Purpose

The UKRI Cloud Working Group (Cloud-WG) will bring together representatives of the UK Academic and Research communities who are interested in the use or delivery of cloud related services in order to promote their development and uptake for the needs of the UK research community. It will inform discussions in the UKRI National e-Infrastructure group, stimulate the UK Cloud Community through the Cloud Special Interest Group and liaise with the UKRI e-Infrastructure Expert Group.

Objectives

The Cloud-WG will provide a forum:

• to collect the technical needs of researchers around their use of cloud computing resources
• co-ordinate efforts and foster collaboration across research communities with the goal of seeking to develop common solutions and avoid domain-specific solutions and duplicated effort.
• bring together service providers from the Academic and Research community to establish and exchange best practice on the application of cloud computing and make recommendations on service delivery
• establish specific task forces to explore the opportunities for closer cooperation and integration of RCUK projects and related institutions
• provide representation of the UK Academic and Research community with public cloud providers (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCE), open source cloud technologies (e.g. OpenStack, Docker) and other similar bodies.

Management

A chair will be appointed by UKRI.

Membership

The core of the Cloud-WG will be appointed by UKRI while the remaining members of the WG will be invited by this core to establish a full WG of approximately 12 members with the chair having a casting vote.  The membership will be made up of persons from the UK research community and should aim to be representative of UKRI’s remit.

Meetings

The chair will be responsible for calling regular meetings of the WG. The chair will report at regular intervals (as required) to the UKRI NeI (National e-Infrastructure) group. It is expected the group will meet monthly by telecon and quarterly face-to-face.

Communication

The Cloud-WG as a whole will use a closed mailing list CLOUD-WG@JISCMAIL.AC.UK for communication.  Additional mailing lists may be set up for individual task forces as required.   The group will make meetings minutes publicly available.

Task Forces

Task Forces may be established by the Cloud-WG drawing on a chair and members from the Cloud-WG and Cloud-SIG, as required. Task Forces will have a defined written remit, work plan with timeline and deliverables, and a membership that has committed to contributing to the Task Force in order for it to achieve its objectives in the stated timeline. The output from these Task Forces will be communicated openly over the Cloud-SIG mailing list and at Cloud-SIG meetings.