Starting in 2017, the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) built and operated a high-performance private cloud platform named "Stratus". As we embark on the design and build-out of a successor platform, this presentation covers some of the motivations and use cases which drove the development of the project, with a comprehensive analysis of what worked well and what fell short. We also discuss researcher experiences with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) capabilities, how these needs have changed over time, and how our next OpenStack cluster aims to address these challenges. By sharing our experiences at MSI, we aim to foster discussions on enhancing research computing ecosystems and better supporting researchers in this era of data-driven research.
