AWS Public Sector Blog
Author: DK Benjamin
DK Benjamin is a HOT Devops Manager and has been deploying disaster response and humanitarian development applications with Amazon Web Services (AWS) since 2018. Over the past year, he and the HOTOSM team have been pushing the migration to Kubernetes to run scalable, cost-efficient tools to work with large-scale high-resolution imagery and produce high-quality datasets with the power of the community and machine learning together.
How HOT uses open source on AWS to power humanitarian AI
When disasters strike, the first thing responders need is an accurate map. But for much of the world, detailed maps don’t exist. Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has been fulfilling that need since 2010. Today, HOT is a global network of over 500,000 contributors across 94 countries. By combining local ground-truth mapping, regional hubs, and open source tools, HOT coordinates massive, crowdsourced efforts to provide immediate data to responders without licensing costs or procurement barriers.