Knowledge sharing on the uses of cloud platforms in research and education was the purpose of a two-day workshop organised by the EU-funded Eastern Partnership Connect (EaPConnect) project and the Italian national research and education network (NREN) GARR in Rome on 21-22 November.

The workshop was attended by participants from the NRENs of Eastern Partnership countries Armenia (ASNET AM), Azerbaijan (AzScienceNet), Belarus (BASNET), Georgia (GRENA) and the Republic of Moldova (RENAM).

The programme featured presentations of case studies by GARR cloud administrators and experts and round-tables to share questions, common challenges and best practices. The ultimate objective was to share the lessons learned in this field and inspire and guide the NRENs who do not offer cloud services to their communities or who would like to expand their services. 

Tural Mustafayev, an administrator at AzScienceNet said: “The main benefit of participating in the workshop was experience exchange. We have just started on the deployment of our OpenStack cloud environment and the workshop demonstrated an easy, fast and automated installation process of OpenStack. We believe that this workshop will speed up our deployment process and will make it much easier.”

From GRENA, Tsotne Gozalishvili reported that, “learning regarding the monitoring of Cloud infrastructure and services was interesting and informative,”  while his colleague Temur Maisuradze added: “The OpenStack discussion was particularly interesting since it will be very helpful for our future work.”

The workshop was organised as part of the EAPConnect project’s activities to build skills and capacity within its partner countries, with the greater objective to integrate them in the pan-European GÉANT network, and facilitate collaboration with local scientists, students and academics, also through the deployment of shared services. 

The EaPConnect project aims to create a regional research and education network in the EU’s Eastern Partner countries namely Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. The overall objective is to decrease the digital divide, improve intra-regional connectivity and facilitate the participation of local scientists, students and academics in global research and education collaborations.

Press release