Category: Technical How-to

In a recent disaster response field testing exercise (FTX), the AWS Global Social Impact Solutions (GSI) team developed a prototype cloud architecture and tested it in a search and rescue (SAR) scenario simulating a missing responder crisis. This blog post walks through the SAR simulation and result, and provides an overview of the AWS services and technical architecture components the GSI team used to provide a hybrid edge/cloud COP solution that helped locate the missing team member in the simulated scenario within 20 minutes.

In this blog post, we explain how government agencies can accelerate their development workflows while maintaining strict application and operational security using the principles of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and DevSecOps. We provide a solution to walk you through how you can quickly set up your own DevSecOps pipeline that incorporates AWS and third-party security tools to give you a fast, flexible, and secure software delivery process.

Geospatial datasets are increasingly large, reaching terabyte and even petabyte scale, which can cause many challenges for geospatial analysts and educators–but Amazon AppStream 2.0 can provide some solutions. In this blog post, we walk through how to deploy QGIS, a no cost, open-source geospatial information system (GIS) application used by geospatial analysts, in Amazon AppStream 2.0. We also load an example dataset to demonstrate how desktop GIS application users can access large, cloud-hosted geospatial datasets with high performance by keeping the data and compute components together on the cloud, and streaming the desktop application instead of downloading the data itself.

To drive innovation and optimise operations in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, UK public sector organizations need to transfer data quickly and safely, in accordance with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)’s guidance on how to configure, deploy, and use cloud services securely. The NCSC provides security guidance for protecting government systems, planning for cyber incidents, and more. In this post, we cover how you can configure AWS services—like AWS DataSync, AWS Storage Gateway, and AWS Transfer Family—to align your data transfer solution with the NCSC’s cloud security principles, as understanding these configurations is important to protect data and meet requirements for local force accreditation.

The AWS Secure Environment Accelerator (ASEA) landing zone helps customers deploy and operate a secure multi-account, multi-Region AWS environment. Governments in Canada and others around the world currently use the ASEA, with over 30 deployments to date. Some of these same customers also use VMware Cloud on AWS to integrate on-premises vSphere environments, allowing them to move existing workloads to the cloud more quickly. Integrating your VMware workload with natively managed AWS services can help you reduce your operational overhead and optimize your total cost of ownership (TCO). In this blog post, we review the technical considerations related to integrating your ASEA landing zone with your VMware Cloud on the AWS environment.

Galaxy is a scientific workflow, data integration, and digital preservation platform that aims to make computational biology accessible to research scientists that do not have computer programming or systems administration experience. Although it was initially developed for genomics research, it is largely domain agnostic and is now used as a general bioinformatics workflow management system, running on everything from academic mainframes to personal computers. But researchers and organizations may worry about capacity and the accessibility of compute power for those with limited or restrictive budgets. In this blog post, we explain how to implement Galaxy on the cloud at a predictable cost within your research or grant budget with Amazon Lightsail.

Government departments work hard to meet required security framework controls for cloud services, and obtaining an Authority to Operate (ATO) can sometimes take up to 18 months. To assist with this process, AWS developed the open-source AWS Secure Environment Accelerator (ASEA), a tool designed to help deploy and operate secure multi-account AWS environments. This post describes how government departments can more simply deploy a web application consisting of a single-page application (SPA), backend API, and database within ASEA.

Many nonprofits and other tax-exempt organizations need to make sure their tax status is correct across their Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts. A new tax analyzer solution automatically detects the tax status of all AWS accounts across an organization. In this blog post, discover how this simple solution identifies which AWS accounts across an organization are paying sales tax, and learn how this solution can quickly remediate tax status by opening an AWS support case automatically.

Electronic notifications of patient events are a vital mechanism for care providers to improve care coordination and promote appropriate follow-up care in a timely manner. This post shows how a combination of Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies, like AWS Lambda, Amazon Comprehend Medical, and AWS Fargate, can effectively manage and deliver actionable data to help healthcare customers deliver electronic notifications in a secure and efficient way.

Moodle is an open-source learning management system (LMS). Moodle has more than 300 million users worldwide across both academic and enterprise organizations, and is the world’s most widely used learning platform. There are many ways to get started with Moodle on AWS. In this blog post, I focus on how to scale and optimize Moodle once you are already serving students. In this case, you may need to deal with migrating data from an existing platform and making sure the new environment caters to thousands of students, and still be cost-effective — we cover additional considerations in this walkthrough.