AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog

Whiteboard with an SA: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

on | in Education, government, Nonprofit |

How should you design your first VPC? Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC for short) lets you provision an isolated section of the cloud to run your AWS resources in a network you control. When planning your VPC network design, there are several design considerations to explore.

In this video, Warren Santner, AWS Solutions Architect (SA), shows you how to plan and deploy your VPC to have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. He will walk you through several design patterns taking into account these three criteria:

  1. Who are your users?
  2. What systems are accessing your resources?
  3. Where are they accessing these resources?

Watch this whiteboarding video to learn how to design your first VPC.

Continue to whiteboard with our AWS Worldwide Public Sector Solutions Architects for step-by-step instructions and demos on topics important to you in our YouTube Channel. Have a question about cloud computing? Our public sector Solutions Architects are here to help! Send us your question at aws-wwps-blog@amazon.com.

 

Ecosia: Planting Trees, One Search at a Time

on | in Nonprofit |

Ecosia, a social business based in Berlin, Germany, is the search engine that plants trees. They donate $100,000 or 80% of their monthly profits from ad revenue to nonprofit conservationist organizations every month, with a focus on tree planting. Since they launched in December of 2009, they are close to hitting the “5 million trees planted” milestone and have a goal of doubling their users by year end.

How it works

By reaching users where they are and with no financial asks, Ecosia offers a search engine with social good in mind. They invest money generated from advertising into planting trees in Burkina Faso, Madagascar, and Peru. All the user has to do is use the search engine and for every ad click, they donate money towards planting trees. After plug-in installation into the browser, every user sees the progress of planted trees in their browser in the upper right corner.

 

The tech behind the trees

In 2013, Ecosia turned to AWS to host their website and search engine on Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Route 53, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Prior to moving to AWS, Ecosia was hosting its applications on dedicated servers with traditional hosting companies. “We needed a service that provided us with excellent options for scalability. As our traffic started to increase, we quickly realized that using dedicated hosting would not scale. We could not react quickly enough to spikes in traffic and were delivering sub-optimal performance during peak hours,” said Gregory McCue, Chief Technology Officer at Ecosia. “We wanted to see exactly how much we were spending to serve our website, and have the ability to utilize only the capacity we needed.”

Ecosia has 2.5 million active users a month, and is trying to reach 5 million active users. They reach upwards of 720,000 search requests a day and are able to fund planting a new tree every 10-12 seconds.

“AWS is at the core of the business; without AWS, we wouldn’t have any product to offer our users. The fact that everything runs smoothly allows us to deliver a well performing product to our user,” said Jacey Binger, Head of PR at Ecosia.

For nonprofits dedicated to helping the world, cost and scalability matters. Since they are donating 80% of their profits to planting trees, being frugal is important to their bottom line. Learn more how organizations need technology that help them achieve their mission without wasting precious resources.

Counting young trees in the second year – Credit Beeldkas and OZG

Dead trees in the desert in Burkina Faso – Credit WeForest

Improve Operations and Increase Efficiencies with the AWS Cloud

on | in government |

State and local government customers are leveraging the AWS Cloud for a variety of government operations every day. From elections and city planning to digital libraries and payment systems, government customers are recognizing efficiencies, flexibility, and cost savings made possible through cloud technology.

Cloud technology is helping governments innovate for and with citizens. Check out some of the ways governments are using the cloud to help deliver improved citizen services.

Over 2,300 government agencies have turned to AWS to provide secure, cost effective, and scalable IT infrastructure. The expectations of an increasingly digital citizenry are high, yet all levels of government are facing budgetary and human resource constraints. Adoption of cloud computing provides access to new deployment models with significant cost and agility benefits. Although each organization has its unique set of challenges in cloud adoption, read the case studies below to learn from other governments about how they use cloud computing, how the cloud has changed the way government does business, and how it has helped create essential tools for service delivery.

