Top Ten Public Sector Stories from 2018

Happy New Year! As we start off 2019, we wanted to share the most popular posts from 2018. With a focus on developing our next-generation of cloud practitioners to best practices to get started in your cloud environment, read the top ten blog posts from the AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofit blog.

Microsoft Windows on AWS: How to Bring Microsoft Apps to AWS

When you plan your data center migration to the cloud, it’s critical to consider how workloads will run for maximum performance and availability. With Microsoft applications making up 60% or more of most on-premises data centers, more and more public sector customers are moving their Microsoft workloads to AWS to improve performance, increase availability, and improve their security posture. One of our customers, Kaplan, was running 12 different data centers across the organization and started moving its applications to AWS to consolidate its infrastructure. As part of the move to the cloud, Kaplan migrated approximately 50 applications and 50 nested sub-applications in its stack. Learn more.

Prepare for a Computer Science Career with AWS Educate and the Amazon Future Engineer Pathway

As part of Amazon’s $50M commitment to Computer Science (CS) Education, students now have access to Advanced Placement (AP) CS course offerings, scholarships, and early college internships through the Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) Pathway. With cloud computing ranked as the #1 LinkedIn skill for two years in a row and with millions of employment opportunities currently available in the cloud, the AFE Pathway provides students an opportunity to learn in-demand skills at a young age, setting the stage for a future cloud-enabled workforce. The Amazon Future Engineer Pathway creates accessible learn-to-work opportunities for students through three key steps. Learn more.

Busting the Myth of Vendor Lock-In

The cloud enables organizations to achieve their missions faster, speed up innovation, and save costs by scaling up quickly without the lengthy and costly process of acquiring additional hardware. Although more public sector organizations are adopting the cloud for mission-critical workloads, misconceptions about vendor lock-in still exist. Learn more.

Major in the Cloud: NOVA and AWS Announce First Cloud Computing Degree

Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA), in collaboration with the AWS Educate program, announced a Cloud Computing specialization as part of its Information Systems Technology (IST) Associate of Applied Science degree starting in Fall 2018. The program will be one of the first cloud computing degrees in the nation offered by a community college. The two-year IST Cloud Computing degree program is built to address the high concentration of tech employers in the Northern Virginia region and the demand for employees with cloud computing skills. Learn more.

Introducing AWS Educate Classrooms

AWS Educate members now have access to expanded features provided by educational cloud-lab environment provider, Vocareum. The new features provide simple, secure, and no-cost learning environments for educators and students to leverage AWS on projects, assignments, and other classroom environments without needing a credit card. Learn more.

Canadian Federal Government Awards Multiple Contracts to AWS Partners for Access to AWS Cloud Services

Shared Services Canada (SSC) is the central IT service provider of the federal government of Canada. It delivers infrastructure services related to email, data centers, telecommunications, and workplace technology devices for 43 federal agencies. Currently, they operate approximately 700 data centers running roughly 14,000 applications. To meet the future needs of the government, SSC plans to drive efficiencies and augment their computing capacity through data center modernization and consolidation, and the adoption of cloud computing between 2017 and 2024. Currently, AWS has six partners active with SSC for unclassified data including, DXC Technology, Infosys Ltd, LinkbyNet, TeraMach, Scalar Decisions, and Unisys. Learn more.

Serverless Optical Character Recognition in Support of NASA Astronaut Safety

The NASA Extravehicular Activity (EVA) Office at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) needed to be able to search and make decisions based upon a huge volume of spacesuit safety and test documentation, many of which were only available as scans of paper reports. Timeliness was critical, especially in the event of a spacewalk mishap. While the EVA Data Integration (EDI) infrastructure was hosted in AWS GovCloud (US), the load to perform optical character recognition (OCR) on 100,000 pages per month overwhelmed their systems, so they had to suspend their OCR activity. Learn more.

AWS Well Architected Framework: Best Practices for Building and Deploying an Optimized Cloud Environment

AWS has developed the Well-Architected Framework to help customers architect their mission-critical applications on AWS with secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure. Well Architected can help you build and deploy faster, lower or mitigate risks, make informed decisions, and learn AWS best practices. The AWS Well Architected Framework is based on five pillars. Learn more.

Develop and Extract Value from Open Data

Open data is fostering new opportunities for innovation, both in terms of entrepreneurship and public service. AWS embraces open data, providing the tools to develop and extract value in a single place. This includes direct hosting of public datasets at no cost on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). This blog post explores a use case for government organizations using the OpenStreetMap (OSM) dataset, a free, editable map of the world, created and maintained by volunteers and available for use with an open license. Using open source tools, we generate and render custom maps for a government’s digital property. By leveraging Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, and multi-tiered architectures, map tiles server can run in an efficient and highly available infrastructure. Learn more.

What Would You Do with $50,000 in AWS Promotional Credits?

The City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge is a global program recognizing how local and regional governments are innovating on behalf of their citizens around the globe. In 2017, we opened up the competition to school districts who are using the cloud to enrich learning, help teachers reach more students, and improve school or district operations. In 2018, we added a new category to the Challenge: We Power Tech. Governments, school districts, and partners can now compete in four award categories. Learn more.

Continue to stay up to date with all of the latest AWS news for the public sector on the blog. We are looking forward to an exciting 2019!