In January, Amazon Web Services’s (AWS) Skills to Jobs Tech Alliance chose West Virginia as the fourth state in the nation as a partner, giving the Mountain State access to cloud computing services, funding and more for the purpose of better training and upskilling the state’s technology workers.
Through the alliance, a number of employers, as well as higher education institutions like West Virginia University, Marshall University and West Virginia State University, have new tools at their disposal.
David Krovich, a research associate with WVU’s Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, said that Amazon Web Services is a collection of roughly 100 different products, all of which are cloud based.
Perhaps the most popular initiative, he said, is the AWS Infrastructure as a Service model, which provides anything that would normally be in a data center virtually through the cloud.
Krovich himself developed a web application called CSSP that plugs on top of AWS, which he said allows him to more easily delegate and distribute class materials and more to his students.
“AWS gives you all of the infrastructure and everything you need, but it doesn’t have an easy way to delegate the resources,” Krovich said. “This is bridging that gap.
I can assign Google email address to give them access to resources in AWS. CSSP is facilitating all of that.
It’s been used in support of cybersecurity classes here at WVU. …
“We need cloud technology. I want it to be an open-source product that any high school or college can download, point at their AWS account and be good to go.
In West Virginia, we’ve got to be creative in terms of how we compete, and this is an awesome thing that gives us a level playing field.
We’re not going to be behind in any regard with this kind of technology and the cloud.”