A few examples include:

  • New York Public Library – The New York Public Library’s Digital Collections platform makes available 677,496 items spanning a wide range of eras, geographies, and media, and includes drawings, manuscripts, maps, photographs, rare books, videos, audio, and more. Encompassing the subject strengths of the vast collections of NYPL, these materials represent the applied sciences, fine and decorative arts, history, performing arts, and social sciences. While that’s a small fraction of the Library’s holdings, the aim of Digital Collections is to provide context for the digitized materials and to inspire people to use and reuse the media and data to advance knowledge and create new works. Cloud technology has simplified access to a part of the Library’s collection that otherwise would be difficult or impossible to access. The NYPL created not only an elegant user interface, but also provided flexible search tools to make finding material easier. Users can search and browse NYPL’s collections with ease compared to the various trips they would have had to make in the past.
  • City of Los Angeles, CA – While the City of Los Angeles is known for sunshine and celebrities, it is also the largest cyber target on the West Coast. With the world’s sixth busiest airport (LAX), the largest port in the Western hemisphere, a high profile police department, and infrastructure supporting 4 million residents, the city must deploy innovative, world-class cybersecurity to protect digital assets, requiring it to collect, correlate, and analyze mountains of data on cyber threats. Against the backdrop of limited resources, the city implemented a unique, cloud-based enterprise security solution, known as the Integrated Security Operations Center (ISOC). The City of LA needed to proactively tackle the rapidly growing cyber threats attempting to infiltrate digital assets. Given the limited resources, the City of LA implemented a unique, cloud-based security information and event management (SIEM) solution for the Integrated Security Operations Center (ISOC), to help consolidate, maintain, and analyze security data across the city’s departments.
  • DC Health Benefit Exchange – DC Health Link is the District of Columbia’s health insurance marketplace created to support the federal health laws known as the Affordable Care Act. The website helps District residents, small businesses, members of Congress, and their staff obtain quality, affordable medical, dental, or vision coverage. To reach goals of sustainability, and become the first US state or territory where every resident has quality, affordable health coverage, DC Health Link moved mission critical IT into the AWS Cloud, adopted an agile delivery model, and re-architected the website using open source technology. This approach achieved significant increases in enrollment, website performance, and cost savings.

Check out more perspectives on how governments are breaking down innovation barriers, tackling mission-critical operations, and delivering more value with the cloud in this AWS Public Sector Summit session, “Modernizing Government in the Cloud,” featuring Jay Haque, Director of Development Operations and Enterprise Computing at the New York Public Library.

Are you interested in learning more about how state and local governments are cutting costs, digitizing old systems, solving data challenges and improving access and customer experience by leveraging the AWS Cloud? If so, then visit: https://aws.amazon.com/stateandlocal/government-operations-and-efficiencies/

 

AWS Public Sector Month in Review – August

on | in Education, government, Nonprofit |

Here is the first edition of the AWS Public Sector Month in Review. Each month we will be curating all of the content published for the education, government, and nonprofit communities including blogs, white papers, webinars, and more.

Let’s take a look at what happened in August:

All – Government, Education, & Nonprofits

Education

Government

Nonprofits

New Customer Success Stories

Latest YouTube Videos

Whiteboard with our AWS Worldwide Public Sector Solutions Architects for step-by-step instructions and demos on topics important to you. Have a question about cloud computing? Our public sector SAs are here to help! Send us your question at aws-wwps-blog@amazon.com.

Recent Webinars

Upcoming Events

Attend one of our upcoming events and meet with AWS experts to get all of your questions answered. Register for one of the events below:

Keep checking back with us. But in the meantime, are you following us on social media? Follow along to stay up to the date with all of the real-time AWS news for government and education.

AWS Signs CJIS Agreement with the State of Oregon

on | in government |

 

 

 

 

 

AWS recently signed a Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) agreement with the State of Oregon. Oregon joins California, Minnesota, and Colorado in allowing both state and local police to leverage the AWS Cloud for sensitive data, such as fingerprints and criminal history. These CJIS security addenda give our law enforcement customers the confidence that their data will pass CJIS compliance audits and that their data is secure in the AWS Cloud.

We are committed to doing our part as a cloud service provider by giving our customers the means, through our services, to comply with CJIS requirements within their IT environments. Customers can deploy applications, data, and services, all of which securely comply with CJIS Security Policy requirements.

