Category: Education

I’ve always valued education, because it shapes our world and defines our future. At AWS, we work with K12 schools, higher education institutions, education technology, and learning companies to support both teaching and learning. The institutions and their dedicated instructors collaborate daily and deliver education to the current and future workforce. These students will help AWS, our customers and partners, and industries and governments across the globe continue to innovate. Alongside the education institutions, we are committed to providing access to cloud computing and technical skills to everyone, no matter their knowledge level. Learn how AWS is helping individuals on their cloud career journey for reskilling and upskilling, and how other companies can follow. 

When I travel around the world, I try to spend time with women leaders in different organizations, industries, and walks of life. In the time we have together, I try to learn about their hopes and dreams. In those conversations, I hear both a desire to think big about the future and a struggle to balance the commitments and responsibilities that fall almost exclusively to women. The numbers are clear: the percentage of the women participating in the global labor force is declining. I recently wrote about steps we can take to recover from the last year. Today, I want to share three stories that make me hopeful that we can collectively achieve gender parity. 

To allow more visibility into and management of AWS resources and expenses and minimize the cloud skills training required to operate these resources, AWS Partner RONIN created the RONIN research computing platform. RONIN gives researchers the ability to create exactly the computers or storage that they need in minutes. With access to the flexibility and scalability of the cloud, researchers are able to store and process larger datasets, collaborate globally, and adapt to changing technologies and research methods instantly.

AWS Partner ITZ Data, with support from UNICEF and the Canadian Embassy in Guatemala, helped Ministerio de Educación de Guatemala launch Mineduc Digital—the country’s first online platform where students can access digital self-study guides from any device connected to the internet. The Ministry implemented the solution in less than two months, paving the way for the digital transformation of their education system. The solution was built on AWS.

Applications running on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack are ubiquitous—WordPress alone represents 38% of all content management systems. Because of the popularity of these applications, public sector organisations such as educational institutions should protect their business continuity by implementing disaster recovery (DR) solutions: policies, tools, and procedures to help the recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure and systems following a disaster. AWS Professional Services created a business continuity solution for on-premises LAMP applications that could eliminate the need for physical backup infrastructure and improve recovery time. The solution was recently piloted by Cardiff University.

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.

Cloud Innovation Centers (CICs) powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) aim to empower public sector organizations to quickly create and test new ideas using Amazon’s innovation methodology. In the second half of 2020, all those who participate in the CIC program, from students and researchers to the technology teams from AWS, worked on wide-ranging societal problems. Their focus was on improving education with virtual computer labs, working on climate change initiatives, improving economic and healthcare research, and supporting at-risk high school students. What were they up to at the end of 2020?

The US CDC convened the National Forum on COVID-19 Vaccine to share and discuss best practices to help advance the goals of the National Strategy for the COVID-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness. The forum brought representatives together from across the US government involved in the response to COVID-19. AWS participated in the forum as a panelist for “Day 2 Town Hall: Using Technology to Manage COVID-19 Vaccination.” AWS has worked closely with many states and jurisdictions looking to quickly design, launch, and mobilize their vaccination administration plans using cloud technology. Learn some of the best practices shared at the forum on how the cloud can help with vaccine administration.

Diversity matters. Governments, countries, cities, agencies, and more recognize the value that diversity brings. According to McKinsey, companies with ethnic or cultural diversity are 33% more likely to outperform on profitability. With this in mind, I am thrilled to announce the global launch of the Think Big for Small Business Program. With the global launch of this program, I wanted to share the three things I like most about it.

The AWS Cloud gives genomics researchers access to a wide variety of instance types and chip architectures and this elasticity allows us to rethink genomics workflows when running workloads in the cloud. Given the increased performance of the Graviton2 instances, we wanted to explore if they can be used for cost-effective and performant genomics workloads. Read on to learn about our generalized approach for determining the most effective instance type for running genomics workloads in the cloud.