AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog

The AWS Research Initiative (ARI) brings Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) together to spur innovation in Big Data research. Under the program on Critical Techniques, Technologies and Methodologies for Advancing Foundations and Applications of Big Data Sciences and Engineering (BIGDATA) a total of $26.5 million will be funded by NSF and the Office of Financial Research (OFR) in addition to $3 million in AWS promotional credits for a period of 3-4 years.

The program seeks novel approaches in computer science, statistics, computational science, and mathematics, along with innovative applications in domain science, including social and behavioral sciences, education, biology, engineering, and the physical sciences that lead to the further development of interdisciplinary data science.

Under the ARI program, AWS and NSF will respectively support and collaborate on groundbreaking research from all qualified scientists, engineers, and educators. Now techniques and technologies like cloud-based Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data analytics, and High Performance Computing (HPC) will help researchers maximize the value of their NSF grants to accelerate the pace of innovation.

“BIGDATA research provides a paradigm shift by putting smart in everything we do today including smart home, smart city, smart cars, smart health, and more. We are excited to collaborate with the NSF to foster innovations in the field,” said Sanjay Padhi, Ph.D, AWS Representative to the NSF.

There are two categories of proposals:

• Foundations (F): those developing or studying fundamental theories, techniques, methodologies, and technologies of broad applicability to big data problems, motivated by specific data challenges and requirements.
• Innovative Applications (IA): those engaged in translational activities that employ new big data techniques, methodologies, and technologies to address and solve problems in specific application domains. Projects in this category must be collaborative, involving researchers from domain disciplines and one or more methodological disciplines (computer science, statistics, mathematics, simulation and modeling, and more).

The AWS Research Initiative with NSF provides up to $3M in AWS promotional credits over a period of up to four years, or for the duration of the initiative. AWS will offer many services through ARI grants, including compute and data services. NSF will be responsible for selecting grant awardees.

“In today’s era of data-driven science and engineering, we are pleased to work with the AWS Research Initiative via the NSF BIGDATA program to provide cloud resources for our Nation’s researchers to foster and accelerate discovery and innovation,”  said Dr. Jim Kurose, Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) for Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE).

To get started on your application, here are some cloud resources and tools for grant applicants:

• Big Data on AWS
• Artificial Intelligence on AWS
• Machine Learning on AWS
• Amazon Deep Learning (MXNET)
• High Performance Computing on AWS
• AWS Cloud Credits for Research
• AWS Research & Technical Computing Tools

To see how to apply, who qualifies, and more, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/research-and-technical-computing/nsf-aribd/

Learn more about the program here.

AWS was proud to help sponsor the 2016 Girls Who Code (GWC) Summer Immersion Programs for 1,500 high-school aged girls. To enable their work, AWS built a custom curriculum for the Girls Who Code teams to learn and build their projects in the cloud. At the conclusion of the seven-week program, students formed small teams and built web-based projects using the skills they gained during the summer.

A team of AWS experts reviewed the projects of the student teams who incorporated AWS into their projects. Two project teams were then selected to come to AWS re:Invent 2016 in Las Vegas. This provided students a chance to learn more about cloud computing, experience a large-scale tech conference, and share with other cloud enthusiasts their AWS-powered projects and passion for programming. The two selected projects were:

• The Mercer of Durham, Seattle Girls Who Code Summer Camp (2 students): The Mercer of Durham is a “choose-your-own-adventure” game played on the Amazon Echo through the cloud-based Alexa voice service. The purpose of the game is to play an adventure game through the power of your voice, similar to role playing. It was inspired by the text-based “choose-your-own-adventure-game” that the group created in class on Python.
• Kokua, Boston Girls Who Code Summer Camp (5 students): Kokua is a website that is used as a “cold caller” to select random students and as a random group generator to allow students the opportunity to work with different peers. In addition, the team created a bar graph displaying the statistics of how many times a student’s name was called. Kokua differs from traditional cold-calling devices because it organizes multiple functions into one tool that is easy for teachers to use. Coded using JavaScript, HTML, PHP, and CSS, Kokua saves teachers from worrying about who to call on next or keeping track of who is not participating.

“Attending AWS re:Invent gave us the opportunity to interact with world-class programmers and engineers and a chance to share our final project from Girls Who Code. Thank you AWS and GWC for sponsoring us!” shared the team from Kokua.

