Category: Public Sector

Scientists at NC State University’s North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies (NCICS) work with large datasets and complex computational analysis. Traditionally, they did their work using on-premises computational resources. As different projects were stretching the limits of those systems, NCICS decided to explore cloud computing. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, we invited Jessica Mathews, Jared Rennie, and Tom Maycock to share what they learned from using AWS for climate research. As they considered exploring the cloud to support their work, the idea of leaving the comfort of the local environment was a bit scary. And they had questions: How much will it cost? What does it take to deploy processing to the cloud? Will it be faster? Will the results match what they were getting with their own systems? Here is their story and what they learned.

Countless popular websites maintained by public institutions – including whitehouse.gov and PMIndia.gov – are built on the WordPress platform. It’s essential that these sites are highly scalable. Amazon Lightsail helps ensure that they can handle high-traffic situations. These sites often require on-demand scaling during high-traffic spikes, for example, when media coverage mentions government websites or an educational institution is registering during admissions season. Given these requirements, if the website isn’t set up properly, the features that make WordPress popular for public websites can sometimes become a challenge to manage.

Today, at the AWS São Paulo Summit, we announced that AWS EdStart, the AWS educational technology (EdTech) startup accelerator that helps startup EdTech companies build teaching and learning solutions on the AWS Cloud, is now available to customers in Brazil. Brazil is the first country in Latin America and second in the Western Hemisphere to offer the AWS EdTech-focused program to customers.

Highline College hosted the 12th annual Pacific Rim Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (PRCCDC) this spring. The 2019 event was the first regional qualifier for the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) run on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

This week, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team is at the 2019 International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ISTE supports educators as they rethink the status quo and use technology to drive good practice. At the event, ACT, Frontline Education, and Kahoot! are rolling out Alexa Skills that make it possible for customers to engage with their products through Alexa.

The Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) is a US-based nonprofit organization funded by NASA, NOAA, and the USGS. ESIP is playing a critical role in facilitating collaborative efforts to improve the collection, stewardship, and use of Earth science data and information. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, we invited Dr. Annie Burgess, ESIP Lab Director, to share the story of how ESIP is advancing knowledge of Earth-system science.

The University of Nicosia (UNIC) is the largest university in Cyprus, and it is located in Nicosia, the capital. UNIC is a global university with more than 12,000 students from over 70 countries. Beyond Nicosia, UNIC has a presence in 18 additional cities across the globe. It’s the largest university in southern Europe that teaches primarily in English. To better serve its students, UNIC turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for reliability, cost savings, and innovation.

The terrible headlines are all too familiar. A major earthquake strikes, with a devastating impact on lives, economies, and the environment. The initial event often triggers additional disasters, such as fires or tsunamis that unleash substantial damage. The 2004 Indian Ocean undersea earthquake spawned a tsunami that took more than 225,000 lives. More than 100,000 people were lost as a result of a 7.0 temblor in Haiti in 2010. In some cases, the impact of a major seismic event will continue for decades or longer, as we’ve seen in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011.

Every year, students across the U.S. and around the globe begin preparing for college entrance exams. These tests are a key component of any student’s application to college. The ACT, a nonprofit organization that administers the ACT test, wanted to make the process of researching, studying for, and taking the ACT less stressful for students and parents. Today, they are announcing a new Alexa skill that helps guide high school students through the process of preparing for and taking the ACT.

At the 2019 AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington D.C, we unveiled a number of activities for developers. Developers were able to get hands-on and build solutions, learn from developers in the community, meet and join user groups in the mid-Atlantic area, and even see projects currently being built using AWS products and solutions.Take a look back at the activities that kept developers busy at the Summit.