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Hello Everyone,
My passion for cloud and cloud computing club at NIST brought us together in the event called CloudConnect, where as a board member of the club we organized everything from scratch and were able to introduce the cloud to 100+ students.
The event took place on the 14th and 15th of November and the workshop was divided into 2 modules based on different concepts.
Inception:-
All of this started way before the event when it was time for the new members of the club to collaborate with the senior members on deciding a new event plan for this year. Last year we had Cloudify Resume where we enabled folks to host their resume and build a solid foundation in the cloud.
So this year the bar had to be set higher than that. We wanted the folks to get accustomed to the cloud concepts and infrastructure but at the same time, we also wanted them to taste the flavors of having hands-on training on the cloud.
So we planned 2 things to do for this year's participants. we will enable them to store data in s3 buckets which is one of the most basic things to do while learning cloud and then we will help them to launch an EC2 instance on AWS and connect through an RDS client.
Now if you are unfamiliar about what's all the gibberish I just mentioned, just check out these resources.
learn about the S3 Buckets
video tutorial
Warm-Up:
Now that we had decided what we had to teach, we got ideas on what we would add to a S3 bucket. Although there were many older versions of the events we could try building a resume or a website for a college campaign. We sought to stick to the cloud concepts this time by serving the participants with ready-made websites so that they could get more time to delve into the realm of the cloud and just get some more hands-on experience.
Before this, we also made sure that all the members were better accustomed to the knowledge of these cloud tools and could configure or troubleshoot in the event of a technical issue or a bug.
Day-1:
The day started pretty well, we had distinguished professors and Alumni start with words of wisdom and share their experience with the Cloud Computing club.
After the words of wisdom, the event started and we set our gears by directing participants to make their AWS account and sign in to their AWS console. We split into teams covering multiple sections of folks at a time and helping them with minor issues.
On the 1st day we had to make them deploy an S3 bucket on AWS and inside it host a webpage. We gave them a presentation about the basic cloud concepts and S3 so that they wouldn't feel alienated.
Everything went relatively smoothly as the participants were already well-understood and guided on the topic although we did face some problems while configuring the policy generator for the buckets, which was soon resolved by the volunteering club members.
After deploying the S3 buckets, the folks were guided to download a webpage created by our club which was a profile picture presenter. After downloading the file, they were asked to deploy it into the S3 bucket.
After it was successfully deployed we configured the permissions and properties like the static webpage hosting, unchecked the block of public access, enabled ACLs, etc.
After all the configuration, students were then guided to launch the website and it was the ultimate moment for us to determine if we had done everything correctly. The results came in and it turned out that about 80% of the people had the websites working successfully, we were astonished by this achievement but also looked upon the remaining 20% as were determined to get them on CLOUD!
So, it turned out that the remaining 20% just had some minor issues like giving the incorrect name for the index file or not making the file accessible to everyone.
All the club members assembled and started helping the folks out.
The bug was quickly resolved and with that right there we had completed our 1st day of the event. It was 2 hours long, and we did have some obstacles but I learned that with proper planning and discipline, execution just becomes a function of time.
Day-2:
After an amazing Day-1 we were ready to proceed further into Day-2, this time we were doing something a bit more than just clicking on buttons and following the screen. This time we were going to launch EC2 instances on their console.
We started Swiftly this time and had them decide on a name for their server after which they were directed to choose any OS preferably Windows.
After that, we directed them to other minor settings and then created a key-pair file. This key-pair value was downloaded as a .pem file.
This was the stage in which we encountered some issues as the values were not adequately stored in some PCs and we had to reconfigure it.
After that, we created the instance and then connected it through the RDS client where we had to use the .pem file to generate the password. This was one of the most valuable points in the process as not only the participants but also we got to learn a ton of technologies in this process.
So after using the RDS client on the desktop, we configured the network and successfully connected it to the local desktop. With this step, we successfully launched a virtual machine and connected to it.
After this, we completed the 2nd day of the workshop concluding with an outstanding amount of success. This journey of ideation, creation and execution taught us many things that we didn't know before. keeping aside the technical skills we also gained an edge in management and communication skills that will surely help us in the future.
We concluded the event by presenting the momentos to the Alumni who presented us with their valuable time and guided us more about the industry-level applications of the cloud and how it is needed to progress in the technical world.
Conclusion:
All in all, we learned many things and also helped many folks to be introduced to a new world of technology. This is just a start, one of the many upcoming amazing journeys I am going to be a part of... But that's the story for another blog or maybe a vlog...
Till then keep learning, keep sharing and most importantly keep living...
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