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CHEESEHub is a web-accessible, public science gateway that hosts containerized, hands-on demonstrations of cybersecurity concepts. There are now a plethora of services and tools designed to simplify modern gateway deployment and configuration such as commercial and academic composable cloud, the Terraform infrastructure as service tool, Kubernetes and Helm for container orchestration, as well as CILogon for simplified user authentication. Despite leveraging these tools, our day-to-day experience with deploying, upgrading, scaling, and extending CHEESEHub has not been entirely straightforward. We describe here some of the major challenges we have encountered in managing CHEESEHub and developing web-accessible demonstrations for the last five years. We hope this will help both new and seasoned gateway developers to effectively leverage these modern tools while avoiding these same pitfalls, while also providing starting points for discussions about gateway development and deployment best-practices. 

We present a Photo2Building tool to create a plausible 3D model of a building from only a single photograph. Our tool is based on a prior desktop version which, as described in this paper, is converted into a client-server model, with job queuing, web-page support, and support of concurrent usage. The reported cloud-based web-accessible tool can reconstruct a building in 40 seconds on average and costing only 0.60 USD with current pricing. This provides for an extremely scalable and possibly widespread tool for creating building models for use in urban design and planning applications. With the growing impact of rapid urbanization on weather and climate and resource availability, access to such a service is expected to help a wide variety of users such as city planners, urban meteorologists worldwide in the quest to improved prediction of urban weather and designing climate-resilient cities of the future.