“The Oregon State Police (OSP) is pleased to announce to the Oregon CJIS community that OSP and Amazon have agreed to a security control agreement that meets every requirement of the FBI’s CJIS Security Policy. This agreement gives Oregon agencies additional hosting options that enhance security, while meeting their business requirements pertaining to Criminal Justice Information (CJI),” said Major Tom M. Worthy, CSO, Oregon State Police.

Members of the AWS Partner Network (APN) are enabling the delivery of electronic warrant services that create, route for approval, and issue field warrants electronically across multiple state, county, and city law enforcement agencies. Additionally, APN partners support law enforcement agencies worldwide in managing police videos related to demonstrations, public meetings, and general police interactions as a way to create transparency through public portals, and to help build trust and transparency in law enforcement. View our “Future of Policing” webinar here.

AWS is dedicated to enabling and educating the law enforcement market. Come talk to us at any of these upcoming events to get your questions answered.

To learn more about the APN and the broad set of public safety solutions available today, click here. Please reach out if you would like to get started.

Industry, Teaching, and Jobs: How One Instructor Keeps Learning to Prepare Students for Cloud Careers

on | in Education |

To fuel the pipeline of technologists entering the workforce, the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT), one of Canada’s largest post-secondary polytechnics, is constantly looking for ways to bring innovative technology to their students. Whether it is equipping students with cloud computing resources through AWS Educate or partnering with technology companies to understand the skills necessary to succeed post-graduation, BCIT is an example of the importance of industry and education working together to meet the increasing demand for cloud employees.

Different than a college or university, BCIT’s approach combines small classes, applied academics and hands-on experience so that students are ready to launch their careers from day one. With 300 new students in computer science each year, BCIT creates a custom curriculum geared toward achieving a high placement rate for their students. This past year, 75% of BCIT students secured jobs in a related field upon graduation. How do they achieve such a high placement rate for their students? They bring the cloud into the classroom and continue tweaking the courses to provide the most innovative, up-to-date technology resources to their students.

Cloud in the Classroom

“We brought in our first cloud computing class four years ago, and recently we made the decision to only teach AWS. Instead of breadth, we decided to give students depth on AWS so they can easily transition into the workforce,” Dr. Bill Klug, Cloud Computing Option Head & Instructor at BCIT, said. “And AWS Educate is really important to give students the opportunity to work on the platform, so they don’t have to pay to consume the resources.”

Every class has a lab with it, mostly built as two hour lectures with two hour labs. During the labs, students are tasked with different assignments and projects, such as creating a virtual private cloud (VPC) with two parts: a public and a private subnet. For example, in the public subnet, they set up an OpenVPN server, a NAT instance, and a web server. In the private subnet, they set up a database server.

Students are using their AWS Educate credits for compute resources used in labs, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Route 53.  These exercises move from theory into practice, helping students get the skills they need to secure a job after graduation.

AWS Educate provides students and educators with the resources needed to accelerate cloud-related learning endeavors. Students are able to access cloud content, training, collaboration tools, and AWS technology at no cost to prepare them for a future as cloud entrepreneurs.

Cloud Outside the Classroom

Last summer, Dr. Klug approached Cloudreach, an APN Premier Consulting Partner, to see if he could work for them for five months to learn how they use the AWS Cloud. From January to May, he shadowed DevOps engineers to learn the types of workloads customers are moving to the cloud and what skillsets employees need to maintain to be able to provide the best resources for their customers’ needs.  He then took these methods back to the classroom to make sure his department was delivering the training required.

“Building these relationships between the university and technology companies provides value to both of us. They know that they are getting someone that is properly trained for the work they will be doing right out of school, and we can tailor our curriculum to the kinds of skills needed,” Dr. Klug said.

As a result of his sabbatical and in developing the courses to match what is needed, BCIT created an “option,” or a minor, in cloud computing, the first of its kind in Canada. This option includes AWS Educate for classes, such as “Cloud Computing Platforms,” ”DevOps Engineering,” and “Programming in the Cloud.”

