Top re:Invent 2022 announcements for K12 education

A computer on a teacher's desk in a K12 classroom.

For 10 years, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has brought the global cloud community together to meet, get inspired, and rethink what’s possible at AWS re:Invent. re:Invent 2022 included many new service and feature announcements, with something to offer for every industry. Discover some of the key announcements related to K12 education:

New features to power education data analytics

Many schools and education service agencies are looking for ways to securely share, store, analyze, and visualize data for a variety of use cases. These can include visualizing and predicting enrollment trends and absenteeism, correlating data from disparate education applications, reporting data to regional and state agencies, and providing dashboards for teachers and principals. AWS offers a multitude of data services to help schools unlock these use cases and more. You can check out all of the top analytics announcements of AWS re:Invent 2022 here, but let’s discuss some of them as they relate to K12.

Amazon QuickSight is a fast, simple-to-use, cloud-powered business intelligence service that makes it simple for schools to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly derive education insights. At re:Invent 2022, QuickSight introduced paginated reports, allowing schools to create and share highly formatted, personalized reports in .pdf or .csv formats. These reports can be delivered regularly via email, web, or mobile interfaces, or even printed out on physical paper. QuickSight also announced new QuickSight API capabilities to allow programmatic creation and management of resources, and new analytical questions for Amazon QuickSight Q, which lets users ask questions of your data using natural language.

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes it simple to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources. AWS introduced AWS Glue 4.0, a new version that upgrades the Spark engines to Apache Spark 3.3.0 and Python 3.10 so that schools can develop, run, and scale their data integration workloads and get insights faster. AWS Glue also announced custom visual transforms which let schools define, reuse, and share organization-specific extract, transform, load (ETL) logic among teams.

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed data warehousing service that lets you use SQL to analyze structured and semi-structured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes. Amazon Redshift announced several new features to simplify data ingestion and make your data warehouse more secure and reliable.

Amazon AppFlow is a fully managed integration service to securely transfer data between software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and AWS services. Amazon AppFlow can be used to ingest data with ease from SaaS applications for analysis and correlation with other education data. At re:Invent 2022, Amazon AppFlow announced several new data connectors, including connectors for Microsoft Teams, Zoom Meetings, Okta, Zendesk, and more.

New services to securely share, govern, and collaborate on data

Amazon DataZone, currently in preview, is a new data management service that makes it faster and simpler for customers to catalog, discover, share, and govern data stored across AWS, on-premises, and third-party data sources. With Amazon DataZone, your school can share, search, and discover data across team and departmental boundaries. Users can collaborate on data projects through a personalized data analytics portal while enforcing all of the necessary governance and compliance policies. Read more about Amazon DataZone.

AWS Clean Rooms, currently in preview, is a new analytics service that helps organizations across industries simply and securely analyze and collaborate on their combined datasets—without sharing or revealing the underlying data. While many schools have existing mechanisms for sharing data and collaborating with other education organizations, AWS Clean Rooms can offer a new way to create a secure data clean room to collaborate with any other company or organization in the AWS Cloud. The service provides a set of built-in data access controls that protect sensitive data, such as query controls, query output restrictions, query logging, and cryptographic computing tools. Learn more about AWS Clean Rooms.

Centralize security data with Amazon Security Lake

Amazon Security Lake, currently in preview, is a new service that automatically centralizes security data from cloud, on-premises, and custom sources into a purpose-built data lake stored in your own AWS account. With the increasing importance of cybersecurity in K12, Security Lake makes it simpler for your school to aggregate and analyze security data across the entire educational institution. To normalize and combine security data, Security Lake adopted the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF), an open standard. Security Lake can automatically collect data from multiple AWS services and logs, and you can bring data into Security Lake from third-party security solutions or custom data that has been converted into OCSF. Once ingested, you can use your preferred analytics tools while retaining control and ownership of your security data. Read more about Amazon Security Lake.

Secure access to internal applications without a VPN using AWS Verified Access

AWS Verified Access, currently in preview, is a new service to quickly enable applications for secure remote access without a virtual private network (VPN). Built using AWS Zero Trust guiding principles, Verified Access can help schools implement a work-from-anywhere model for their faculty and staff. With Verified Access, you can create fine-grained policies that define the conditions under which a user can access an application. Access requests are then evaluated in real time, only connecting users to the application if the defined conditions are met. Verified Access supports direct federation with third-party identity providers through OpenID Connect and has direct integration with AWS IAM Identity Center. Learn more about AWS Verified Access.

Run Microsoft Office on Amazon EC2 with AWS provided licenses

AWS now offers fully-compliant, Amazon-provided licenses for Microsoft Office LTSC Professional Plus 2021 Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon EC2 provides secure, resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. Many schools have workloads or applications that rely on Microsoft Office. With Microsoft Office AMIs, schools can now run those workloads on default tenancy Amazon EC2 instances without having to bring their own licenses. Read more about the availability of Microsoft Office AMIs and how to set up Microsoft Office on Amazon EC2.

Modernize and migrate applications with new features for AWS Application Migration Service

AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) simplifies and expedites migrations to AWS by automatically converting source servers from physical, virtual, or cloud infrastructure to run natively on AWS. Migrating to the cloud can help your school unlock increased security, agility, scalability, resiliency, and cost savings. Application Migration Service announced several new migration and modernization features, including application-centric migrations, wave planning, custom modernization actions, and launch template configuration. These features can help schools simplify, group, track, and modernize application migrations. Learn more about the new Application Migration Service features.

Improve developer productivity and accelerate serverless application development

Amazon CodeCatalyst, currently in preview, is a new unified software development service that makes it faster to build and deliver software on AWS. CodeCatalyst simplifies and automates many of the complex activities in developing and deploying applications. The service brings together the tools needed to plan, code, build, test, and deploy applications on AWS, saving teams time and shortening time to development. CodeCatalyst is accessed via an AWS Builder ID, a new personal profile for everyone who builds on AWS. Whether you are a software developer, student, data analyst, or any other builder, your AWS Builder ID provides access to tools like CodeCatalyst and Amazon CodeWhisperer. You can keep your AWS Builder ID as you move between schools, jobs, or other organizations. If you have developers building custom applications for the school, or students exploring software development, learn more about CodeCatalyst.

AWS Application Composer, currently in preview, helps developers quickly architect, configure, and build serverless applications. Many schools and educational service agencies are exploring serverless technologies to build custom applications for their organization without any infrastructure management. Serverless technologies feature automatic scaling, built-in high availability, and a pay-for-use billing model to increase agility and optimize costs. Schools that are new to building serverless applications, however, can face a steep learning curve composing applications from multiple AWS services. AWS Application Composer simplifies this with a browser-based visual canvas to drag, drop, and connect AWS services into an application architecture. Read more about AWS Application Composer.

Learn more about re:Invent 2022 and cloud for K12 education with AWS

To dive into even more updates from re:Invent, register for the AWS re:Invent Recap for Education and Government webinar; the conversation happens live on Tuesday, January 31, 2023 from 1:00 – 2:30 PM EST and will be available on-demand thereafter.

You can also check out all of the Top Announcements of AWS re:Invent 2022 for more information on announcements across analytics, compute, databases, networking, storage, security, and more. Other announcements include AWS’s commitment to be water positive by 2030 and Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology.

Finally, learn more about how AWS can help your school or district at the K12 and Primary Education hub, or reach out directly to chat with a public sector representative with any questions.

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