Tag: Amazon EC2

ECHO is a nonprofit, founded in 1981, equipping small-scale farming families worldwide with access to knowledge, seeds, and agricultural training. The organization teaches small-scale, sustainable farming methods so families can provide for themselves and their communities. They provide training in agricultural techniques globally, with centers in Southeast Asia, East and West Africa, and Florida in the United States, empowering small-scale family farmers to thrive.

Today more than 200,000 volunteers around the world are helping accelerate research toward COVID-19 therapies—by walking away from their computers. That’s because of a concept called distributed computing, which allows anyone with a home computer, laptop, or virtual machine to contribute computing power to a common cause. This month, nonprofit Folding@home has started sharing one of the world’s largest public protein simulation databases as an AWS Open Data Set so that researchers around the world can easily access this data to speed up the search for therapies for COVID-19.

State and local governments and health and human services (HHS) agencies provide key services to the nation’s most vulnerable and at risk populations such as healthcare, nutrition, economic, and other social support programs. HHS organizations were among the first to feel the impact of COVID-19 and its effects continue to linger and test aging infrastructure and limited technology systems. State and local government agencies made mission critical decisions to address those immediate needs and are preparing for resiliency moving forward. For this, they turned to the cloud. To help organizations discover how the cloud can help, Amazon Web Services (AWS) created the Health and Human Services Cloud Pavilion, an online, interactive learning environment.

In October 2018, the Florida panhandle was hit by Hurricane Michael, a Category 5 storm that set a new record for the strongest hurricane on record to make landfall in the area. Florida State University (FSU) already understood the need for a long-term continuity of operations plan, and the devastation Michael wrought on the surrounding areas solidified how critical a disaster recovery (DR) service is to their overall operations. Disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) is the business world’s advanced solution to unexpected disruption. Whether the threat comes from natural disaster, technical failure, human error, or malicious action, the result is still unplanned downtime and the need for recovery. Learn how FSU designed and launched their DRaaS solution on an accelerated timeline while optimizing costs.

To help support DIL environments, Amazon Web Services (AWS) created the Snow family of products to include the AWS Snowcone and AWS Snowball devices. The Snow family moves data processing and analysis as close as necessary to where data is created in order to deliver intelligent, real-time responsiveness and streamline the amount of data transferred. To address the challenges of edge of the edge computing, we use the Snowball Edge as a central management hub and a Snowcone as an outer edge device. This how-to shows how to use Rancher as a centralized Kubernetes management tool installed on a Snowball, which has been set up to manage a single-node Kubernetes cluster on a Snowcone. This configuration allows us to fully manage the containers running on one or more Snowcones from the Snowball itself.

Governments, like the state government of California, are in the midst of a transition to a new way of delivering vital information, services and programs using technology and the cloud. Government organizations are adopting approaches pioneered in the technology industry, including user-centered design, agile development, data science, modular contracting, and the use of modern technology platforms. Many of these governments, like the state of California, are using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to respond quickly and scale to battle unprecedented challenges, like COVID-19, and help them quickly make decisions about how to protect their constituents.

Azavea believes in the power of geospatial technology to improve communities and the planet. Azavea has been exploring the power of this technology to help their clients to answer complex questions in a wide range of domains from urban ecosystems, infrastructure planning, and economic development to water, energy, and climate change. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), we invited Jessica Cahail, product manager at Azavea, to share how her organization is using AWS and open data to develop tools that help users address environmental challenges and deliver knowledge to support decision making.

Efforts to prevent and combat homelessness are limited by the lack of comprehensive data about people experiencing homelessness. This makes it difficult for states to identify trends and emerging needs to respond and make data-driven decisions about the effective deployment of resources. The cloud can help bridge information silos. Read on for examples of how states use the cloud to bridge data silos and better serve the homeless.

From speeding the time to science to accelerating the delivery of critical citizen services, our customers are migrating to the AWS Cloud to successfully deliver on their missions. Our current environment has pushed us all into new ways of learning, working, and even socializing. And the cloud has made these recent changes and innovations possible. These customer examples can offer a playbook and inspiration for how organizations can leverage the cloud to innovate quickly and deliver on behalf of citizens.

Tuesday, September 22, 2020 is National Voter Registration Day, a nonpartisan civic holiday in the United States celebrating democracy with a mission to create broad awareness of registration opportunities for voters. Learn how nonprofit civic organizations use the cloud to meet their mission in a secure, scalable, and cost-effective way on National Voter Registration Day and throughout the election cycle.