Ready to help your students skill up on cloud to get them ready for cloud careers?  Visit the AWS Educate web page to sign up your institution or class — or let your student know about individual student accounts.

 

MalariaSpot: Diagnose Diseases with Video Games

on | in Education, government, Nonprofit |

More than one billion people in the world entertain themselves with apps and video games. Only a hobby? For Miguel Luengo Oroz, the answer is no. Miguel and his team from the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) have resolved to use the collective intelligence of players from around the world to help diagnose diseases that kill thousands of people every day.

Parasites rather than spaceships

The idea originated in 2012. “While I was working for the United Nations in global health challenges, it caught my attention how tough and manual the process of diagnosing malaria was,” explains Miguel. “It can take up to 30 minutes to identify and count the parasites in a blood sample that cause the disease. There are not enough specialists in the world to diagnose all the cases!”

Miguel, a great fan of videogames had an idea: “Why not create a video game in which rather than shooting spaceships we search for parasites?” And MalariaSpot was born, a game available for computer and mobiles in which the “malaria hunter” has one minute to detect the parasites in a real, digitalized blood sample.

Since its launch, more than 100,000 people in 100 countries have “hunted” one and a half million parasites, and the results are promising. The number of clicks made by many players in the same image sample combined by artificial intelligence shows a count as precise as the one of an expert, but quicker.

“We published a study that probed that the collective diagnosis by the use of a videogame is not a crazy thing, but now it needs to be assessed from a medical point of view,” explains Miguel. His team cooperates with a clinic in Mozambique and has done some tests in real time and has achieved the first collaborative remote diagnosis of malaria from Africa.

The technology platform to host the game was the key. “We needed a flexible infrastructure that worked from anywhere in the world. We usually have traffic spikes when we appear in media or when we do campaigns in social networks, and we saw that Amazon Web Services (AWS) offered a good solution for auto scaling based on demand,” Miguel said.

Miguel and his team use the AWS Research Grants program that allows students, teachers, and researchers to transfer their activities to the cloud and innovate rapidly at a low cost. “We can now test different services without having to worry about the bill,” explains Miguel.

From the White House to neighborhood schools

The MalariaSpot project has attracted the recognition of entities such as the Singularity University of NASA, the Office of Science and Technology of the White House, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which has named Miguel one of the ten Spaniards under 35 with potential to change the world through technology.

But one of the greatest rewards for Miguel and his team comes from much closer to home. They enjoy visiting schools all over Spain and helping awaken unsuspected scientific vocations. “Today’s kids are digital natives. They are used to seeing and analyzing complex images on a screen,” says Miguel. This shows the educational value and awareness of videogames. During the last World Malaria Day on April 25th, thousands of Spanish students participated in “Olympic malaria video games,” playing the new game MalariaSpot Bubbles. School teams competed to become the best virtual hunters of malaria parasites.

“With MalariaSpot, we have even be able to reach kids who were not very good at biology. In a workshop that we ran in a school last year, the kid who won was the worst troublemaker out of his whole class,” explains Miguel (with a smile).

The future of medical diagnosis is not only defined in laboratories. “We are at a turning point where technology allows ubiquitous connectivity. We, and the rest of our generation, are responsible to direct all the possibilities that technology offers us to initiatives that make a real impact on the lives of people. And what better than health.”

With MalariaSpot and her “younger sister,” TuberSpot, Miguel and his young team of researchers are contributing so that in five years, 5% of video games are used to analyze medical images. Their objective? “Achieve a low cost diagnosis of global diseases, accessible to any person anywhere around the planet.”

Moving Buildings Leads to the All-In Move to the Cloud for Pacific Northwest College of Art

on | in Education |

For Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA), an arts college with under 1,000 students, their move to the cloud began with a physical move. When a renovated post office became the new classroom for students and office for the team, they were faced with deciding whether to bring their servers with them or leave them behind.

“We had to decide if we wanted to put together a big proposal to ask for $100,000 to $200,000 to build out a server room in the new building or we could start paying a couple of thousands of dollars monthly and create a new model without having to make the big financial request,” Brennen Florey, senior web developer and one of the technology co-directors at PNCA, said.

