Amazon Launches New AWS Initiative As Part Of A Broader Global Technology Response To COVID-19


Amazon Launches New AWS Initiative As Part Of A Broader Global Technology Response To COVID-19

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has had a profound impact on enabling technology to scale up with the growth of the Internet and online services. They enabled modern cloud computing which has in turn enabled services such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and others to scale so dramatically. One of the reason all your favorite websites are still online when people are clamoring for information about COVID-19 is because of the cloud.

Today AWS announced the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative, touted as “a program to support customers who are working to bring better, more accurate, diagnostics solutions to market faster and promote better collaboration across organizations that are working on similar problems.”

More specifically, AWS are investing $20 million to “accelerate diagnostic research, innovation, and development to speed our collective understanding and detection of COVID-19 and other innovate diagnostic solutions to mitigate future infectious disease outbreaks.”

35 global research institutions, startups, and businesses are jumpstarting the program, which will be open to accredited research institutions and private entities. The overall goal is to further accurate detection (which is critical in pandemic scenarios), facilitate more effective diagnostics research, and enable COVID-19 research to tap into scalable compute resources which are the hallmark of AWS. Those of you interested in learning more can find out here.

AWS’s new initiative will also bring together a cavalcade of scientists, health policy experts and industry leaders to form a technical advisory group. Steve Davis, a member of the group jumped in, “The world needs more and more private sector innovation to combat this pandemic. Amazon’s commitments and participation are very welcome, particularly since the lack of significant next-generation diagnostic tools remains a large gap in most health systems. A platform to link research, digital capabilities, and new products to customers globally is an exciting venture.”

Exciting stuff.

An Industry and Community Response

A cynic could look at this and other announcements as merely an opportunity to tap into the current wave of COVID-19 news to generate revenue, but AWS are taking a trajectory that is becoming increasingly common: companies and institutions rolling their sleeves up to support the cause.

The examples are flowing out every day. Microsoft launched their Coronavirus tracker. Google has launched a screening website. John Hopkins University has built a map to track COVID-19 data. Zoom has lifted their video limitations to support the army of new people working from home. There are many examples of companies adapting to play a supporting role in the crisis.

Where Amazon’s announcement is especially interesting is that AWS has enabled many open source projects to prosper by providing accessible tools for communities to collaborate around common projects. In the infrastructure world, projects such as Kubernetes, TensorFlow, and Prometheus have become incredibly popular because communities can build powerful open source infrastructure software together. Much of this is deployed on AWS.

Similarly, open source developers have taken up the mantle to help with COVID-19.

The John Hopkins COVID-19 map and data I mentioned earlier are in GitHub. Nextstrain provides real-time tracking of pathogen evolution used to work out a disease’s family history which in turn can provide insight into future behavior. CHIME is enabling hospitals to enter information about their facility and population and then modify assumptions around COVID-19’s spread and behavior. PrivateKit and SafePaths from MIT are projects to enable secure and private sharing of individual information that can support the containment of infections.

For many years, open source projects and their carefully curated communities have enabled enormous collaborative potential to be channeled into shared problems. COVID-19 is becoming a true test of this potential and it is fantastic to see that the lines between software and infrastructure are blurring more and more every day as the broader technology community weighs into the fight.

Jono Bacon is the author of ‘People Powered: How communities can supercharge your business, brand and teams’, published by HarperCollins and now available.


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