Prior to 2015, the majority of University of Arizona IT infrastructure was highly virtualized in a pair of datacenters managed by UITS - University Information Technology Services. The main datacenter was on campus in the Computer Center (building 77). The backup datacenter was a few miles away in downtown Tucson. We mostly used the VMWare VSphere virtualization platform at the time.
Our CTO at the time presented a few of us in UITS with the opportunity to help lead the migration of much of our enterprise applications from on-prem virtualized servers to Amazon's public cloud AWS, and I was fortunate to be chosen to join that project.
At the time, very few people in UITS knew much about AWS at all, so we were mostly starting from scratch. We did have AWS come in and do some high level training, but it was very much a marketing style training. We mostly learned that AWS has a ton of services, and that they might be useful for us!
Shortly after the project started, I was moved into the newly created Enterprise Cloud Services team. To start the team was really just my boss Josh Shaloo, and myself. One of the biggest changes I brought to the initiative was a standardized way for deploying new AWS accounts. 2015-2018 pre-dated many of AWS's current methods for making this less painful, such as Organizations and Control Tower. I developed a set of CloudFormation templates that established baseline user roles, federated login through SAML SSO, VPC network configurations, and basic security controls for all newly created AWS accounts. Parts of these templates are still in use by the current Cloud Team as I write this in 2024.
