Meeting summary - Nov. 9th, 2017 - Kick-off call

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for the summary above. An additional action item that I'd like addressed is a discussion on the pros/cons of hosting the application in the cloud vs. locally. Could both DevIT and Industrial please post your views here on the issue to help inform me on what is the appropriate approach.

Thanks,

Morgan

In addition to the above, please ensure that Industrial's preparation for the UX Design approach includes recommendations on implementing a user survey to help inform on what improvements will be needed in the new platform. Also, to give Megan some more accurate numbers to work with, we currently have 232 institutions that subscribe to ISLG and 299 active user accounts. However, 69% of the institutions have enterprise accounts with automated IP-authenticated accounts (i.e., there could be a hundred users using one account). 

Looking at our Google Analytics, over the past 6 months, we'd averaged 121 daily users, 499 weekly users and 1,520 monthly users. 

Morgan

Hi everyone,

Further to my comment above after our meeting earlier this month, would it be possible to get comments from both DevIT and Industrial on the pros/cons concerning cloud vs. locally. I would like to flesh out the issues here, and then we can decide on the appropriate approach during our meeting on Thursday.

Thanks,

Morgan

Hello All,

As per our review and comparison for cloud vs on premise application, we found the following:

Pros:
- User doesn't require to care about IT infrastructure, it is managed by cloud company. (But in our case it is already manged very well by Carbon60.)
- User will pay only for the instances, bandwidth, storage, SQL database etc. which are actually used by their application instead of paying entire server's cost.
- Cloud services are scalable, user can request for more bandwidth, storage etc and fulfilled by cloud company with additional cost.   

Cons:
- We would not have control over the entire server, instead we can only have a control panel from where we can deploy application and manage instances. 
- It would occupy our lot of time to configure new ISLG on cloud which we can easily configure on our existing infrastructure.

After reviewing cloud services, we would suggest to go with on premises application  instead of cloud service as we already have our common infrastructure ready on Carbon60 on which have configured our applications (P3, ISLG etc.) on our dedicated servers. So, it would be nice if we maintain same infrastructure for new ISLG without any extra cost.

Hi Anil,

Thanks for the details and recommendation above. Juan and Derek , do you agree with this recommendation?

Thanks,

Morgan

Morgan,

Cloud services like AWS/Azure are great and there are a lot of pros to them. As Anil mentioned though, there's some additional overhead involved in setting them up that we offload to Carbon60 right now.

Their primary pro is the ease of scaling out when you need the additional resources that traditional hosting companies usually cannot provide in a timely or cost-effective way.

Both AWS/Azure provide support tiers but, based on my limited experience with their support, they likely will not match a managed hosting relationship until you either reach a certain scale, or pay them a lot through their higher level support tiers.

We recommend sticking with Carbon60 as it:

When scale does become a concern, we can either talk to Carbon60 about what options they have available to us, or consider these other options and migrate then.

Derek , thank you for the details and recommendation above. Glad to see we're all in agreement that we'll build the new ISLG application on a local server (i.e., Carbon60). I guess the next question is whether the existing infrastructure with Carbon60 is sufficient to host the current ISLG application, the P3 prototype and the new ISLG application. In the long-run when we transition from prototype to full product with P3, we'll transition this to expanded infrastructure with Carbon60. However, do Anil , Derek or Juan see any problems of having all three applications on the same infrastructure for the time being?

Also, I had a call with Industrial this morning concerning the ISLG public site design, and we tentatively set a date for next Tuesday for a call concerning the ISLG rebuild. I'll let Stephen follow up with the details, but hopefully this will work for everyone.

Thanks,

Morgan