How do IT giants help education? Part 3: Amazon Web Services

For 25 years, Amazon has grown from an online bookstore to one of the leaders in several areas at once. About a third of the cloud services market belongs to him. Another interesting fact: thanks to the use of microservices and continuous deployment, the company’s employees deployed something for the 192 million (!) Times in 2019. Well, there’s someone to learn from.

This year AWS launched a pilot project – AWS Educate Student Ambassador, and I was honored to be one of the ambassadors. So the writing of this part brought me particular pleasure.

If you read the previous two parts, you know that the possibilities of Google and Microsoft considered in them are limited in geography. If you have not read it, I recommend that you familiarize yourself.

AWS Educate is used in more than 200 countries around the world (compared to a few dozen Google for Education and just over 140 in Azure for students). Amazon does not offer any free educational support services, but they do have one unique offer, which I will discuss below. At the very end there will be a link to registration.

It is noteworthy that the AWS Educate program, apparently, is little known and underestimated in the post-Soviet space (in any case, judging by the geography of the participants of Cloud Ambassador and Student Ambassador). I hope this post allows you to somehow change the situation.

AWS Educate for Students

Students can register for an AWS Educate Starter account. Depending on whether your educational institution accepts in the program, you will receive different amounts to the account:

  • students of higher education will receive $ 100 if their institution takes part in the program, and $ 30 if not;
  • high school students will receive $ 75 and $ 30 respectively.

The amount is provided for 12 months. The range of services is somewhat limited, but most are available. If after their expiration you are still a pupil or student of this educational institution, you will be able to receive the same amount. To register, you must specify the e-mail provided by the institution.

The AWS Educate Starter dashboard is different from the regular AWS console. It is rather a small portal for those who want to connect their careers with the technologies offered by AWS. There are training materials integrated into career paths and badges. Each career path is from 25 to 45 hours of training materials and practical tasks on a specific topic.

Badges, in turn, are courses that focus on one or more specific technologies provided by Amazon. The duration of this course is 10-15 hours.

In addition to training materials, the account has built-in opportunities for starting a career – a job seeker profile, which will automatically display your started and completed courses, and a job catalog linked to your career path.

Since 2020, Amazon has launched a program AWS Educate Student Ambassador. Its goal is to select the most active students who would further promote the AWS Educate program in their educational institutions. In return, the selected participants will receive additional credit to their account, access to training and events from Amazon, private testing of products and a souvenir. Plus, the resume of the participants goes to the company’s base, and the most active and useful participants may well be invited to work.

AWS Educate for Educators

Teachers may also receive some AWS fees. However, unlike students, teachers can not only create an AWS Educate Starter account, but also apply credit to a regular account. The amount is slightly different:

  • $ 200 for educational institutions participating in the program, and $ 75 for the rest if using a regular AWS account;
  • $ 150 and $ 50 respectively if using an AWS Educate Starter account.

To use a regular account, you need a credit card, but it also provides more options.

A very useful opportunity for teachers is the Classroom. It allows you to create a virtual environment for the practical training of your students for free. You can invite your students to a virtual classroom, and they will receive a separate amount on their AWS Educate Starter account to complete your assignments. Within the classes, templates are provided that correspond to a certain field (big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and others).

As with students, teachers have various opportunities for learning and certification. I did not have the opportunity to see the account for teachers from the inside, but, as far as I can see from the description, teachers can access materials created by both AWS and other teachers, as well as export materials for further publication in LMS. Plus, discounts on some training and certification are available.

By analogy with the Student Ambassador program, for teachers there is one year earlier AWS Educate Cloud Ambassador. If you are an experienced AWS user or trainer, be sure to try the offensive cycle. You will also receive exclusive access to materials, discounts and buns.

AWS Educate for Education

As I mentioned, one of the main advantages of registering an educational institution in the program is a higher amount of loans for students and teachers. Registration is free, the link will be given below.

There is another unique offer – the program AWS Educate Cloud Degree. Its goal is to help educational institutions bring their curriculum into line with market requirements. The phrase “forget everything that you taught at the university,” I think, is familiar to many. Someone, perhaps, even from personal experience. Amazon, together with employers, has prepared a set of recommendations that allow students to enter entry-level professionals ready for the job market and help implement them.

Disclamer The registration link contains a referral code. It does not give any advantage to either you or me, however, it helps to track my activity as an ambassador. There is no commercial gain in this, so please do not judge strictly. So, students, teachers and university representatives can create an AWS Educate account here. After submitting the application, you can write to me in PM, I will disturb the people responsible for validating and activating the account.

AWS Activate

In addition to educational programs, Amazon offers support to start-ups that arise on the basis of educational institutions and not only. As part of the assistance, $ 1000 promotional loans are offered to your AWS account (valid for 2 years) and $ 350 loans to AWS Developer Support (valid for 1 year). The project must be operational, it must have either its own website, or a page on LinkedIn or a platform with business information about a startup (Crunchbase, AngelList, etc.). Formal registration of the company is not required. Projects that previously received any bonuses from AWS directly or through various accelerators are not allowed to participate.

Ambassadors have a responsibility to pre-evaluate startups for compliance with the criteria, so I won’t give a direct link. If you are interested in this program – write in a personal description of the project, I will tell you about further steps.

More on the topic: Part 1: Google> Part 2: Microsoft> Part 3: Amazon Web Services

Instead of a conclusion

Hope it was helpful. Share information with familiar students, teachers, and deans. If you know any other educational suggestions from Amazon, write in the comments. Subscribe to us in order not to miss the continuation of the various educational opportunities.

On our behalf, we also want to offer all students a 50% discount for the first year of using our hosting services and cloud vps, and VPS with dedicated drives. For this you need register with us, make an order and, without paying for it, write a ticket to the sales department, providing a photo of yourself with your student. An employee of the sales department will adjust your order value in accordance with the terms of the promotion.

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