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Meeting our Users�with Cloud Checkups

Matthew Rich

Cloud Forum 2024

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The Magic of Cloud Forum

  • Kari Robertson: describes meeting with each team that has a cloud account monthly
  • Audience: 🤯

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The idea: a “checkup”

  • Audit account access
  • Find out what’s running in the account
  • Present available support resources (e.g. Kion, Amazon SA)
  • Answer questions
  • Roughly 1-2x/year

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The challenge

  • Over 100 account owners
  • How to schedule
  • How to track
  • How to not go insane

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I know: I’ll overthink it

  • Exchange Bookings With Me to let people schedule
  • Outlook template email
  • Weekly reminder to send out 10 invitations
  • M365 Power App to record notes
  • Track invitations and store notes in Accounts spreadsheet

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Results so far

  • ~60 checkups since May ’23
  • ~30% hit rate on emails (pretty good!)
  • Have emailed all account owners at least 3x
  • Now directly sending meeting invitations to “Belindas”

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What does a checkup look like?

  • Matthew, Dan, local IT partner if available, account owner, and tech contact
  • Brief introduction
  • Have owner share screen and:
    • Log into group management portal to audit account access
    • Log into Kion and click on reports, savings opportunities
  • Ask what they are doing in their account today
  • Ask what they plan to do differently in the future, if anything
  • Answer questions

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Interesting findings

  • “We have a cloud account?”
  • The Elk Rapids summer camp archive
  • Use of random services, e.g. Polly and Textract
  • Use of Marketplace services, e.g. Cogito as MTurk replacement
  • Distributed IT unit refactored all apps to run in Lambda, now vast majority of their spend is CloudWatch

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What do you think?

m-rich@northwestern.edu