Service Workbench on AWS
A web portal for researchers to accelerate their time to science
Service Workbench on AWS is a cloud solution that enables IT teams to provide secure, repeatable, and federated control of access to data, tooling, and compute power that researchers need. With Service Workbench, researchers no longer have to worry about navigating cloud infrastructure. They can focus on achieving research missions and completing essential work in minutes, not months, in configured research environments.
With Service Workbench, researchers can quickly and securely stand up research environments and conduct experiments with peers from other institutions. By automating the creation of baseline research setups, simplifying data access, and providing price transparency, researchers and IT departments save time, which they can reinvest in following cloud best practices and achieving research reproducibility.
What Service Workbench allows
On-demand research environment capabilities
A self-service, three-click, on-demand service for researchers to build research environments in minutes without having to know anything about cloud infrastructure or wait for research IT to respond.
Pre-built, secure, and compliant environments
Pre-built, secure, and compliant environments for researchers to have simple access to data and tools that can be replicated across internal and external research teams.
Transparent view of total cost
Insight into currently accrued cost by cost centers and individual environments to manage budgets and charge-backs.
Open source AWS solution
A no-cost, AWS open source solution (Apache 2.0 license)—customers pay only for utilized downstream AWS services.
"[Service Workbench is] a platform to democratize access to cloud computing for research and teaching with full billing control and a very high level of cybersecurity."
– Paul Avillach, MD, PhD, Harvard Medical School, Department of Biomedical Informatics
"Service Workbench provides a secure environment for investigators to leverage the flexibility of the AWS ecosystem to work with data at scale. Thus, they are able to focus on their research while the infrastructure is professionally managed by IT staff."
– Lisa Guay-Woodford, M.D. , Director, Clinical and Translational Science Institute at Children's National, Children’s National Research Institute and The George Washington University
Frequently asked questions
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What obstacles does Service Workbench help overcome?
Customers can accelerate research while promoting repeatability, multi-site collaboration, and cost transparency in the research process:
- Most researchers are not familiar with deploying complex cloud infrastructure, so they lose critical time to science.
- Most research operates on fixed-cost awards requiring cost transparency and spend control.
- Major burden on research IT to offer repeatable, reproductible, and collaborative research environments across research centers and universities.
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Which AWS services are supported by Service Workbench?
Service Workbench targets medical research workloads and all AWS HIPAA-eligible AWS services with a focus on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), machine learning, artificial intelligence, Amazon SageMaker, RStudio, Amazon EMR, and Amazon EMR with Hail. Service Workbench is also an additional customer channel for AWS open data, AWS Data Exchange, AWS Marketplace, and AWS Service Catalog to provide their content services to medical researchers and their IT. Currently, Service Workbench does not support AWS ParallelCluster/high performance computing (HPC) environments.
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How does Service Workbench work?
Research IT deploys Service Workbench into a dedicated account and configures underlying accounts and services. Once there, the researcher navigates to the Service Workbench UI that serves as the entry point for researchers, data owners, and administrators. From there:
- The researcher logs into the Service Workbench web UI, requesting access to the environments.
- Research IT grants access to the researcher, associate’s department(s), or project(s) identifiers to that researcher.
- The researcher searches a selection of data, tools, and preconfigured AWS CloudFormation templates and clicks to launch their research environment and conduct their science.
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What are the options for deploying Service Workbench at my organization?
As on open source solution, research IT may freely download, use, and customize Service Workbench for their needs. Alternatively, your organization can leverage the AWS Professional Services team to assist in your production deployment or use one of the many partners in our AWS Partner Network to assist and even manage your Service Workbench environment for you.
Delivery and Managed Service Partners
Delivery and Managed Services Partners are AWS Partner Network (APN) Consulting Partners who help create and manage catalogs of research IT environments that the customer's organization approves for use on Amazon Web Services (AWS). With AWS Service Catalog on Service Workbench, customers and partners can centrally manage commonly deployed research IT services to help achieve consistent governance and meet compliance requirements while enabling users to self-provision approved services. These APN Partners have developed offerings to help you adopt and implement Service Workbench on AWS at scale.
Eplexity
2 AWS competencies
6 partner programs
1 AWS service validation
50+ AWS certifications
100+ AWS customer launches
Explexity’s cloud architected solutions provide cloud agility and immediate improvements in compliance, automation, operations, performance, and reliability for clients. Powered by Explexity’s Cloud Command Center, client cloud environments are managed 24/7/365 by a 100 percent AWS certified engineering team.
ONIX
5 partner programs
1 AWS service validation
20+ AWS certifications
20+ AWS customer launches
Onix helps clients increase organizational efficiency with cloud solutions. With expertise in data and analytics, Amazon Kendra, application modernization/migration, and cloud adoption, Onix clients outsmart competitors. Onix is based in Ohio, with technical resources across North America. Onix enjoys a significant number of returning and referred clients, a true testament of their culture and craft.
Privo
3 AWS competencies
5 partner programs
3 AWS service validations
100+ AWS certifications
100+ AWS customer launches
Privo is an AWS consulting firm with offices across the United States. Privo helps clients architect, migrate, monitor, manage, secure, and optimize their AWS workloads, so they can focus on innovation. Their small-team consulting approach serves a broad range of industries including life sciences, financial services, software as a service (SaaS) independent service vendor (ISV), and more.