In fall 2019 and spring 2020, Enterprise Technology & Services (ET&S) guided a UNH student-led cloud computing capstone project. Students were tasked with researching three major cloud computing vendors — Amazon, Google and Microsoft. They collated their findings to provide information to ET&S. Students faced the challenge of determining which projects would be better suited for on-premises environments, and which ones would be candidates for the commercial cloud.
The group started with minimal knowledge about cloud-based options but learned more by deep-diving into the details of how to deploy the technologies and provided proof-of-concept demos to help with real future implementations. Together, they investigated standard technologies or services offered by cloud vendors and established a baseline of available possibilities for each while considering benchmark and cost comparisons. They also investigated vendor service offerings, their usefulness to researchers or projects, and determining ways to eliminate competing vendors based on pricing and features.
The involved students benefitted from the experience of digging into cloud facilitation research and building knowledge they may someday leverage in their careers. Research faculty directly benefitted from the project findings, which provided critical information about ways to leverage cloud services for research — for example, the setup and execution of heavily computational jobs that might require off-premise High-Performance Computing technology. Additionally, the students assisted ET&S in the development of cloud-ready software for researchers' needs, including setting up a data-collection and aggregation website.
