Shortly before Christmas last year Microsoft Switzerland contacted us. They offered us a technical workshop about their cloud service “Azure” according to our wishes. After animated internal discussions, we were able to identify three typical and potentially interesting cloud patterns for such a workshop for ETH researchers as well as for ITS SIS:
(i) Distribution of scientific software services via Docker and orchestration via Kubernetes;
(ii) Interactive parallel computing with Python “user land”: Jupyter Notebooks / Hub, iPython/ipyparallel, Dask, Binder, etc..;
(iii) HPC-style distributed computing with MPI-bases inter-node communication.
Workshop
The three-day workshop took place on 13-14 February and 1 March 2019 and was held by a small delegation of Azure experts from Switzerland and the UK. The workshop was deliberately aimed mainly at the scientific and technical staff of ITS SIS. But it was also interesting for some colleagues of ITS PPF to better understand the cost model of Microsoft Azure.
Next step Pilot tests
The next step will be pilot tests: We had prepared specific applications for each cloud pattern, which we can now test as part of a sponsorship (“Azure Credits”) offered by Microsoft.
After evaluation of these pilots, we may move on to the next round of negotiations with Microsoft. We are curious.