AWS Public Sector Blog

Tag: Amazon RDS

city traffic with train overpass

Enabling rapid COVID-19 and air pollution analysis across the globe with OpenAQ and AWS

Unravelling the relationship between COVID-19 and air pollution is vital for protecting public health. For example, preliminary works suggest that those living in environments with polluted air are significantly more likely to be adversely affected by COVID-19. At the same time, air pollution is already known to cause an estimated one out of every eight deaths globally. The decrease in human activities due to COVID-19 lockdowns across the world has people wondering how air pollution levels are being impacted—and what valuable public health and policy lessons we can learn.

Flooding in Venice, Italy. Photo courtesy Jonathan Ford

Communicating a national flood risk assessment using AWS

The First Street Foundation is dedicated to communicating the flood and inundation risks posed by a changing environment, with an emphasis on allowing Americans to discover and understand those risks. By building awareness, our hope is that every individual is empowered to take steps to reduce their risk exposure to flooding, as well as that of their communities—today and in the future. First Street created a nationwide assessment of flood risk for the CONUS and DC, and is now sharing that assessment through Flood Factor™.

Westbound tunnel Elizabeth River Crossings

Next generation transportation tolling, enabled by the cloud

Toll operators are recognizing that facility and data resiliency are the key to navigating the current environment while preparing for any future disaster scenario or challenge. For departments of transportation and toll operators, this means operating traffic networks and tollways safely and efficiently and supporting essential services and workers—no matter the traffic volume.

Education Perfect

Improving learning with advanced algorithms and text-to-speech technology

In 2012, Education Perfect (EP) wanted to use the cloud to access the necessary infrastructure that would allow EP to reach classrooms globally and rapidly scale. EP is an education technology (EdTech) organization that uses advanced algorithms and text-to-speech technology to improve learning through a library of lessons and assessments across multiple subject areas. Our mission is to use technology to provide learning tools and tailored content for educators and students, regardless of location.

Empty school hallway with lockers

Improving school safety: How the cloud is helping K12 students in the wake of violent incidents in schools

Research shows that students who feel safe are more likely to be engaged at school and be more successful in all aspects of life – not just academics. But students are dealing with the reality of increased violence in schools – finding it more difficult to feel safe. Administrator concerns in the wake of school violence have made school safety a top priority in K12. One collaboration is delivering a safer learning environment for students through a scalable, highly secure, and innovative cloud services solution.

Dr. Nick Engerer, CTO of Solcast, standing next to solar panels

Solcast: Solar irradiance forecasting for the solar powered future

Solcast produces real-time, historical and forecast estimates of the available solar radiation resources around the globe. Altogether, this requires processing imagery from five geostationary weather satellites, which take snapshots of the Earth from space every 5-15 minutes. These images can be as fine as 1 kilometer in spatial resolution and are re-captured and transmitted as frequently as every five minutes – a large volume of data. A single third-generation weather satellite in orbit over the United States such as the GOES-16 generates nearly two terabytes (TB) of data each month.

Languages

Oxford University Press makes high-quality language data available using AWS

Oxford University Press (OUP) is a department of the University of Oxford and the largest university press in the world. In 2015, OUP launched the Oxford Global Languages (OGL) initiative aiming to build lexical resources for 100 of the world’s languages and make them freely available online. OUP knew that on-premises solutions wouldn’t provide the scalability and flexibility required for developing an MVP and expanding it in case of success. OUP chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) because it matched the requirements around scalability and flexibility, provided managed services for storing and accessing data securely, and offered options for deployment and automation.

Do Microsoft workloads work on AWS? Yes. Learn how.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been running Windows workloads for eleven years, and runs nearly twice as many Windows Server instances than any other cloud provider. And with seven times fewer downtime hours in 2018 than the next largest cloud provider*, AWS is the right choice for Microsoft workloads and most any other IT workload. Dive deep and learn more about Microsoft workloads on AWS by checking out some of AWS Public Sector Summit on-demand conference sessions and technical presentations given by AWS solutions architects this June in Washington, DC.

Purolator courier delivery vehicle

Purolator, Canada’s express courier company, finds new ways to better serve customers with the cloud

Purolator, Canada’s leading courier company, embarked on a bold transformation plan to keep it at the forefront of evolving customer expectations. Called Delivering the Future, the company recently launched an aggressive five-year $1B investment plan to step-change its company in four key areas – including accelerating the digital experience for customers by investing in new technology and modernizing its existing infrastructure using cloud technology.