Amazon.com has announced a grant program that offers academia free access to its cloud services. The program, titled AWS in Education, offers $100 per student worth of free usage of its services, but only to courses and academics approved by Amazon. Faculty and researchers around the globe can apply online for the grants, which will be judged on the “originality” of their ideas. Amazon has committed to donating at least $1 million worth of free AWS access, but doesn’t have a set timeline.
According to the AWS in Education website, AWS in Education provides a set of programs that enable the worldwide academic community to easily leverage the benefits of Amazon Web Services for teaching and research. With AWS in Education, educators, academic researchers, and students can apply to obtain free usage credits to tap into the on-demand infrastructure of Amazon Web Services to teach advanced courses, tackle research endeavors and explore new projects – tasks that previously would have required expensive up-front and ongoing investments in infrastructure.
With AWS you can requisition compute power, storage, database functionality, content delivery, and other services — gaining access to a suite of elastic IT infrastructure services as you demand them. AWS enables the academic community to inexpensively and rapidly build on global computing infrastructure to pursue course projects and accelerate their productivity and research results, while enjoying the same benefits of reliability, elasticity, and cost-effectiveness used by industry.
The AWS in Education program offers:
- Teaching Grants for educators using AWS in courses (plus access to selected course content resources)
- Research Grants for academic researchers using AWS in their work
- Project Grants for student organizations pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors; Tutorials for students that want to use AWS for self-directed learning
- Solutions for university administrators looking to use cloud computing to be more efficient and cost-effective in the university’s IT Infrastructure
