AWS Public Sector Blog
Tag: technical how-to
Deploying AWS CloudWatch canaries at scale to elevate monitoring, observability and reliability
In the dynamic world of cloud computing, ensuring the reliability and performance of applications is paramount. Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics offers canaries, a proactive approach to monitoring, enabling organizations to detect and resolve issues before they impact users. Canaries are lightweight, automated scripts that simulate user interactions with applications, providing valuable insights into their behavior and performance. This post explores the capabilities of proactive monitoring, end-to-end visibility, customizable scripts, and alerting/notification features provided by CloudWatch canaries.
Hydrating the Natural History Museum’s Planetary Knowledge Base with Amazon Neptune and Open Data on AWS
The Natural History Museum (NHM) in London is a world-class visitor attraction and a leading science research center. NHM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have partnered up to transform and accelerate scientific research by bringing together a broad range of biodiversity and environmental data types in one place for the first time. In an earlier post, we discussed NHM’s overall vision for using open data in combination with large-scale compute, data systems, and machine learning (ML) to create the Planetary Knowledge Base (PKB), a knowledge graph of global biodiversity. In this post, we focus on the underlying services and architecture that comprise the PKB.
Using Amazon Timestream and Amazon Location Service to detect transportation route deviations and anomalies
Transit authorities have to maintain the location and schedule of large numbers of vehicle fleets on a daily basis. Most commonly, GPS coordinates are used to track vehicle location and transportation route. GPS coordinates often have anomalies that can contaminate location reporting. Additionally, if a vehicle takes a detour, it will offset public transportation schedules. Both cases impact the riders negatively. Keeping track and getting notified is a challenge. In this post, we look into an anomaly detection mechanism for public transportation using Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings.
Unlocking the power of generative AI: The advantages of a flexible architecture for foundation model fine-tuning
A flexible architecture is a crucial factor in unlocking the full potential of generative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. In this post, we cover an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud infrastructure with a modular architecture that enables you to explore and take advantage of the benefits from different open source foundation models in a flexible way. This solution provides several benefits.
Documenting the use of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups in DoD
Many Amazon Web Service (AWS) customers in regulated environments such as the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) struggle to gain security approval to take advantage of the scaling of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) using its Auto Scaling capabilities. This is often attributed to configuration management, total asset inventory, compliance with agency third-party security tools, and agency authorization documentation. This post provides AWS recommended best practices for implementing EC2 Auto Scaling in DoD environments.
Transforming electronic case reports with generative AI: Unlocking faster public health responses
For years, public health agencies have relied on paper-based case report forms to supplement the electronic laboratory reports (ELRs) they receive for reportable diseases. While ELRs provide positive test results, the accompanying case reports give public health agencies critical clinical, demographic, and risk factor data needed for effective disease investigation and response. However, the sheer volume of COVID-19 cases quickly overwhelmed this manual, paper-based process. Prior to the pandemic, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) developed standards for an electronic case report (eCR) form that could be automatically sent to public health agencies from providers’ electronic health records (EHRs).
Using customer-provided ephemerides with AWS Ground Station
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Ground Station is a cloud-based service that provides you with an opportunity to perform communication sessions with your satellite without spending a fortune on your own ground station infrastructure. AWS Ground Station balances between providing a ready-made solution and tailoring the service to meet the unique needs of each customer. One of the ways to customize the service is to use customer-provided ephemerides (CPE) for antenna targeting.
Web filtering for education using AWS Network Firewall
Managing access to websites and safeguarding users from harmful content is a critical component of a layered cybersecurity approach, especially in educational settings. Schools and institutions of higher learning have a responsibility to provide a secure online experience for their students and staff. Traditionally, this has been accomplished through on-site web filtering appliances. Amazon Web Services ( AWS) Network Firewall allows customers to filter their outbound web traffic from on-premises environments based on fully qualified domain names (FQDN) or Server Name Indication (SNI) for encrypted traffic. This post will use AWS Client VPN to demonstrate routing and filtering traffic from external resources through Network Firewall.
How to transfer data to the CISA Cloud Log Aggregation Warehouse (CLAW) using Amazon S3
In this post, we show you how you can push or pull your security telemetry data to the National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS) Cloud Log Aggregation Warehouse (CLAW) using Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) or third-party solutions.
Building the WIS 2.0 global weather cache on AWS
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) wants to build and modernize a global weather framework with WMO Information Systems (WIS) 2.0 to enable and democratize unified access to critical, up-to-date weather data across the world. The WIS 2.0 system and the global cache provide a single point of access to improve the speed and accuracy with which forecasts can be generated while decreasing the time and capital requirements. This post describes the value of a global weather cache as well as the design and architecture for building the WIS 2.0 global weather cache on Amazon Web Services (AWS).