AWS is committed to helping build the pipeline of women and underrepresented communities in tech. As a part of this effort, we held a Diversify Tech panel at re:Invent. In the panel, experts in the field of diversity, equality, equity, inclusion, and innovation discussed actionable steps we can take, both individually and as companies, to improve diversity in tech. The Girls Who Code teams also presented their projects at the end of this panel, and received an opportunity to get to know Girls Who Code VP of Strategy and Innovation, Leah Gilliam, who moderated the discussion. You can watch the full panel here:

Amazon Web Services has a strong commitment to the needs of our customers across sectors in the UK. That’s the driving reason why we recently launched a new Region in the London area. Learn more about the new Region here.

Cities like London are quickly embracing innovation and developing new ways for engaging and serving citizens. From transportation to planning to utilities, cities are using cloud computing to transform the way they interact with citizens and think about their future. Both government and commercial organizations are using the cloud to provide information and deliver services to their customers and citizens. Learn more about the organizations you know that are already working to bring you smarter, more flexible services in and around London. Read more public sector case studies here.

AWS works with organisations around London to serve citizens more effectively and reach broader constituents. Learn more below:

• Helping Londoners heat their homes from anywhere – Hive (which runs on AWS) gives Londoners more control on how they heat their homes.
• Life in the cloud is always sunny – The Met Office looked to AWS when they wanted to deploy their weather and climate forecasting systems in the cloud, safely and efficiently.
• Keeping London moving takes more than trains and buses –  AWS and Transport for London work together to help Londoners better manage the daily commute.
• Helping Londoners on their path to university – Working together, UCAS and AWS are improving the university application experience.
• Introducing your smartphone to an even smarter bank – Monzo is building a new kind of bank, designed for your smartphone.
• If you are running a GIS on a CMS, AWS can help – Driver & Vehicle Standards Agency and AWS are finding novel ways to rapidly develop and deploy new services

Register now to get started on your digital journey to future government

When it comes to digital government projects, where do you get started? How do you train your staff and align your technology strategy with the ever-increasing pace of citizen requirements?

To answer these questions (and learn even more), join us the week of January 23rd  and week of March 6th, 2017 at the Urban Innovation Center, where AWS and Future Cities Catapult will offer discussions, roundtables, and workshops as part of the London Innovation Series. Customize your own itinerary and learn how to build citizen services in a new and fresh way. Learn more and register now.

Continue to learn about how AWS is helping Londoners every day here and check out the “Webminster” station in the photos below.

Also in London, AWS launched AWS re:Start, a training and job placement program for the UK to educate young adults as well as those leaving the Armed Forces, Reservists, Veterans, and their spouses on the latest software development and cloud computing technologies. Learn more here.

Two out of every five people in the U.S. will be diagnosed with cancer during their lifetimes and the number of new cancer cases will rise to 22 million globally within the next two decades, according to the National Cancer Institute (NCI). And as research organizations work to find a cure, the same technology behind improved voice assistants and credit card fraud detection—artificial intelligence—could also help improve cancer screening and save lives.

Through Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, participants of the third annual Data Science Bowl, have the chance to improve lung cancer screening technology that can reduce lung cancer deaths by 20 percent.

The Data Science Bowl competition was created by Booz Allen Hamilton in partnership with Kaggle. Amazon Web Services is proud to sponsor the 2017 Data Science Bowl, which aims to inspire everyday citizens, data scientists, and medical communities around the world to work together and improve the success rate of low-dose CT scanning, using training and test datasets directly provided or facilitated through the National Cancer Institute.

This year, the 90-day Data Science Bowl competition will award winners with over $1 million in prizes, including AWS cloud computing credits. The funds for the prize purse will be provided by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. To learn more and participate in the Data Science Bowl, visit DataScienceBowl.com.

Last year’s Data Science Bowl was related to heart health. Learn more about it here.

AWS Public Datasets

Today, qualified researchers can access two of the world’s largest collections of cancer genome data as AWS Public Datasets:

• The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) corpus of raw and processed genomic, transcriptomic, and epigenomic data from thousands of cancer patients is now freely available on Amazon S3 for registered users of the Cancer Genomics Cloud, one of the funded cancer cloud pilots of the National Cancer Institute.
• Over 2,400 whole genomes from 1,100 unique donors from the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) PanCancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) dataset is also freely available on Amazon S3 for credentialed researchers, subject to the ICGC data sharing policies.

And, in order to help data scientists work with unique datasets, we built the AWS Research Cloud Program. The program was built by researchers, for researchers, in order to enable easy use of AWS resources by the scientific community around the globe. It’s free to join the program, and you can download the guide here to get started.

