Best Practices for Managing Cloud Computing Infrastructure for Research

Abstract:

Cloud computing has the potential to be a powerful tool for open, reproducible, and scalable science. However, one of the barriers to cloud computing for scientists is the complexity of setting up infrastructure. Terraform addresses these problems by managing infrastructure as code and allowing the building process to be scripted. Using it allows us to make fewer configuration mistakes, easily disable costly components, and have a living record of our infrastructure that we can give to collaborators to foster open science.

In this session, we will walk through how to set up cloud infrastructure on AWS with the Terraform package. Terraform can deploy a massive variety of resources, but we will focus on a specific use-case: cloud infrastructure that has been used for week-long scientific Hackweeks for up to 100 participants at the University of Washington eScience Institute. The infrastructure can also be used to support customized JupyterHubs for general educational and research needs.