Prior to the move, their servers sat in a small closet with an air conditioner blowing on them. They were at the end of their life cycle, and these servers needed an upgrade. They were anxious to move their “old-school environment” to a new, advanced architecture to better serve the students, but still needed to have the trust and security to meet mandates, such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), to continue to protect student data.

“Education as an institution can be a little hesitant to adopt new technology, but technology supports education. The old content and concept of doing things with the service closets was not furthering our mission to better educate our students and give them the resources to be successful,” Brennen said. “Why not leverage the most modern tool and technology to educate, and not have to build or manage hardware?”

With a willingness to consider cloud technology, the team, Brennen, Jason Williams, and Teresa Christiansen, set a goal to make a fresh start in their new building and decided to leave the servers behind. They started by moving their web applications to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), then they began moving their mission-critical apps as well. Their journey evolved with new AWS releases and innovations. Since the infrastructure shaped how they delivered those web apps, they then began using Amazon Route 53, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). They started by “dipping their toes in the water,” achieving small successes and then let them grow.

“We were able to start small and build small successes and the Amazon model allowed us to continue to grow. You can set up one service or 35. You don’t need a big ramp to make a radical change,” Jason Williams, Senior Application Engineer and Technology Co-Director at PNCA, said.

To make the case to the CFO and other leadership to go all-in on AWS, the small technology team had to prove the value and deliver across the board. “We needed to show no downtime and no weakness,” Brennen said. “The case was made when the leadership saw that as we slowly made the move, the stability was there, there were obvious improvements with speed and capabilities, and we were saving money along the way. It paid off for the organization.”

“We didn’t begin the process as AWS certified experts, and there was a learning curve and an educational period, “ Jason said, “ But the move to the cloud challenged us to grow as professionals and actually shaped what kind of department we had from who we hired to what we prioritized.”

In the first 6-12 months, the college had almost 80% of their applications on AWS. One application in particular was their learning management system, Homeroom, which they built themselves. It started as a small application sitting on a server beneath a desk. Every time an update needed to be made, it went down. “We were very much at the mercy of a single box, but as we moved onto the Amazon architecture, Homeroom entered a new era of stability, which meant a more powerful toolset being delivered to the school,” Brennen said. These benefits were seen by faculty, staff, and students.

 

Ransomware Fightback Takes to the Cloud

on | in Education, government, Nonprofit |

Guest post by Raj Samani, EMEA CTO Intel Security (@Raj_Samani)

“How many visitors do you expect to access the No More Ransom Portal?”

This was the simple question asked prior to this law enforcement (Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, Dutch Police) and private industry (Kaspersky Lab, Intel Security) portal going live, which I didn’t have a clue how to answer. What do YOU think?  How many people do you expect to access a website dedicated to fighting ransomware?

If you said 2.6 million visitors in the first 24 hours, then please let me know six numbers you expect to come up in the lottery this weekend (I will spend time until the numbers are drawn to select the interior of my new super yacht). I have been a long-time advocate of cloud technology, and its benefit of rapid scalability came to the rescue when our visitor numbers blew expected numbers out of the water. To be honest, if we had attempted to host this site internally, my capacity estimates would have resulted in the portal crashing within the first hour of operation.  That would have been embarrassing and entirely my fault.

Indeed my thoughts on the use of cloud computing technology are well documented in various blogs, my work within the Cloud Security Alliance, and the book I recently co-authored.  I have often used the phrase, “Cloud computing in the future will keep our lights on and water clean.”  The introduction of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the AWS Marketplace into the No More Ransom Initiative to host the online portal demonstrates that the old myth, “one should only use the cloud for non-critical services,” needs to be quickly archived into the annals of history.