Key Resources for Researchers and Scientists

Additionally, below are some key resource links for researchers to help in the Data Science Bowl:

• Big Compute (HPC) on AWS (particularly C5, F1, Elastic GPUs)
• Artificial Intelligence on AWS
• Machine Learning on AWS
• AWS Research & Technical Computing Tools

How Does the Cloud Help Cure Cancer?

The cloud can fuel cancer breakthroughs at a rapid speed and we are looking forward to seeing what the participants of the Data Science Bowl are able to achieve using the cloud. For example, The Algorithms, Machines, and People (AMP) Lab at the University of California Berkeley builds scalable machine learning and data analysis technologies that turn raw data into actionable research insights, shared globally.

Among the many experiments run by the AMP Lab, one area of concentration is in the field of genomics and cancer research. Due to the vast amount of data that genome sequencing produces, the AMP Lab leverages AWS cloud-based compute power to quickly scale the compute resources needed to analyze algorithms that are used in genomics work. As a result, researchers are able to use many machines in the cloud simultaneously, to process genome data faster and more cost effectively than ever before.

Learn how more customers, like American Heart Association, National Institute of Health, and Harvard Medical School, use the AWS Cloud to revolutionize our understanding of disease and develop novel approaches to diagnosis and treatment.

Good luck to all participants!

Startups and small to midsized government agencies share many similarities – limited capital budgets, a pressure to meet deadlines and expectations, and a direct impact on people’s lives. With the AWS Cloud, startups like Lyft, Slack, and Thrive Market are able to be lean and agile and scale up and down quickly to respond to demand. If startups are able to use the cloud to minimize up-front capital costs, why shouldn’t any government agency—no matter the size?

With the successes startups have seen by building and scaling their services on AWS, government agencies too can bring the benefits of the cloud to citizens, while realizing numerous cost savings and efficiencies.

Invest in innovation, not infrastructure

Using the same model that startups use to maximize their initial capital, cities, counties, and localities are also turning to the cloud to solve some of the challenges facing governments today.

For example, the City of Asheville in North Carolina is no stranger to natural threats. Hurricane systems throughout the late summer and snowfall runoff in the spring leave the city under the constant threat of flooding. Hurricane Sandy led the city’s IT department to search for an offsite disaster recovery (DR) solution – a vital decision that had been put off due to the perceived cost and resource requirements of a cloud deployment.

The city used AWS to build an agile DR solution without the time, cost, and geographic risk of an on-premises data center. Without that capital expense, Asheville was able to reinvest resources toward continued testing of the DR system and expand functionality in asset management systems.

In addition to DR, governments have been turning to the cloud to lead public safety entities to cut down vital incident response time, to connect city transportation systems to operate at their most efficient, and to help build healthier communities with Health and Human Services.

Optimizing costs with AWS

One way that government differs from startups is that they have to adhere to strict annual budgets. With a devotion to making the most of taxpayer dollars, city, county, and local governments look to manage costs and still maintain the performance and capacity citizens require.

AWS allows these customers to control their spend by following a simple set of steps, such as:

1. Right-sizing services to meet capacity needs at the lowest cost
2. Saving when reserving instances for the year
3. Using the Spot Market
4. Monitoring and tracking service usage
5. Using Cost Explorer to optimize savings

Through variable cost structure, scalability, and cost optimization tools, AWS has saved its customers over $350 million, not including the coast avoidance in items such as real estate and energy that would be incurred in an on-premises data center.

To learn more about how your city, county, or local government can realize the benefits of the cloud, visit https://aws.amazon.com/stateandlocal/.

Three new services within the AWS GovCloud (US) region have received a Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) from the Joint Authorization Board (JAB) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). Amazon RDS for MySQL, Oracle, and PostgresSQL, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, and AWS CloudTrail were assessed at the HIGH baseline and received the authorization.

“We are constantly listening to our customers and work to deliver more services to help accelerate their missions in the regions where they do business, and it is no different in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region,” said Teresa Carlson, VP of Worldwide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services. “We are thrilled to offer these three new services that meet the FedRAMP High baseline.”

