Today’s students come to education with different expectations than students did a decade ago, given their confirmed status as digital natives. In response, education must transform to meet those student needs. Universities are adopting cloud to be more agile and responsive. Platforms being used to teach students have had to transform as well. And education technology companies are emerging to champion new models of education. This session will feature why AWS is an ideal fit for this transformative moment in education and highlight customer examples across the education ecosystem. The session will highlight how cloud can accelerate breakthroughs in educational models and learning outcomes by providing on-demand access to powerful computing that enables dynamic content, video lecture capture and self-paced and distance models and how educational institutions leverage cloud to address their unique technology needs.

1. ©2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved
Why AWS in Education:
Transforming Education in the
Cloud
Curtis 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

2. 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

3. Used by educational institutions worldwide

4. 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

5. 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 minutes
Old world:
Infrastructure in weeks
Everything changes with this kind of agility

6. 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

7. 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

8. ©2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved
University of Arizona
Derek Masseth
Senior Director, Cloud Services, University of Arizona

9. University of Arizona
2.0B budget
17 formal
colleges
228 buildings
392 acres
Research 1
land grant
40,600 students
15,300 faculty
& staff
356 degree
fields

10. Higher education crossroads
Higher education needs:
• Responsiveness
• Value
• Global Reach
• Low cost
• Accessiblity
Cloud enables:
• Agility
• Flexibility
• Global Presence
• Savings
• Elasticity

11. 2010 2015
Today
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Faculty & staff email
6/15/2011
Cloud-focused role created
4/15/2014
Cloud training with pilot projects
6/1/2014
Cloud training for directors
9/15/2014
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 - 10/31/2013
Focus on
technology
11/1/2013 - 4/9/2015
Shifting focus
to people
UA cloud journey -
A shift in focus

12. 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

13. Committed cloud projects
• Workspaces in
ResLife
• Websites
• ERP grants
• Disaster
recovery
• IT Help desk
• Student Information
System
• Photographic
archive
• DNS
• High performance
computing

14. 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

15. ©2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved
Instructure
Q. Wade Billings
Sr. Director of Global IT Shared Services

16. 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

17. 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

23. 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

25. Self-managed hosted provisioning
Needed
capacity/performance
Semester start Unexpected usage Midterms Finals
Most critical times for uptime/availability

26. Canvas automated provisioningNeeded
Capacity/Performance
Semester start Unexpected usage Midterms Finals
Most critical times for uptime/availability

27. ©2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved
Cloud Trends at Stanford
Bruce Vincent
Sr. Technology Strategist, Stanford University

28. 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

29. IT practice and infrastructure – recent progress
Making 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?

30. IT practice and infrastructure – DevOps
Making cloud resources more accessible, secure, portable, and cost effective
Upgrades without service
interruption
Portable stack
Entire environment builds
automatically
Rapid deployment

31. So…much…change.
• The platform
• The skills
• The work
• The possibilities

32. SAN FRANCISCO