Why AWS in Education: Transforming Education in the Cloud

©2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved

Why AWS in Education:

Transforming Education in the

CloudCurtis Bray, Manager, Solutions Architecture, Worldwide Public Sector, AWS

Derek Masseth, Senior Director, Cloud Services, University of Arizona

Q. Wade Billings, Sr. Director of Global IT Shared Services, Instructure

Bruce Vincent, Senior Technology Strategist and Director, Emerging Technologies, Stanford University

Strong growth and adoption

900+

government

agencies

3,400+

educational

institutions

11,200+

nonprofit

organizations

900+

government

agencies

3,400+

educational

institutions

11,200+

nonprofit

organizations

Used by educational institutions worldwide

Architected to meet enterprise security requirements

Certifications and accreditations for

workloads that matter

AWS CloudTrail - AWS API call

logging for governance & compliance

Stores data in

Amazon S3, or

archives it to

Amazon Glacier

Log and review

user activity

Research can’t afford to be slow

Add new dev environment

Add new prod environment

Add new disaster recovery (DR)

environment on East Coast

Add 100 servers for enrollment

Remove 100 servers after enrollment

Deploy 10,000 core HPC clusters

Shut down 10,000 core HPC clusters

AWS:

Infrastructure in minutesOld world:

Infrastructure in weeks

Everything changes with this kind of agility

A culture of innovation: Experiment often & fail without risk

On-premises

Experiment infrequently

Failure is expensive

Less innovation

Experiment often

Fail quickly at a low cost

More innovation

$ Millions Nearly $0

Development and test

University and departmental websites

Learning/course management systems

Distance learning

Massive Open Online Courses

(MOOCs)

High performance computing (HPC)

Storage and backup

Data archival/Collaboration

Disaster recovery

Student information system software

Virtual desktops

Data center migrations

Student lab environments

Education use cases on AWS

©2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved

University of Arizona

Derek Masseth

Senior Director, Cloud Services, University of Arizona

University of Arizona

2.0B budget

17 formal colleges

228 buildings392 acres

Research 1 land grant

40,600 students15,300 faculty

& staff

356 degree fields

Higher education crossroads

Higher education needs:

• Responsiveness

• Value

• Global Reach

• Low cost

• Accessiblity

Cloud enables:

• Agility

• Flexibility

• Global Presence

• Savings

• Elasticity

2010 2015

Today

2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

Faculty & staff email6/15/2011

Cloud-focused role created4/15/2014

Cloud training with pilot projects6/1/2014

Cloud training for directors9/15/2014

Student email migrated to gmail

1/1/2010

Private cloud POC

4/1/2012

RFP for IaaS

1/1/2014

1-day primer training

2/15/2015

Cloud first strategy

5/6/2015

1/1/2010 - 10/31/2013Focus ontechnology

11/1/2013 - 4/9/2015Shifting focusto people

UA cloud journey -

A shift in focus

AWS in our classrooms

• ArcGIS

instruction

– Pre-built

– For distance

learners

– Scalable

• Amazon RDS in the Business College

– Top-ranked program

– Capstone project in analytics

Committed cloud projects

• Workspaces in

ResLife

• Websites

• ERP grants

• Disaster

recovery

• IT Help desk

• Student Information

System

• Photographic

archive

• DNS

• High performance

computing

What’s next for us?

Develop org structures

Transition cloud ops to central IT

Continue to focus on the people

Develop skills

Perform financial modeling

Automate bill distribution

©2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved

Instructure

Q. Wade Billings

Sr. Director of Global IT Shared Services

EDUCATION

$4.4 Trillion

• Founded 2008• Launched Canvas in 2011• Launched Bridge in 2015• Raised ~$90MM in funding• Headquartered in Salt Lake City• 600 employees on four continents

March 27, 2008

Brian and Devlin (dba Instructure) 50,000

Fifty Thousand Dollars and 0/100

Making Awesome!! Joshua Coates

Joshua Coates

Salt Lake City, Utah

*Not an actual check

Peak user count: 216.1K (02/09/2015)

Number of orgs using platform: 1,300+

Number of provisioned users: 16.5M

Number of production clusters: 41

Number of servers online at peak: 1700

PB of data under management: 1.5

Self-managed hosted provisioningN

eeded

capacity/p

erf

orm

ance

Semester start Unexpected usage Midterms Finals

Most critical times for uptime/availability

Canvas automated provisioningN

eeded

Capacity/P

erf

orm

ance

Semester start Unexpected usage Midterms Finals

Most critical times for uptime/availability

©2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved

Cloud Trends at Stanford

Bruce Vincent

Sr. Technology Strategist, Stanford University

Some of the Ways the Cloud Supports Stanford

• Teaching and learning– MOOC

– Learning management system (LMS)

• Research– Alacrity and capacity

• IT practice and infrastructure– Scale, geodiversity, availability

– Automation and DevOps

IT practice and infrastructure – recent progressMaking cloud resources more accessible, secure, portable, and cost effective

Summer 2013

Emergency

Stanford

website

Summer 2014

Stanford

homepage

Fall 2014

Cloud Platform

Initiative

Winter 2014

Continuous

integration

deployments

2015

Containerization

deployments

Future

What’s the goal?

IT practice and infrastructure – DevOpsMaking cloud resources more accessible, secure, portable, and cost effective

Upgrades without service interruption

Portable stack

Entire environment builds automatically

Rapid deployment

So…much…change.

• The platform

• The skills

• The work

• The possibilities

SAN FRANCISCO