Category: Education

The concept of a COVID-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium emerged from a roundtable discussion at the White House in March and included input from industry, government, and academic leaders. Following the announcement of the consortium, AWS has been collaborating with teams on a growing number of projects to provide cloud computing resources from AWS. I want to share three early learnings and insights into some of the innovative projects on which we are collaborating with the world’s leading researchers.

With the increase in remote work and education, government, education, and nonprofit organizations, are adopting virtual desktop solutions like Amazon WorkSpaces. Large scale deployments of virtual desktop solutions can decrease administrative burden and save time. In this post, you can learn how to deploy Amazon WorkSpaces with less engineering effort by leveraging a PowerShell script.

As we continue to work with public sector bodies around the world, AWS understands how valuable open source software and development communities are at this time. To accelerate the combined global response to COVID-19, we gathered examples of third-party open code, tools, and standards that reformers in the public sector can immediately use. We’ve included these in a new resource now available in Open Government Solutions.

The annual AWS Public Sector Summit is now an online experience. At the virtual event, developers can build their own agenda, choosing between two session tracks as well as multiple virtual booths, zones, and activities. If you’re a developer who has registered or are thinking about registering, here’s what you need to know.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is now generally available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Now government organizations and commercial organizations in government-regulated industries who adopt Kubernetes as their standard for orchestrating containers can use Amazon EKS to deploy a managed Kubernetes cluster on AWS. According to the 2019 Cloud Native Computing Foundation survey of their community, Amazon EKS is the leading method for deploying Kubernetes.

The COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition is a private-sector led response to COVID-19 that brings together healthcare organizations, technology firms, nonprofits, academia, and startups to preserve the healthcare delivery system and help protect U.S. populations. AWS is a member of the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition, working side by side with leading healthcare providers and researchers such as the Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, and ZocDoc. Together, we’re coordinating our collective expertise, capabilities, and data to provide insights to improve clinical outcomes.

With most everyone off campus, parent and student communications are top of mind for school districts and universities. Amazon Alexa can help extend the classroom to home through integrations with commonly used education technology applications. Now Amazon Alexa can aggregate information across education skills into one response, creating a faster, streamlined, more convenient way to access information.

Across recent customer engagements, our teams have seen an increase in requests for support in four key use cases: remote workforce and productivity, citizen engagement, data management and analytics, and operational resilience and business continuity. Today I want to share a few stories of success where customers have implemented AWS services to address these use cases. They address four of the most urgent IT issues facing public sector customers in the crisis.

Getting started with the cloud can be challenging, but it doesn’t have to be. The first step is understanding the basics. Learn what the cloud is, how it works, and its benefits. Next, learn the different types of cloud computing and the foundational cloud services to help get you started making sense of large amounts of data, innovating quicker, handling sudden changes in demand, and more.

In April 2020, the AWS Public Sector Blog covered stories on AWS launching machine learning enabled search capabilities for COVID-19 dataset, supporting healthcare with technology in response to COVID-19, and building a chatbot for your school in less than an hour. For more blog highlights from this month, you can also check out The Brief, hosted this month by Ray Rogers, the host of the Fix This podcast.