ResponsiBLUE
ResponsiBLUE is a multi-platform (web, iOS, and Android) app that supports the university’s policies related to COVID-19 safety based on the CDC guidelines. The app informs people of their latest compliance statuses for daily health screening check, quarantine & isolation, testing, and vaccinations.
Google Cloud Platform provides a complete serverless solution for ResponsiBLUE: hosting, storage, analytics, database, and authentication. Its scalability meets the needs of about 35,000 active daily users of the app while staying within the project’s monthly budget goals.
Due to its industry adoption and platform maturity, training and documentation are readily available to support developers’ work. With a relatively low learning-curve, the functional app team members, including designers and managers, have been able to utilize Google Cloud Platform products via the Firebase console for app content updates, metrics analysis, and testing.
Cloud Firestore, a scalable NoSQL database, is capable of delivering critical and time-sensitive information in realtime for the entire U-M population. Combined with Google Cloud Storage, it allows cross-organizational collaboration and the data to be shared with the U-M Data Warehouse to generate public dashboards to leadership reports.
The existing relationship between U-M and Google added a level of assurance in the Google Cloud Platform for ResponsiBLUE. And the ease of Information Assurance auditing further added to the confidence in the platform having met compliance requirements.
“The results have been a successful partnership between positive user experience design and the appropriate use of technology. It’s proven that we chose the appropriate platform to use for ResponsiBLUE.”
— ResponsiBLUE app team
ORION Network Telescope
"The ORION Network Telescope consists of networking instrumentation that receives and records unsolicited Internet traffic destined to an unused, but routed, Internet address space. This traffic, usually referred to as Internet Background Radiation or Darknet traffic, mostly consists of malicious activity originating from malware that try to propagate to infect more Internet-accessible machines or nefarious users that sequentially scan the whole Internet to identify and exploit vulnerabilities. Monitoring and analyzing Darknet traffic is thus critical for understanding macroscopic Internet threats and defending critical infrastructure.
"The ORION Network Telescope is operated by researchers at Merit Network and at the University of Michigan and is partially funded by the National Science Foundation. One of its critical infrastructure components is the extraction of Darknet events on a near-real-time basis that are then exported to Google’s BigQuery for further analysis, visualizations and ease of data sharing. Our pipeline makes frequent use of other useful Google-cloud products, such as 1) storage buckets for exporting large amounts of analyzed Darknet data and 2) computing instances for data processing and exploration."
— Michael Kallitsis
HITS DevOps
"The HITS DevOps team has migrated vendor applications (such as GitLab and Jira) as well as custom applications for Research and Education. The move to MCloud has allowed us to gain locality to solve complex problems efficiently. Using a combination of Ansible and Terraform, we’ve been able to spin up full environments (including Networking, Load Balancing, Compute, Container Orchestration, Identity and Access Management, and a Google-managed Database) in under 30 minutes. We’ve been able to leverage Google Kubernetes Engine’s self-healing and auto-scaling capabilities and greatly improve reliability and recovery targets. With the help of ITS, we’ve been approved to host ePHI. The move has also been cost-effective — moving our Atlassian apps from vendor-hosting to GKE hosting resulted in a ~65% cost reduction — and upgrades are actually easier now compared to when the vendor was doing them for us."
— Shanelle Boluyt