 We are live welcome to you on the stream welcome everybody in the room this is a session where we be talking about reclaim cloud and this is a kind of version of a presentation we gave at the OER 23 conference in Scotland Lauren and myself and so we're going to be talking about this but we're also have lucky enough to have a guest from VCU John Bigby thank you for joining us who actually is not an ed tech but a histologist who's a practitioner and he has a story about a site but then we'll also talk about some of the uses and values of the cloud so John thank you for joining us today um so what is reclaim cloud you know if you look behind the curtain it is containers and it's interesting because one of the things I'm really fascinated about container technology is what an amazing metaphor it is for um basically taking the metaphor of transportation and how everything shifted to containers to change the global economy for how we move things well that's exactly what's happening with infrastructure right now the containerization of server infrastructure is changing the way we can use and move our infrastructures across various servers or spaces there's a book here and this book is by Mark Levinson and it's a history of how this container how the box changed the world economy and changed shipping from the 1960s through to the 80s whereas now places like Baltimore which used to have stevedores and people working doing physical labor is now all automated and I don't know if any of you have ever seen the show the wire but there's a great episode of the wire where they talk about in Baltimore how that entire community had been kind of ravaged by the shift in technology of shipping and it's a real one and it's my argument that all of the advantages of shipping containers which was the standardization of sizes right the flexibility for what you shipped the ability to ship so much in one space reducing the costs as well as the security of enclosing what's in that shipment provides an actually really interesting kind of parallel to what is so valuable about containers as a kind of all of these things basically apply to what we're talking about with infrastructure so I love these images by Brian Mathers because I think more than me talking about it this kind of is a really good look at what a container is you can think of a container server like a ship as this is the one big bare metal server we have at Reclaim Cloud we have many of them but this would be one of them and within that server you have a whole bunch of individualized containers because we like the brand of VHS tapes these ones are VHS tapes but all of these are distinct applications one of them being your histology site they live in their own environment they run independent of one another yet at the same time they all share the same underlying infrastructure to run and something like the cloud is that you don't have to own the whole big server you can just own one corner of it right and then you have flexibility to have so many different things happening on one big server so for instance you know one of these little VHS stacks could be the multi site and then another one could be a random sandbox application that you want to play around with and then turn turn off when you're done you know and then maybe you've got a larger WordPress site or you know we're other applications so I love that it's you know you you have more flexibility here but then you're also not tied to a single software stack right with a dedicated c-panel server you've only got the lamp stack underneath and so we have to say no to certain applications yeah this we can say yes to a lot more so whereas John's WordPress site for example is PHP and it runs in this container you could have a ghost instance maybe that runs in no JS or Ruby and that's here and then etc and they don't all have to share the same underlying technology they're all distinct but they still use the same underlying server and this is great because yeah talk about this one it's really just an excuse to share the art in some ways but this is Brian Mathers way of helping us think through reclaims roles with you know and in some ways it really has a change our goal is to support the infrastructure so you all can focus on the applications themselves the exploring the learning the collaborating and then where they're kind of behind the scenes supporting those different applications and we'll use this this example will come up when we talk about John's site and digital scholarship in the cloud this is an interesting one you can have all these different applications whether it's data set visualizations data sifting the thing with data visualization for those of you are dealing with that is a lot of these research sites are bespoke and people at various universities or institutes are creating these unique applications and maybe they're putting them as a docker container and if that were the case that means you could run them in reclaim cloud simply and it wouldn't have to be that we have an installer for it or we know about it it's just basically allows for that idea of universal application by design the container wherever it's created will fit on our server because it's standard us and that's important and that's why docker i think is somewhat revolutionary now let's jump out of the technical talk and i want to talk a little bit about a use case and john i'm going to let you jump here and i'm going to give you this microphone and talk a little bit about the history of the site and why it found itself in the cloud without you having to worry about talking about what the cloud is reclaimed that so feel free well good afternoon i'm john bigby i'm a professor at the vcu school of medicine and so i don't understand anything that i heard this morning i mean i i i told jim when i saw him i have never seen him live so this was a treat um that it's it's kind of fun to see another group of professionals and how the different societies work as i live in the scientific community and when we get together like this we have a pretty scripted thing and we do the same sort of thing but this has been so much fun my ignorance is is off the charts but you know it's just kind of but it's fun to see people get excited about stuff because i'll get excited about histology and i'll be more than happy to spend the next two and a half years telling you about histology and you'll know where you'll stay but anyway i hope not life's too important um but it was it's been it's just been fun so i appreciate jim asking for me to come up and and just sort of let you know so digital histology started in the school of medicine and in many many medical schools the cost of teaching histology is a lot because every student has to have a microscope every student has to have um slides slides are made out of glass they break and every student has a different one so what we decided to do with um the shrinking time for for curricula and everything we said let's just create a digital platform that we can do this so we went through it's been so long it's hard for me to remember um adobe authorware we wrote the original one in authorware immediately immediately overloaded that and so then we started and we started working with wordpress and that was really nice we and so this was all hosted through the university server vcu server and that