Learn more about what new capabilities are available for U.S. government agencies to use to process their highly sensitive data, including Personal Identifiable Information (PII), Protected Health Information (PHI), Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), criminal justice information (CJI), and financial data in AWS GovCloud (US):

• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), MySQL, Oracle, Postgres: Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing agencies up to focus on their applications and mission.
• Amazon CloudWatch Logs: U.S. government agencies can now use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor and troubleshoot their systems and applications using their existing system, application, and custom log files. They can send their existing log files to CloudWatch Logs and monitor these logs in near real-time. CloudWatch Logs can be used to monitor logs for specific phrases, values, or patterns. For example, an agency could set an alarm on the number of errors that occur in their system logs or view graphs of web request latencies from their application logs.
• AWS CloudTrail: AWS CloudTrail is a web service that records AWS API calls for accounts and delivers log files to the user. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by the AWS service.

Read more in the AWS Security blog post here. And contact us today to get started in AWS GovCloud (US).

Cloud computing can support the Department of Defense (DoD) mission by increasing innovation, efficiency, agility, and resiliency— all while reducing costs.

Comprised of small, highly empowered teams, DoD’s United States Digital Service (USDS) is breaking down innovation barriers, tackling mission-critical operations, and delivering more value with the cloud in highly regulated, unclassified environments.

Chris Lynch, Director of the Defense Digital Service, has been tasked with a push toward digital within the department. He recently spoke at AWS re:Invent about how DDS used the AWS Cloud to drive missions forward.

DDS encouraged the U.S. Air Force to use the cloud for testing. The program’s engineers needed regular and reliable test environments to more rapidly test software. The solution: build test environments in AWS GovCloud (US).

“We deployed our first ever national security system, or Impact Level 5, to AWS GovCloud (US). We are working on automatic builds and deployment. But the real impact is that when we are done, we are going to take something that took three weeks down to 15 minutes,” said Lynch.

The program has resulted in a cultural shift within the Air Force. Air Force Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves at re: Invent said the project has ignited a shift toward more oversight on the software development side of the acquisition process.

Watch the video of Chris Lynch at AWS re:Invent below.

The creation of the Defense Digital Service (DDS) shows progress toward Secretary Ash Carter’s goal to bring a culture of innovation in people, organizations, operations, and technology to the DoD. The DoD and the tech sector are working to support people who innovate, try new things, and iterate to recreate defense information technology.

In DefenseOne’s “Going Digital” event, Lynch spoke more about the work being done within the Defense Department and Intelligence Community to bring effective change through modernization efforts and harness promising technologies to tackle national security challenges.

Then, Steve Block, Senior Manager of Public Policy at Amazon, shared what the Department can do to better leverage the innovation happening in the commercial world today and what they can learn from industry experience as they continue to move toward a more modern IT environment.

Watch the viewcast here to learn more about how the DoD is modernizing defense in the cloud.

Two thousand sixteen saw global moments impacted by the cloud: presidential elections, treating virus outbreaks, and even handling traffic after the Chicago Cubs won the World Series! As the headlines took note of how these events impacted the lives of people across the globe, cloud computing was working behind the scenes to keep these technology services always on, accessible, and easy to use. Whether for downloading images of the surface of Mars or plotting out the best route to work, the AWS Cloud helped global governments, educational institutions, and nonprofits innovate to deliver better services to citizens and students.

Take a look back at 2016 and how the AWS Cloud powered innovations in policing, health, smart cities, education, and more.

Cloud-Powered Policing

Law enforcement agencies depend on AWS for solutions across the AWS Partner Network (APN) to connect their communities and improve public safety. These solutions provide first responders with real-time data, making often difficult situations as transparent as possible before police arrive on the scene.

For example, sensor technology alerts police officers when gunshots are detected providing complete visibility that improves officer safety in the field. Read more about the future of policing in these blogs.

Cloud-Powered Health

Public Health officials use the AWS Cloud to build healthier communities. The cloud aids initiatives, like monitoring air and water quality or epidemic management, with the data needed to protect citizens. Smaller, more citizen-engaged projects, like assisted living, elderly care, and wearable health devices, help medical personnel deliver the best care to their patients.

Learn more about cloud-enabled innovation in personalized medical treatment in this e-book.

Cloud-Powered Smart Cities

While a “smart city” can mean many things, what makes a city smart remains the same: data. In a mobile-driven world, AWS can help cities of all sizes gather, store, and distribute data in the AWS Cloud. Cities can then make data-driven decisions, modernizing programs that deliver measurable results for citizens.

For example, through open data and cloud technology, Transport for London (TfL) was able to deliver new services to the public, impacting the 24 million daily commuters using the Tube, buses, roads, trams, and freight, which has led to improvements in reliability, customer experience, and significant cost savings.

