll do desktop as a service, Citrix, I know at St. Norbert. Some of my co-workers are working with things like, when I was there, I was working with things like AppStream and from Amazon and Paperspace. And there's a lot of these platforms, but they're all, they're more like delivering an entire Windows desktop. And that actually has a ton of complication to it. Whereas I think the cool thing I got to see working with chasm is that it was very focused on just like one application delivered to us, any number of users, I guess, but it seems like manageable that if you could get something like QGIS working, because of the way Reclaim Cloud works, you could potentially make that application available to a bunch of people, or you could make it an installer that it's just like, nope, go sign up, and then you've got a credit on your account of 50 bucks or whatever you may need. Probably wouldn't want that for a classroom scenario. You probably want to handle that. Or maybe you don't, right? Like maybe you have a research project where it's a faculty member and a student working in QGIS and they're just going to drop on 50 bucks. Like $50 goes a pretty long way in Reclaim Cloud. They may get a year worth out of usage depending on what they're doing and how long they're doing it. So. So, Alyssa, you see now that WordPress is simply the gateway drug. Well, you know, the thing that's great and I'm sure, Jim, that this was absolutely perfect. Absolutely. This is me giving out free drugs to see what happens. You know, the great thing is to me, this is the two main things for Reclaim Cloud, right? It's like scale. I'm not actually trying to point, but it looks like I'm pointing at you. Exactly. Like huge scalable sites and things that will not run on LAMP, right? Those to me are the big things that I think of when I think of Reclaim Cloud. So it's really cool. We have just a few minutes left, but one of the things worth noting here and a couple of things is like someone was running a library site at Skidmore and, you know, it was running it on our professional services. It was like a VIP server where it was just a few people. But even that it was a library site. Like it needed to be on a more stable space. It was WordPress and they jumped to the Reclaim Cloud and they never look back. And it's like, yeah, for those kind of bigger sites, absolutely. And the other example which I think has been fun is I was talking with John Stewart, who we just heard from and Adam Kroom. They had a publications for University of Oklahoma, the student publications, which in some ways need to be separate from IT because they want their own independence. They want to be able to pay for their own media and they want it to truly be independent media from the university. They set up Tim, to your point, their own account on Reclaim Cloud, separate from the university where they could pay for their infrastructure, apart from domain of one's own or anything that was maybe tied to the university. And I think that's super interesting to think like, you know, these are other options in other ways. And sometimes the practical points like paying for them and like separating them out from the university is considered not necessarily a drawback, but a benefit to dealing with Reclaim Cloud which is interesting. So having said that, I am mindful of time and I want to say Alyssa and Tim, any last comments before we wrap up? Because we have about two minutes. You don't have to. I'm not putting you on the spot, but you can say no. Thank you, Jim. Well, I mean, I'm just, for me, like I said, I am sold. We've got multiple courses coming and are going to be using it. So we are thankful to have stumbled upon it. And if anyone does have any questions or thinking about doing something similar, we're happy to talk to them and kind of share our process as well. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, maybe it's stating the obvious, but for me, it's really the continuity here is encouraging people to do it themselves and to host it themselves and to have their space online that's theirs. And so, you know, thinking of this honors student that I wrote about in my blog post, going on to grad school and being able to, you know, zip this thing up and take it with her, I think that's the continuity from Domain of One's Own to Reclaim Cloud is infused with that ethos of doing it ourselves. Yeah. Thank you both. You rock. You rule. We drool. See you in five minutes for the close-up wrap-up of day two of Domain's 201. Thank you, Alyssa and Tim, once again. Thank you.