Category: Public Sector

As federal fiscal year 2018 comes to an end and with budgets to spend and IT plans in place for 2019, the questions of “how and where do we start migrating mission-critical applications to the cloud?” still loom on many federal IT executives.

It’s not a secret that AWS is used by many of the hottest silicon valley startups and success stories, like Hulu and Netflix. But what you might not know is that AWS is also used by companies and organizations across a range of industries and segments who are transforming through technology.

With Hurricane Florence heading for the east coast of the United States, home to many of our U.S. federal government customers, Jeff Barr is sharing some important reminders on how AWS takes extensive precautions to help ensure AWS will remain operational and what customers can do to be ready to weather the storm. From availability zones and contingency planning to data transfer and disaster response, learn about disaster preparedness in Jeff’s blog post.

Serverless architecture remains on the rise. From simple Alexa Skills to advanced web services, our customers’ use cases are innovative and diverse. Take Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO)’s genomics research, for example. “AWS has become versatile and interoperable making it possible to set up complex research workflows as serverless web services,” says CSIRO’s Dr. Denis Bauer. Dr. Bauer and her team created a bioinformatics research tool, GT-Scan2, which Jeff Barr featured two years ago as one of the first examples of serverless architecture for compute-intensive tasks.

With the heat of summer came another hot month for the public sector blog. Here is a look at the top five posts from August.

Since going live in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has delivered groundbreaking images to broaden our understanding of the universe. Each image captured by the telescope is archived and made publicly available, free of cost, by NASA through the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). The Hubble images archive is used by a global community of astronomers, researchers, and engineers and has led to the discovery of distant galaxies and nebulae. “The legacy is a treasure trove of data that can be mined in the future,” Arfon Smith, head of data science at STScI, said.

Many people are under the impression that cloud computing, which is marked by pay-as-you-go pricing, is impossible to buy with year-end funds. However, AWS has solutions to help you obligate year-end funds to secure a cloud future. The end of the federal government fiscal year is fast approaching. With budget left to spend before September 30, the clock is ticking for agencies to obligate their remaining FY2018 funds.

Achieving sustainable development and addressing local and national needs requires access and analysis of large datasets and the use of complex tools and algorithms. This creates barriers for many users, particularly for communities in developing countries where resources for data storage and data analysis are limited. The African Regional Data Cube (ARDC), a new data management technology developed on AWS, hopes to address this challenge by building capacity in those communities to access large datasets in support of their local and national needs framed around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the broader development priorities.

Last year, we shared a post about the Nonprofit Open Data Collective and how a consortium of nonprofits and researchers came together to make the data from the IRS’s 990 filings easier to work with. As a follow-up, we spoke with David Borenstein, one of the driving forces behind the Nonprofit Open Data Collective, about his new project: Open990.

AWS EdStart members are pushing the limits in education, creating products and solutions to improve teaching and learning. FilterEd, Kornukopia, and SchooLinks use AWS to revolutionize parent-school communication, assess school’s learning technology needs, provide a complete education management ecosystem, and prepare students for the careers of the future.