Cloud-Powered Education

The AWS Cloud impacts all corners of a campus and beyond. The cloud sparks education innovation by helping to reduce costs, improve service delivery, and increase student access to education. Explore the Campus on a Cloud map to learn how and where universities use the cloud every day.

AWS has over 7,000 education customers globally using the cloud to solve challenges, including: disaster preparedness, scaling web applications during peak loads like enrollment or graduation, supporting faster time to research results, creation of a cloud-ready next generation workforce with AWS Educate, and improved student outcomes and persistence through learning analytics and big data analysis.

Beginning their cloud journey by moving their web environment to AWS, University of Maryland, College Park focused on becoming a campus with no data centers. Watch this video to learn how the university uses Amazon WorkSpaces to give students and faculty access to software anytime, anywhere, from any device.

As we ring in 2017, we look forward to the innovations our customers will deliver in the New Year.

Check out more of our customer case studies here.

Thank you all for reading our blog this past year! From veterans and researchers to educators and engineers, our customers are changing the game in the public sector with the cloud.

To end the year and ring in 2017, we have compiled the top five most-read blog posts from 2016.

1. Cloud Transformation Maturity Model: Guidelines to Develop Effective Strategies for Your Cloud Adoption Journey – The Cloud Transformation Maturity Model offers a guideline to help organizations develop an effective strategy for their cloud adoption journey. This model defines characteristics that determine the stage of maturity, transformation activities within each stage that must be completed to move to the next stage, and outcomes that are achieved across four stages of organizational maturity, including project, foundation, migration, and optimization. Where are you on your journey? Read the post to learn more.
2. AWS Educate Now Available to U.S. Veterans – U.S.-based veterans, transitioning military personnel, and their spouses are eligible to create an AWS Educate account to get access to the resources needed to accelerate cloud-related learning endeavors to help power civilian career success.  From the frontline to the classroom, AWS is committed to prepping the next generation of IT and cloud professionals. Get started today.
3. A Practical Guide to Cloud Migration – To achieve full benefits of moving applications to the AWS platform, it is critical to design a cloud migration model that delivers optimal cost efficiency. This includes establishing a compelling business case, acquiring new skills within the IT organization, implementing new business processes, and defining the application migration methodology to transform your business model from a traditional on-premises computing platform to a cloud infrastructure. A Practical Guide to Cloud Migration: Migrating Services to AWS provides a high-level overview of the cloud migration process based on the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and is a great first read for customers who are thinking about cloud adoption.
4. AWS Offers Data Egress Discount to Researchers – The pace of research is no longer limited by the availability of computing resources. Researchers are beginning to rely on cloud computing to drive breakthrough science at breakneck speeds and AWS wants to fuel the pace of new discoveries by making it possible for all scientists to have their very own supercomputers in the cloud. AWS committed to making it easier for scientists to use its cloud storage, computing, and database services by waiving data egress fees for qualified researchers and academic customers; these are fees associated with “data transfer out from AWS to the Internet.”
5. IRS 990 Filing Data Now Available as an AWS Public Dataset – We announced that over one million electronic IRS 990 filings are available via Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Filings from 2011 to the present are currently available and the IRS will add new 990 filing data each month. Collaborating with the IRS allows us to improve access to this valuable data.

See you all in the New Year!

We hope you have had a chance to catch up on the security and compute services announced at re:Invent. Next up, we have the re:Invent updates on storage and ingestion that will benefit our public sector customers.

AWS Snowball Edge – Petabyte-scale Data Transfer with On-Board Compute

AWS Snowball Edge is our newest 100TB data transfer device, offering highly secure, on-board storage and in-flight compute capabilities with AWS Greengrass. Organizations can use AWS Snowball Edge to move massive amounts of data into and out of the AWS Cloud, use the device as a temporary storage tier for large local datasets, or seamlessly support edge workloads in remote or offline locations.

Snowball Edge connects to your organization’s existing applications and infrastructure using standard storage interfaces, streamlining the data transfer process, minimizing setup and integration, and helping ensure that the applications continue to run even when they are not able to access the cloud.

How does Snowball Edge accelerate data transfer to the cloud?

It has four times the network speed of the original AWS Snowball, built-in WiFi and cellular wireless communication, a Network File System (NFS) interface, and an Amazon S3-compatible endpoint. The device automatically encrypts all data stored. Encryption keys are managed with the AWS Key Management Service (KMS) and never stored on the device, ensuring that your most sensitive data is secure on site and in transit to AWS.