To ensure such an important site was ready for the large influx of traffic at launch, we had around the clock support out of Australia and the U.S. (thank you, Ben Potter and Nathan Case from AWS!), which meant everything was running as it should and we could handle millions of visitors on our first day.  This, in my opinion, is the biggest benefit of the cloud. Beyond scalability, and the benefits of outsourcing the management and the security of the portal to a third party, an added benefit was that my team and I could focus our time on developing tools to decrypt ransomware victims’ systems, conduct technical research, and engage law enforcement to target the infrastructure to make such keys available.

AWS also identified controls to reduce the risk of the site being compromised. With the help of Barracuda, they implemented these controls and regularly test the portal to reduce the likelihood of an issue.

Thank you, AWS and Barracuda, and welcome to the team!  This open initiative is intended to provide a non-commercial platform to address a rising issue targeting our digital assets for criminal gain. We’re thrilled that we are now able to take the fight to the cloud.

Global Nonprofit Leadership Summit Recap

on | in Nonprofit |

The AWS Global Nonprofit Leadership Summit in London focused on how to achieve the United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDGs) through technology.

We value and recognize the amazing contributions that organizations make in order to make this world a better place. By hearing from nonprofits, such as UNICEF, the American Heart Association, Conservation International, and many others, attendees were able to provide each other with technology approaches that have yielded improved outcomes and share big ideas for projects or programs that could greatly advance achievement of the SDGs, which include reversing climate change, ensuring equality for all, and eliminating poverty.

Why does the cloud matter?

  1. The cloud helps pave the way for disruptive innovation – This gives nonprofits the agility to fail fast and to try many things, pick what works, and continue moving forward. We innovate to give our customers the capabilities and cost savings to achieve more mission for the money.
  2. The cloud also helps drive an innovative ecosystem – Our innovation extends to our partners, our customers, and the entire ecosystem that is touched by the approach and technology. Many nonprofit organizations depend on a broad network of volunteers, donors, and staff. As AWS innovates, we seek to help our customers innovate as well.
  3. The cloud is helping to make the world a better place – Our customers change the world through medical research, monitoring tools that protect endangered species, empowering underserved youth through technology education, and much more. In addition, AWS is helping to improve government and spur economic development around the world though open data and public/private partnership initiatives and by bringing services to places that might not otherwise receive them.  The goal is to connect the private, public, and social sectors to share our strengths and do more, together.

Nonprofits are all in the business of improving the well being of people and environmental ecosystems around the world. By using AWS’s inexpensive and highly scalable infrastructure technology to build websites, host core business and employee-facing systems, and manage outreach and fundraising, nonprofit organizations around the world can stop paying for computing power they aren’t using, and focus their resources on their important work.

From issue advocacy to charitable causes, from health and welfare to education, nonprofit organizations use AWS to radically reduce infrastructure costs, build their capacity, and reduce waste. The common denominator for all discussions was technology, and session after session, we heard about how it touches and improves lives in areas such as green activism, animal conservation, fighting heart disease, and finding exploited children. Through engagement with the AWS Nonprofit team, we have helped guide nonprofits globally on new ways to leverage data analytics capabilities, such as to hone in on specific human genomes to create personalized care that has a higher success rate of healing and recovery or to crawl image data for clues as to the location of abducted children.  We have strategized with our customers and determined approaches for leveraging IoT sensors to monitor air quality, weather conditions for agricultural yields, and even smart donation solutions.

Partnerships in the Cloud: Bringing the big ideas

As part of the event, AWS committed $500,000 in AWS promotional credits to support the big ideas and new concepts brought forward by the nonprofits in attendance. AWS technical experts hosted office hours at the event to help the nonprofits build out their concepts and transform them into approaches, and will soon award the credits to these organizations.

Teresa Carlson, VP of Worldwide Public Sector at AWS, closed the event by encouraging the attending organizations to continue to collaborate with each other and share solutions.  We intend to hold this event annually and we look forward to sharing the progress AWS and, most importantly, our customers have made in 2017.

“As we begin to see drastic changes in our climate and increasing levels of poverty and humanitarian crises around the world, AWS has taken action to ensure we are an active participant in sustainable development.  We want to both be part of the solution and bring our resources to bear to enable others to reverse the compounding effects of the violence, hatred, and even indifference,” Teresa said.