server was the wordpress was really used more as a blog site so anybody could get on there and start a blog and do all that kind of stuff so it worked it worked okay for a while these images we have about now about 1500 images they are 300 dpi you know so they're high resolution images and there's a lot of interactivity with it um so over the over a period of time um since we had no control over the over vcu server and it got busier and busier and busier we started finding that they were doing things and the site started running slower the page kind of half loaded for a few seconds and then loaded full it was it was just getting too busy and busy so there we were on the university server and we said please help us and they said we just can't invest in that it's too expensive we have other priorities so we were just kind of suffering with this this situation this we decided to make this an open educational resource because some very wise person told me if you are going to have an application and you charge for it the expectation is that you have support so if something goes wrong you have to have somebody at the other end of the phone to help them we said no way you get what you pay for so it's free it's free to the entire world it's up as a as a dot org site it's a dot com site but i like i just like dot org because it doesn't look like we're making any money on it which we're not um we just wanted to give this to the world and it's all over the world now people all in every continent are using it to teach to learn histology so that they don't have to invest this is really nice for undergraduate small undergraduate schools or even down in the high school level where they just can't afford microscopes and slides and all that so this is free and it's out there but we were stuck with this problem and we have a tech we have a a person who's in charge of our instructional design who knows tom woodward and knows jim and he said i think i have a solution for you and i talked to jim and i said this can this is too good to be true i can't this is this can't be happening he said yeah we'll just do this and and for what we're paid what we're what he's charging for it which is minimal it's chump change tiny tiny money at a big university um it's it's almost free compared to some of the other things so that is just not an issue at all but hit you know will he said you know and he's been very helpful with with giving us some ideas about about some of the stuff behind the scenes and again he gets into lingo with tom and i just zone out i just let them go whatever you say as long as i get this and i can see it so this the the program now um is is running in reclaim cloud and it is absolutely flawless it i've never seen it slow down even if i look at the usage over a semester um it's fun to look at our own it's kind of flat the first part of the semester then an exam comes and up it goes and then after the exam it goes back down and so it fluctuates you know um and so even at the busiest times where we get thousands of hits um no issues at all i just i just have been so happy and so pleased and then jim has been able to interface with tom woodward who wrote this word press he he's the brains behind the code that makes this thing work it's just so it is so the i don't know i mean i can if you want to see how it works i'm more than happy to to just show you but it's absolutely it's just hysto yaya and i don't i don't want to bore you with that kind of stuff but it is interesting even in your design choices with tom some of that is really great so you know we decided we decided at first we thought you know just we wrote this and so we want a splash page we want you to see john bigby up there and then tom and jim said no that's not what people want they don't want they they don't want to have somebody that stuff come up they'll get it if they want to know in any way you aren't in it for the buck so who cares so we just wanted to brand it with vcu because vcu i'm a faculty member so this is my intellectual um uh my act my sort of research kind of stuff um so we branded it with vcu and then we decided to build it so that it looks like a textbook so it down the left side is um all of the the things you would find in this discipline histology discipline um and then if you go down to say some other things so if you go up there and you say like the reproductive system so that's one more so reproductive system obviously male and female if you go into the male click on that one then you got all these other parts and this arrow just indicates that there's more stuff that's going to come so if you click on one of those so if you click on the epididymis say then if you don't see an arrow in these that means it's going to take you to the images take you to the images and we had a a a medical artist draw some of these images we have a bunch of those in there what's over on the right side are the are the are the structures are going to be they're going to be indicated um so if you just click on any one of those so it's not what the advantage here is that you don't have static superimposed labels they come and go with each click and then if you click back on main slide they all disappear there's a little carrot that pushes off to the side where it says coni vasculose and what that means is that this descriptive text changes when that arrow to the right or that carrot to the right changes um there's a little thing up there where it says hide if you hide that it everything disappears the arrow stays and the students can then say what in the hell am I looking at and they can just click back down through it keep a little jot down their their list then go back up to where it says show and everything reveals itself and they can see how they did um then if you so then they where did the i think molly has a question oh i'm sorry i don't know on this part with this particular functionality is is that the main reason why you're building it you had these guys custom build this as opposed to the different platform tom had custom built this in rampages and rampages was a very big in a 35 000 sites and this was a highly traffic site so it was one of the wordpress multi sites that were getting thousands of hits a month and it was the rest of the site was suffering so one of the things i think john needed to do given that is to take this off of the wordpress multi site that was living on and get it into an environment where people who were using it weren't finding it slowing down and as john mentioned like the the thing was we took a wordpress out of a wordpress multi site which you can one instance out put it on the tone but then put it in the space like reclaimed cloud where the resources could elastically adjust to the demands so when you have those sites that go and are successful in your various spaces this is one potential outlet to go and kind of feel beyond the idea of the work you could see for it for like different environments and stacks essentially also just for a wordpress site that could run on shared hosting but because of demands needs its own elastic cloud space that's been nice to that adjustment of demand and so john the way john said it's affordable which it can be is because it only uses the resources you use and john has decided to basically say i just want to pay for the resources i use at what time