Inspiring the public sector to innovate on AWS

Davis-Muffett shares how AWS supports the public sector.

The AWS Public Sector Summit 2018 in Singapore was about inspiring the audience to create solutions to problems. “What will today's summit inspire you to build on AWS?” was a theme that ran through the keynote session for the event.

“We're delivering what you need so you can focus on delivering on the mission,” said Patricia Davis-Muffett, Director, Global Public Sector Marketing for AWS. “Take this technology and go build.” She pointed out that anyone in any capacity can become a builder, not just developers.

Some of the resources that AWS has in place to help people get up to speed include free digital training and entry-level certification.

In November 2017 AWS Training and Certification launched unlimited access to more than 100 new courses built by AWS experts. The digital courses are typically just 10 minutes long and meant to impart basic knowledge on AWS services and solutions.

The free training includes the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials curriculum, which helps members of the public to prepare for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner examination. AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner is a prerequisite for other credentials.

AWS Educate, which provides students aged at least 14 with free access to learning content and AWS services designed to build knowledge and skills in cloud computing. 

The programme has already reached more than 10,000 educators and hundreds of thousands of students in over 200 countries and territories, said Peter Moore, Regional MD, Worldwide Public Sector, Asia Pacific and Japan, AWS, in keeping with LinkedIn's naming of cloud and distributed computing as the skills which are most in demand for the 3^rd year in a row.

The programme is continually refreshed. In June, an Amazon Alexa badge with 10-15 hours of dedicated Alexa skills training was launched, for example, while the month before a new machine learning pathway teaches students about solving problems with the AWS artificial intelligence (AI) Suite came online. AWS Educate also introduced access to Udacity’s Nanodegree Program on Machine Learning in May.

In 2017, AWS introduced more than 1,400 new capabilities.

Davis-Muffett said that AWS has a “fluency in the cloud that others simply can't match”. “We constantly innovate. We're pushing ourselves harder and harder,” she said. “No matter where you want to deploy technology, we are there for you.”

AWS has been adding to its capabilities regularly. In June, for instance, AWS announced that Amazon AppStream 2.0 can be used to visualise the SAP graphical user interface (GUI) in any browser that is HTML5-compatible. AppStream is a fully managed application streaming service.

EC2 Bare Metal instances with 6 TB, 9 TB, and 12 TB of memory, designed to run mission-critical deployments of SAP HANA are to be generally available in Q3/Q418. Bare metal instances, rolled out in May 2018, provide users' applications with direct access to the processor and memory resources of the underlying server.

“While 12 TB instances are certainly a big step forward, we don’t plan to stop there, and are working on even bigger ones — instances with more than 16 TB of memory are in the works as well!” shared Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist for AWS, in a blog post dated June 2018.

“It's a true builders' toolkit with everything that you can need,” Davis-Muffett commented. “Everything you need is here in AWS, and it all can be deployed in that quick and innovative manner that you know.”

There are four ways to work with AWS, she said. Re-hosting, or “lift and shift”, allows public sector organisations to benefit from the cloud. Re-platforming can offer further efficiencies, while re-provisioning provides more control as users pick and choose what they re-platform and what they take into cloud-native mode. Alternatively, users can choose a complete re-architectural rewrite, decoupling the applications that they were running on-premise.

“The transformation is not-one-size-fits-all,” she noted.

Lee explains what Singapore's NDI is all about.

Several public sector customers spoke about using the cloud to build innovative solutions, including Kendrick Lee, Deputy Director, National Digital Identity (NDI), Government Technology Agency of Singapore. As part of the national digital identity programme in Singapore Lee is helping to build a community of developers, businesses and the government that is based in the cloud.

The national digital identity, accessible through the MyInfo portal, offers members of the public a single, trusted digital identity for participating private sector and government bodies. The owner of that identity authorises access to data and services and the sharing of that data, so documents need only be submitted once.

“It changes the way we transact digitally. Transactions are more seamless,” said Lee. Businesses benefit as they receive machine-processable data, and no longer need to handle uploaded documents or data verification.

Various updates that can be viewed through the MyInfo
status dashboard.

MyInfo was launched in 2017 and has already been embraced by the private sector, with more than 70 private sector services accepting the digital identity profiles and a total of 160 to be offered by the end of the year. Instant account opening services by banks OCBC and DBS make use of the technology, Lee noted, as do UOB car loans, which can be approved in 15 minutes via MyInfo, as opposed to three days previously. On average, transaction times across providers have been slashed by 80%, Lee said.

With half a million businesses in Singapore, Lee's agency could not predict how much interest there would be in the development tools to support MyInfo. At the same time the organisation knew it had to respond quickly. The decision was made to go with a scalable engagement model for the NDI Developer and Partner Portal while keeping all personal data on-premise.

“The beauty of using cloud is the fact that you just use it. You didn't have to buy a server, rack-and-stack it, find a space for it. You could try before you buy. It allowed us to turn around things very quickly,” Lee said.

Today, AWS helps to monitor availability and events of the MyInfo application in addition to running an engagement portal. Lee noted that there is end-to-end visibility of each portion of the application even though different components of it reside on different architectures and systems, a feat that would not have been made possible with other technology, he said.

Dr Yun.

Dr Sang-Ho Yun, Disaster Response Lead, Advanced Rapid Imaging & Analysis (ARIA) Team, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), processes massive amounts of satellite data in the cloud to deliver disaster response products quickly. “We need the elasticity to enable rapid responses,” he said, referring to the capability of requesting more compute power and other resources as and when needed.

The JPL is able to take synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite data of the aftermath of a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, volcano eruption or typhoon to create flood proxy maps and damage proxy maps within hours, showing where there is damage and allowing disaster response agencies and search-and-rescue teams to estimate the number of households affected.

JPL recently built in further redundancy with the opening of a mirror in Singapore, which is not at risk for earthquakes in the way the JPL headquarters in California is said to be. The geographical separation has allowed JPL to take advantage of time zone differences and respond more efficiently respond, Dr Yun said.

Dr Matthew Berryman, MD, Across theCloud, shared his work with Reach, a cloud-based decision support system created for Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors without Borders). The platform, built on AWS, brings institutional data, social media and other data sources together to help MSF analyse and respond more effectively to disasters around the world.

The Reach interface. 

The different AWS services used by Reach.

Across the Cloud is also involved with PetaBencana.id, which harnesses the power of social media to gather, sort, and display information about flooding in real time for several Indonesian cities. Across the Cloud developed a scalable and reliable architecture, implemented a DevOps pipeline, deployed the system on AWS, and developing Internet of Things water level sensors as part of the project.

Explore:

Take the free digitally-delivered AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials course

Read the WorkSmart Asia blog post about instant credit card application approvals at DBS via MyInfo

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