Category: Government

Transportation and traffic management are hot topics when city planners and administrations think about ways to make a city smarter and more livable. Recent statistics tell us that drivers in the U.S. spend an average of 42 hours per year in traffic in cities and lose $1,400 on gas, while idling. In Europe, cities like London and Paris show an average of 74 and 69 hours spent idling per year respectively. Researchers in England found adding an additional 20 minutes of commuting per day has the same negative effect on job satisfaction as receiving a 19% pay cut. These statistics and an increasing desire to be more environment friendly are reasons why city leaders are looking to tackle this problem.

Recife, the capital of Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco, is distinguished by its many rivers, bridges, islets, and peninsulas. The municipality of Recife, with an estimated population of 1.62 million, is at the center of a metropolitan region formed by 13 municipalities and around 94 neighborhoods. The cost to maintain such a large metropolis is great, requiring a complex public-cleaning operation with thousands of vehicles and employees, which was consuming nearly 10% of the city’s budget. Before implementing a new technology solution, supervising contractors and controlling the quality of street-cleaning services throughout the city was challenging.

From viewing election results to monitoring stock transactions, government, education, and nonprofits are adopting serverless for increased agility and lower costs. Election night presents a challenge for city and county administrators across America. Voters, party workers, journalists, and constituents converge to a precinct’s website to view election results.

Our second annual AWS Summit in Bahrain took place on Sunday September 30th in Manama, Bahrain. More than 2,000 attendees including the Crown Prince and dignitaries within the Bahraini government joined us to get inspired and gain the technical knowledge needed to get more from the cloud. The event included 15 sessions across three tracks – management, technical, and spotlight. The Summit also featured those in the Middle East who have made impressive use of the cloud to foster a spirit of innovation in the region.

The Bahrain government has set a goal to shift the IT infrastructures of all its ministries and offices to Amazon Web Services (AWS). As Bahrain embraces the cloud, AWS is committed to fostering a spirit of innovation in the Middle East. Ahead of the upcoming AWS Summit in Bahrain where we will offer the inspiration and technical knowledge you need to get more from the cloud, we are highlighting how Almoayyed Computers helped the Bahrain Ministry of Information Affairs (MIA) move a mission-critical, customer-facing website onto AWS in less than two weeks with no downtime.

Adoption of cloud computing is critical to maintaining our military’s technological advantage. Our nation’s warfighters deserve the most innovative and secure solutions. The AWS Snowball Edge is designed for rugged deployments in unfriendly physical environments. For the military, that may mean using the cloud in the middle of the desert, on board ships, and on the front line of the battlefield.

Choice and self-determination are cornerstones of our nation’s democratic process. Come election night, we might not all root for the same candidates, but there’s one point we can all rally around – the need for modernization and the role of the cloud in powering U.S. elections.

Last week, we hosted our fifth annual AWS Public Sector Summit in Canberra, Australia. More than 1,100 government, education, and nonprofit attendees from across the region attended the Summit, which featured 35 breakout sessions within seven tracks.
In this blog post, we recap the major themes coming from the event.

The U.S. Air Force migrated the Air Force Portal, which posts officer promotional lists and other information, to the cloud. With a pay-as-you-go model, the Air Force only has to pay if the portal is being used, instead of a flat fee upfront. This model leads to savings when traffic is down. Migrating applications to a commercial cloud eliminates the need for the government to manage and sustain enough servers in times of maximum traffic such as staff sergeant promotion release days.

The U.S. federal government has been migrating to the cloud for a long time. See the full timeline here. Their cloud journey began with email services and websites, and now virtually any type of workload is running in the AWS Cloud. From websites to mission-critical apps, the cloud is helping government agencies accomplish things they never thought possible.