Cloud Infrastructure Community Program

[Matthew T Rich <>]

Hello higher ed AWS community members!

 

On June 9th the NET+ AWS service advisory group gathered for its annual in person meeting at Amazon’s HQ2 in Virginia on the eve of the AWS Public Sector Summit for a series of conversations with Amazon teams. This was our once-a-year opportunity to share the community’s experiences and perspectives directly with Amazon service teams and push for real improvements. To their credit, the Amazonians were highly engaged and receptive.

 

Here’s what we covered:

 

Challenges Managing AWS Credits

Several schools shared the issues they face managing AWS credit awards, including the lack of a way to share credits across multiple accounts, the poor visibility of credits outside the account they are awarded to, confusion around which services are covered (or not) by credits, and the need to tweak how credits interact with savings plans and reserved instances. The good news is that Amazon is already working to address some of these challenges! Explaining our use cases and hearing in some detail how Amazon billing systems work opened eyes on both sides of the table, and we look forward to improvements in this area in the near term.

Read the position paper here: Credit Sharing Challenges and Possibilities

 

Improving Storage Pricing Predictability

Object storage pricing gets more complicated with each new feature release, and the institutions present made the case that this complexity is actively pushing customers away. Higher education differs from most AWS customers in many ways, but an especially important one is our prioritization of simplicity and predictability over performance when it comes to storage. The Amazon storage team heard that message loud and clear and also shared that they are working internally to address it. We are all agreed on this point: simplifying the storage story will only make it easier for higher ed customers to adopt AWS.

Read the position paper here: Improving Storage Pricing Predictability

 

Engaging the Community

If you’re looking for a way to get involved, this one's for you!

 

The community around higher ed cloud adoption sets our industry apart, and everyone present wanted to make sure higher ed customers are getting the most value they can from this community. We discussed ideas to drive that engagement even higher, including:

• Creating a document on the benefits of engaging with the higher ed cloud community for Amazon sales teams to share
• Publicizing a schedule for future biweekly Tech Share meeting topics
• Crowdsourcing contacts at NET+ AWS subscriber schools to get the right people invited to community events

 

The NET+ AWS service advisory group community will be actively working on these items in the coming months, so look for invitations to help out!

 

Other Topics

• GPU Availability: Amazon does not plan to offer below-cost access to GPU-accelerated instances, but knows they need to help customers find value by matching AI/ML workloads to the right instance types. Between custom silicon Trainium instances and previous-generation NVidia instances, there are plenty of lower-cost, highly capable instance types.
• Q for Business: Schools shared where they are realizing value from GenAI applications, and the technical, financial, and other barriers to further GenAI adoption.
• Security Lake: Architects from the Security Lake team presented to the group on use cases, including flexible permissions for querying security log data and potentially lower cost for log storage.

 

Huge thanks to the Amazon higher ed community engagement team (the indispensable Jan Day and Kevin Murakoshi) for hosting us, and thanks as well to the committee members who were able to attend, whether in person or virtually! And major, major shoutout to the schools that helped prepare our white papers on credit sharing and storage pricing. This work has real, tangible impact on higher ed AWS customers, and I’m proud to be part of such a brilliant community!

 

Many thanks,

Matthew Rich

NET+ AWS Service Advisory Group Chair