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DevCon 2025: A DevOps and Cyberinfrastructure Success Story

· 3 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect

The recent DevCon 2025 event showcased not just cutting-edge development practices, but also demonstrated how modern DevOps principles and cloud infrastructure can seamlessly support large-scale technical workshops. Our team had the privilege of providing IT infrastructure and support for over 200 attendees, creating a robust learning environment through an exemplary public-private partnership.

Image of CIROH's Research Cyberinfrastructure and DevOps team. On the left, two graphs are shown depicting usage for the Google Cloud-2i2c and Jetstream2 environments.

CIROH's Research Cyberinfrastructure and DevOps team.
Left to right, top to bottom:
Manjila Singh, Arpita Patel, Nia Minor, Trupesh Patel, James Halgren; Benjamin Lee.

The Power of Collaboration

DevCon 2025 represented an outstanding example of what's possible when public institutions and private enterprises work together:

  • Corporate Sponsors: AWS and Google Cloud provided funding and infrastructure for the event.
  • Infrastructure Partners: NSF JetStream and 2i2c JupyterHub delivered the computational backbone.
  • Technical Implementation: The CIROH Research Cyberinfrastructure and DevOps Team managed IT access and software packaging.

Our Technical Approach

Supporting 200+ workshop attendees required careful planning and execution. Our DevOps team implemented:

Infrastructure as Code

  • Automated deployment of workshop environments
  • Scalable JupyterHub instances configured for concurrent users
  • Pre-packaged software environments ensuring consistency across all workstations

Cloud-Native Solutions

  • Leveraged AWS S3 bucket and Google Cloud BigQuery
  • Implemented auto-scaling to handle peak workshop loads
  • Ensured high availability across multiple availability zones

Seamless User Experience

  • Single sign-on authentication for 100+ participants using CIROH 2i2c JupyterHub
  • Pre-configured JetStream2 environments with all necessary tools
  • Real-time support channels for immediate issue resolution

Key Achievements

  • Zero Downtime: Maintained 100% uptime throughout the entire event
  • Rapid Onboarding: All 200 attendees were able to access their environments within minutes
  • Consistent Experience: Every participant had identical, fully-functional development environments
  • Real-time Support: Our team resolved technical issues with average response time under 5 minutes

Lessons Learned

This event perfectly demonstrated how DevOps principles—bridging development and operations—combined with cloud computing can transform organizational capabilities. Key takeaways include:

  1. Automation is Essential: Pre-event automation allowed us to focus on attendee support rather than infrastructure management.
  2. Public-Private Partnerships Work: Combining NSF's research infrastructure with commercial cloud providers created a best-of-both-worlds solution.
  3. Preparation Prevents Problems: Our extensive pre-event testing and redundancy planning paid dividends during the live event.

Looking Forward

The success of DevCon 2025's IT infrastructure demonstrates that large-scale technical events no longer need to be limited by traditional IT constraints. By embracing DevOps practices and leveraging cloud partnerships, we can create learning environments that scale effortlessly while maintaining reliability and performance.

We're proud to have supported the DevCon 2025 community and look forward to applying these lessons to future events. The combination of public research infrastructure, private cloud resources, and dedicated DevOps expertise created an environment where 200+ developers could focus on learning and innovation without worrying about technical barriers.

δHBV2.0: How NGIAB and Wukong HPC Streamlined Advanced Hydrologic Modeling

· 2 min read
Yalan Song
Research Assistant Professor
Leo Lonzarich
Graduate Researcher
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect
James Halgren
Assistant Director of Science

Image of graphical outputs from the δHBV2.0 model

Predicting water flow with precision across the vast U.S. landscape is a complex challenge. That's why Song et al. 2024 developed δHBV2.0, a cutting-edge hydrologic model. It’s built with high-resolution modeling of physics to deliver seamless, highly accurate streamflow simulations, even down to individual sub-basins. It's already proven to be a major improvement, performing better than older tools at about 4,000 measurement sites. We also provide a comprehensive 40-year water dataset for ~180,000 river reaches to support this.

Penn State research group pushed δHBV2.0 further, training it with even more detailed river data and integrating other trusted models, aiming to make it a key part of the NextGen national water modeling system (as a potential NWM3.0 successor). But here’s a common hurdle: making powerful scientific tools like this easy and reliable for everyone to use within a larger framework can be tough. Setup issues, runtime errors, and inconsistent results can frustrate users.

NGIAB stepped in to solve exactly this problem. Team has taken the complexity out of using the operations-ready models within NextGen by creating one unified, reliable package. Thanks to NGIAB, users don't have to worry about tricky setups or whether the model will run correctly. NGIAB ensures that our models are compatible everywhere and, most importantly, that they run exactly as designed, consistently and faithfully, every single time, no babysitting required. This means users get the full power of our advanced modeling, without the headaches.

Pennsylvania State University Researchers Leverage CIROH Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Hydrological Modeling

· 3 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect
Yalan Song
Research Assistant Professor
Tadd Bindas
Graduate Researcher

Pennsylvania State University (PSU) researchers have been leveraging CIROH Cyberinfrastructure to tackle complex hydrological modeling challenges. This post highlights their innovative approach using the Wukong computing platform in conjunction with Amazon S3 bucket storage to efficiently process and analyze large-scale environmental datasets. 🚀

CIROH Cloud User Success Story

· 3 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect

This month, we are excited to showcase two case studies that utilized our cyberinfrastructure tools and services. These case studies demonstrate how CIROH's cyberinfrastructure is being utilized to support hydrological research and operational advancements.

1. ngen-datastream and NGIAB

ngen-datastream image

NextGen Monthly News Update - January 2024

· 2 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise Architect

Welcome to the January edition of the CIROH DocuHub blog, where we share the latest updates and news about the Community NextGen project monthly. NextGen is a cutting-edge hydrologic modeling framework that aims to advance the science and practice of hydrology and water resources management. In this month's blog, we will highlight some of the recent achievements and developments of the Community NextGen team.