and he put in a credit and then you can see how much it would cost today and maybe when there's thousands of traffic during one of those tests it gets more expensive but overall you get to see if sturdy bucks a month or whatever it would be and then you put an x amount of money in there and that's where you can kind of do that with faculty at UMass or start thinking about with Dartmouth like you pay based on usage not based on i think it might be really intense at this point in the semester so get me a big server and i'll pay for it all year round only pay for what you use which does make the cloud in some instances more affordable and economical not always because wordpress can run really good in shared hosting and if that's 30 bucks a year that's great so just mentioning you have about five minutes left i think so yeah one more no but one more thing i think i just want to john i just want to mention this a bit i'm going to jump back to here one of the things that's super interesting to me about the cloud and what it makes possible is here is a good example and i'll let you do the slides here's a good example of some of the various applications we can install wordpress as john used is one of them and astadon ghost etc but if we keep going um one of the things we're dealing with right now with that brave new world of wordpress i think we should talk about is so here's a really good example let's just say john tomorrow gets a huge grant from the nsf and what they tell them is you're going to have tons of traffic because it's coming from the us this is the official textbook for the whole world and he's like oh my gosh i need to scale this because it's wordpress and because it's retent cloud we can put this in three or four data centers we could have it fail over so that should one server have a problem it never goes down and this is where the cloud gets into a very different notion as we talked about yesterday of kind of uptime and scalability and so we've been working with schools now um which is interesting and this is kind of what it looks like we can jump over this slide you can jump over this slide um we are now in the business and we've never been in this business before and it's a brave new world for us is because we have a wordpress site so this john live yours is also a wordpress site running a university website this is their dot edu this is mission critical reclaim cloud now allows us with failover using things like dns proxying and the ability to kind of failover based on different servers and if you want to have that talk we're going to have it separately the bigger question is should the server in the east coast go down the server in the west coast will still be up and nothing will be lost data is synced across regions and so this site is essentially running on three distinct servers sometimes in a different country to ensure not only that it's super fast as john has mentioned with his wordpress but also highly available so should anything happen to one data center everything is still running without anyone on the other side knowing and so this is fun for us because this is something this is a world we have not entered yet and we have and we partner with mcallister we're doing their dot edu we partner with trinity college which is another one we're doing not edu so for us the cloud is not only four sites that need to scale you know based on being in a wordpress multi-site but it even allows us to replicate our infrastructure across many data centers yeah i think the cloud is exciting for me because you can use it for those small niche projects that just need a sandbox space that feel very casual right but then it's also powerful and robust enough for us to offer things like hosting for dot edu's or sites that really just garner so much traffic that even if we optimize them to the nth degree and ensure that they are great where they are if something happens to that server underneath which we can't always control we can still make sure that it's online and so that redundancy across data centers and that replication is really really cool it's also nice to i know we're low on time it's also really nice for maintenance right if you've got you want to run maintenance on a site you can say hey point traffic over here while i do work over here and then sync everything up when i'm ready so we can do sort of this live synchronization during development work while still maintaining performance um and i think that that sort of experience has been really cool to think to work through and the next big thing for folks like john or anyone else that you're using wordpress the wordpress is a popular application both trinity college and macaulay are using wordpress for their main site we are going to release in the next i want to say month or so essentially a wordpress specific interface for reclaimed cloud so that when you go in there if you have your main george town wordpress multi site or a various site that you want to run in wordpress and make multi region all of that would be possible with a click so you would actually have a wordpress specific um interface for university websites like that so on the cloud right now john doesn't manage the wordpress like i'm doing a lot of that from the back end but it's arguable that there would be an interface he could come he could see traffic he could log into the dashboard he can get some basic ideas of what plugins are working or not working without ever having to get into the code like maybe he would on reclaimed cloud now so that's the other idea is you can have app specific dashboards based on the application you build so say you build an application for a client and then you want that client to have access to it right you could maybe build that on top of the cloud should that be where to do it so there's a lot of exciting pieces i keep pointing to alex here because we had a conversation yesterday about the work that he's part of a darkness and one of the questions that came up is a lot of people now who are developing for the web are developing across many languages it's not just phb anymore and we talked about that as well and we believe that reclaimed cloud is one potential solution for folks who are finding themselves with faculty who need to run applications we still mainly live in wordpress which is why that's our examples i mean that's that's what's fed us at the same time it's a brand new world of applications and i think reclaimed cloud fits that bill kind of nicely and yeah at the end of the day you know to be able to say yeah you know can't we can't do that in c-panel but we can now do it over here and we you know you're welcome to explore and we can help you get started there and that's a really cool position to be in i think um i know we we're coming up on our time do you all have any questions for us i know it's we've covered a lot of ground um any questions sometimes and sometimes there's things we just install out of the marketplace you know our own instance of bullion for example or yeah that's another point there is it's a good sandbox right that groups who do want to play with stuff to see what can maybe go enterprise on another server i like that idea of the ability to explore plus all the docker images that you can potentially utilize great one more questions i want to thank john again for spending thank you john