AWS Public Sector Blog
Category: Amazon EC2
Library and Archives Canada helps better preserve Canadian history by embracing the cloud
Canada’s history is rich, but not without its scars. The need for documentation and analysis has never been greater. Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is the custodian of Canada’s distant past and recent history—and Amazon Web Services (AWS) is helping expand its reach.
How UCL migrated its Moodle virtual learning environment to the cloud in 10 weeks
University College London’s (UCL) virtual learning environment, built on the Moodle learning management system, is at the heart of its digital education infrastructure and used by students all over the world. Before migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS), its system could handle 2,500 concurrent users. But when the pandemic drove schools and universities to predominantly online teaching, the UCL team wanted to support six times this amount in just 10 weeks. Here’s how they did it with AWS.
Edunation scales up to 32 times activity by boosting infrastructure with AWS
Using AWS, Edunation seamlessly responded to increasing demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. Edunation collaborates with top educational institutions across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and provides all-in-one learning and school management solutions. Today, the EdTech is on a mission to push learning management systems (LMS) beyond virtual classrooms.
NYU Langone Center increases MRI accessibility through cooperative data sharing and research
About 40 million MRI scans are performed in the United States every year. MRIs are a valuable part of diagnostic plans, but as they exist today, they may not always be a part of a patient’s care plan. A research team at the New York University (NYU) Langone Center set out to make MRIs more accessible for more patients by using artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and the power of cooperative open data sharing.
Open data on AWS supports sustainable agricultural practices and crop optimization
With a rapidly growing population, the world is increasingly dependent on the ability to develop and maintain sustainable agriculture and healthy environments. Learn how BASF Digital Farming is leveraging both National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather data hosted on AWS, and commercial weather data, to develop digital solutions to help farmers effectively monitor and manage their fields, and help drive farm sustainability.
Encryption-in-transit for public sector workloads with AWS Nitro Enclaves and AWS Certificate Manager
Government, education, nonprofit, healthcare, and other public sector organizations process and store sensitive data including health records, tax data, PII, student data, criminal justice information, and financial data. These workloads carry stringent security and compliance requirements to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of this data both in transit and at rest. Best practices for protection of data in transit include enforcing appropriately defined encryption requirements, authenticating network communications, and implementing secure key and certificate management systems. In this post, I demonstrate a solution for deploying a highly available and fault tolerant web service with managed certificates and TLS termination performed on customer-managed EC2 Nitro instances using ACM for Nitro Enclaves.
People’s Association in Singapore improves upskilling experiences for communities
People around the world rely on continuing education and upskilling courses to build on their existing knowledge and learn new, industry-specific skills sets. In Singapore, Community Centres (CCs) and Resident Committees (RCs) offer a variety of upskilling courses for residents. CCs and RCs are part of the network of the People’s Association (PA), a Singaporean statutory board with a mission to build and bridge communities. To improve CCs’ and RCs’ time-intensive, manual process of course administration, PA and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), launched a cloud-based web portal in November 2019.
Crowdsourcing a cure for COVID-19: How the cloud and Folding@home are accelerating research and drug discovery
Today more than 200,000 volunteers around the world are helping accelerate research toward COVID-19 therapies—by walking away from their computers. That’s because of a concept called distributed computing, which allows anyone with a home computer, laptop, or virtual machine to contribute computing power to a common cause. This month, nonprofit Folding@home has started sharing one of the world’s largest public protein simulation databases as an AWS Open Data Set so that researchers around the world can easily access this data to speed up the search for therapies for COVID-19.
The Water Institute of the Gulf runs compute-heavy storm surge and wave simulations on AWS
The Water Institute of the Gulf runs its storm surge and wave analysis models on Amazon Web Services (AWS)—a task that sometimes requires large bursts of compute power. These models are critical in forecasting hurricane storm surge event (like Hurricane Laura in August 2020), evaluating flood risk for the Louisiana and other coastal states, helping governments prepare for future conditions, and managing the coast proactively.
TUM researcher finds new approach to safety-critical systems using parallelized algorithms on AWS
Mahmoud Khaled, a PhD student at TUM and a research assistant at LMU, researches how to improve safety-critical systems that require large amounts of compute power. Using AWS, Khaled’s research project, pFaces, accelerates parallelized algorithms and controls computational complexity to speed the time to science. His project findings introduce a new way to design and deploy verified control software for safety-critical systems, such as autonomous vehicles.