Red Cloud and Aristotle: campus clouds and federations

Campus cloud resources represent significant resources for research computing tasks, with the caveat that transitioning to cloud contexts and scaling analyses is not always as simple as it might seem. We detail Red Cloud, Cornell's campus research cloud, and some of the work undertaken by the Center for Advanced Computing (CAC) to help researchers make use of cloud computing technologies. In 2015, Cornell CAC joined with two other universities to develop the Aristotle Cloud Federation, composed of separate campus cloud resources and data sources, supporting a range of science use cases. We discuss the lessons learned from helping researchers leverage both of these science cloud resources as well as leveraging other research cloud infrastructure and transitioning to public cloud.