The AWS Snowball Edge device also comes with AWS Greengrass embedded, so you can execute AWS Lambda functions and process data locally, making it possible to collect and analyze sensor data streams, transcode multimedia content, compress images in real time, or run a local Amazon S3-compatible file server.

How it works

Jobs are created right from the AWS Management Console. Once a job is created, AWS automatically ships a Snowball Edge device to you. When you receive the device, simply attach it to your local network and then connect your applications. Once the device is ready to be returned, the E Ink shipping label will automatically update to the correct AWS facility, and the job status can be tracked via Amazon SNS generated text or email messages, or directly in the console.

AWS Snowball & HIPAA Compliance

AWS has expanded its HIPAA compliance program to include AWS Snowball, allowing you to transfer large amounts of data, including Protected Health Information (PHI), into and out of AWS securely and cost-effectively. Read the HIPAA Compliance whitepaper.

AWS Snowmobile – Move Exabytes of Data to the Cloud in Weeks, Not Years

Even with high-end connections, moving petabyte and exabyte-scale data to the cloud is challenging. Now migrating financial and regulatory records, scientific archives, and satellite imagery to the cloud won’t take years or decades. The AWS Snowmobile secure data truck stores up to 100 PB of data so customers can migrate data to the AWS Cloud in weeks.

Tamper-resistant AWS Snowmobile shipping containers attach to your network and appears as a local, NFS-mounted volume. Each AWS Snowmobile consumes about 350 kW of AC power and includes a network cable connected to a high-speed switch, capable of supporting 1 Tb/second of data transfer spread across multiple 40 Gb/second connections.

Snowmobile also incorporates multiple layers of logical and physical protection, including chain-of-custody tracking, 24/7 video surveillance and GPS tracking with cellular or satellite connectivity back to AWS. AWS Snowball offers 2560-bit encryption and encrypts with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) keys. We can even arrange for a security vehicle escort when the AWS Snowmobile is in transit and dedicated security guards while your AWS Snowmobile is on-premises.

New Amazon S3 Features

• Amazon S3 CloudWatch Metrics – Understand and improve the performance of your applications that use Amazon S3 by monitoring and alarming on 13 new Amazon S3 CloudWatch metrics. For web and mobile applications that depend on cloud storage, these metrics allow you to quickly identify and act on operational issues. You can receive one-minute Amazon S3 CloudWatch Metrics, set CloudWatch alarms, and access CloudWatch dashboards to view real-time operations and performance.
• Amazon S3 Object Tagging – With S3 Object Tagging, you can manage and control access for Amazon S3 objects. Amazon S3 Object Tags are key-value pairs applied to Amazon S3 objects which can be created, updated, or deleted at any time during the lifetime of the object. You’ll also have the ability to create Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, set up Amazon S3 Lifecycle policies, and customize storage metrics.
• Amazon S3 Analytics, Storage Class Analysis – With storage class analysis, you can analyze and visualize storage access patterns and transition the right data to the right storage, optimizing costs. You can configure a storage class analysis policy to monitor an entire bucket, a prefix, or object tag. This new Amazon S3 Analytics feature automatically identifies the optimal lifecycle policy to help you transition less frequently accessed storage to Standard Infrequent Access SIA and save.
• Amazon S3 Inventory – You can simplify and speed up business workflows and big data jobs using Amazon S3 Inventory, which provides a scheduled alternative to Amazon S3’s synchronous List API. Amazon S3 Inventory provides a CSV (Comma Separated Values) flat-file output of your objects and their corresponding metadata on a daily or weekly basis for an Amazon S3 bucket or a shared prefix.

Learn More.

New Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) Features

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) offers storage for use with Amazon EC2 instances and allows you to access file data from on-premises datacenters. You can now migrate file data to and from on-premises into Amazon EFS to support cloud bursting workloads and backups to the cloud when connected to your Amazon VPC with AWS Direct Connect.

New AWS Storage Gateway Provides File Interface to Objects in Amazon S3 Buckets

AWS Storage Gateway now provides a virtual on-premises file server, which enables you to store and retrieve Amazon S3 objects through standard file storage protocols. With file gateway, existing applications or devices can use secure and durable cloud storage without modification. File gateway simplifies moving data into Amazon S3 for in-cloud workloads, provides cost-effective storage for backup and archive workloads, or expands your on-premises storage into the cloud.

File gateway is available as a virtual machine image which you download from the AWS Management Console. To start using the new AWS Storage Gateway, click here.

Contact us to get started today with these new services.