Industry Innovations: Experimenting in public with AWS

A conversation with AWS’ Coral Kennett.

Published On Sep 14, 2021

 

Cloud computing unlocked digital experimentation.

That sounds like a broad statement, but the advent of on-demand, pay-what-you-use computing resources fundamentally altered how we buy and use information technology. Instead of applying for a budget for servers, waiting for them to arrive, installing them, we can now spin up computing resources momentarily, for pennies.

But economics isn’t the main reason experimentation flourishes in cloud computing. For one thing, there’s no regret: If we’d applied for a computing budget, we were naturally going to defend our results and justify the continued existence of those computers as they depreciate and become obsolete. And for another, cloud computing isn’t just “virtual machines.” There are literally hundreds of different cloud services, from storage to analytics to computer vision to content delivery—building blocks atop which we can build sophisticated systems quickly.

Coral Kennett helps the public sector understand the impact of these changes. In her role as education lead for Amazon Web Services, she works with the University of British Columbia’s Cloud Innovation Centre, a public-private collaboration between UBC and AWS. In this interview, we discuss the inextricable link between Lean, Agile, Continuous Deployment, Devops and Cloud computing, and dig into a couple of fascinating projects in medicine and emergency services that the CIC has pioneered since its founding. 

For more information on Coral’s work and the projects she referenced in the conversation, please visit:
https://cic.ubc.ca/projects/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/building-culture-innovation-better-serve-citizens/
https://techcouver.com/2021/04/27/want-to-build-better-products-begin-with-working-backwards/

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