AWS have recently announced a memorandum of understanding with Crown Commercial Services, called the One Government Value Agreement (OGVA). OGVA is intended to help UK public sector customers to accelerate their use of and derive greater value from AWS Cloud services. It is available for use by any UK public sector organisation (as defined in […]
Category: News
Industry news, technology updates and events related to the use of cloud in education.
Project Bicep – beyond ARM templates
One of the key concepts and advantages of public cloud hosting is the use of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). IaC allows repeatable results and faster, simpler automation and orchestration. These can drastically reduce the time to deploy resources and provide a built-in level of quality, change control and versioning. However, a certain amount of time […]
Microsoft have recently announced the general availability of Immersive Reader, one of the Azure Cognitive Services. Immersive Reader is probably more applicable to schools and, maybe, FE than to universities but is interesting nonetheless: Empowering remote learning with Azure Cognitive Services https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/empowering-remote-lea…. Immersive Reader is an Azure Cognitive Service within the Azure AI platform that […]
As must be clear to everyone by now, there has been a massive spike in demand for public cloud services since the coronavirus outbreak first hit us. Microsoft report that whole countries have gone from zero use of cloud to deliver teaching to 100% coverage of cloud-based remote learning in a matter of weeks. MIcrosoft […]
AWS silly season – here we go
The AWS re:Invent annual conference in Las Vegas kicks-off next week, which means we are about to be snowed under by hundreds of new service announcments, product updates and the like. This year, AWS have started this process slightly early, so as not to overwhelm people during the week of the conferenece. There have been […]
AWS Savings Plans
AWS have announced a new pricing feature called Savings Plans, offering a way of saving up to 72% on your compute (EC2 and Fargate) spend. Even though I suspect that in most cases the realised savings will be lower than this headline figure, there is no doubt that they will be substantial in many cases. […]

The RCUK Cloud Working Group are hosting their 3rd annual workshop at the Francis Crick Institute in London on January 8th 2018. This event will bring together researchers and technical specialists to share expertise in the application of cloud computing technology for the research community. The meeting will include presentations from a range of […]