 Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for our webinar today, Using Cloud Technology to Enhance Your Mission with Brad Milms and James Devine from Amazon Web Services. So just before we get started, I wanted to go over a few housekeeping items so all callers will be muted. If you have questions, there is a chat box that you guys should see to the left-hand side. So feel free to ask questions throughout the presentation and we'll try and tackle them as we go along. There will also be a Q&A at the end so the last 15 minutes will be dedicated to Q&A. If you lose your Internet connection, just refresh your browser and use the link that was emailed to you to reconnect. Then if you have to drop off early or you want to watch the webinar again, the webinar will be hosted on techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. You'll also receive an email with the presentation, the recording, and the links. And if you're on social media, feel free to follow us at Techsoup and use the hashtag TSWebinars. Or like I said earlier, you can just send your questions in the Q&A and we'll try and get to each of them. So just a little bit about Techsoup before we get started. So we are located in 236 countries and territories. We serve over a million organizations and we partner with several technology partners like Adobe, Intuit, Microsoft. Today Amazon Web Services is here with us. So yeah, this is a little bit about our organization. So I want to give you guys a chance to practice the chat function. So if you guys want to maybe tell me where you're calling in from, and I can read out a few of the places you guys are calling in from. All right, so Michigan, Long Island, Iowa, Denver, Greenville, Bolivia, nice. Indianapolis. So okay, we have people calling in from all over the place which is nice to see. All right, so just a little bit about our partnership with Amazon Web Services. So if you're curious once the webinar is over you can see the link here, techsoup.org slash amazon-webservices. If you want to find out more once it's over and the speakers will also be going into a little bit of detail towards the end. So now I'm going to go ahead and introduce our presenters. So we have James Devine who is the nonprofit solutions architect with Amazon Web Services. And prior to AWS he was the senior infrastructure engineer at MITRE where he was a nonprofit government contractor. And he helped various government organizations solve some of the toughest problems using cloud computing. And then we also have Brad Milms who is the nonprofit representative at Amazon Web Services. And he has over five years of supporting nonprofits by helping them to evolve and enhance their technology-based operations. Myself, my name is Seema Tucker and I'm the online learning producer here at Techsoup. And then we have a couple people who are going to be on the back end helping with chat so you'll probably see their names. LaShika who is the associate program manager here at Techsoup. And then Jayman who is a program manager and CSR person over at Amazon Web Services. So he will be answering any Amazon related questions. All right, so now I'm going to hand it over. All right, thank you Seema. This is Brad Milms here. As Seema just went over I'm going to be talking about the background of the organizations we talk about and then James will dive a little bit into the technical solutions. But what we really aim to do here with this presentation is pick out three use cases that have overarching themes that we think will apply to the majority, if not everyone on this call. Kind of the big themes we see in nonprofits is just getting started with AWS, some of the hurdles that they encounter and how we've been able to solve them. And hopefully you get some useful action items out of this. As Seema said, we're going to have an email at the end that please do feel free to reach out with any questions at all. So yeah, we're going to get started here. Just through a level set we just wanted to ask a quick question. We'll give you about 15 seconds to answer. Just how familiar are you with Amazon Web Services just to kind of set the groundwork here. Looks like the majority is, I don't know what AWS is and heard of AWS but not using it, which is perfect. It's exactly the people we want to talk to and hopefully the themes that we cover here resonate with you. And then again, we can tell you more about it following up if you're interested. Okay, thank you Seema. So the first organization we're going to touch on here is World Elephant Day. Now the main takeaway that everybody might be able to relate to here is we provided a solution to a small organization that was new to AWS. Judging on those results we just saw, I think a lot of organizations here fall into that category. And this organization specifically dealt with seasonal or spiky traffic. And in this case it's just one day of exceptionally high traffic and then scaling back down to just normal everyday operations. So a little bit about World Elephant Day. It's an international, annual event. International is important there. I think James is going to go into that a little bit more. It's on August 12th. It's dedicated to the preservation and protection of the world's elephants. Their main objective is to create awareness of everything that's going on with elephants. I'm sure many people have heard about the poaching, habitat loss, and just the overall human elephant conflict that goes on. From a technical standpoint they started with just the website. And then they expanded their marketing and social awareness to social media which actually worked very, very well for them. In year three they saw a massive jump in usage from 30,000 users and 70,000 page views. From a vision standpoint, from a publicity standpoint, this was great news. Unfortunately they did not have the infrastructure to handle this. So they actually crashed on World Elephant Day for eight hours. You can imagine how critical that is if you have one day that you're gaining 90% of your donations from to be down for eight hours. So obviously they lost donations and along with that comes credibility, the loss of credibility. So their challenge was how can they have a website, an environment that can scale for this one day but they don't have to pay for the capacity for the other 364 days because traditionally if you have an off-premise solution you have to be provisioned for that one day of huge spike in traffic and you have to pay for it accordingly. Which was not something that the World Elephant Day organization could do. They could not afford to do that. So we had to provide them with a solution that could scale to those extremes on that day and then scale back down when they were not there. And now from real-world results, it's been an extreme success. China actually banned all commerce and ivory at the end of 2017 and the US is at a near total ban of commercial trade of ivory. So not only have we been able to provide the technology that allows them to scale and meet their mission but they've been able to continue to make a real change in the world. And now James is going to go into a little bit of exactly how we help them do that. Thanks, Brad. So I think this is a great use case of how we can take the AWS platform and really help our nonprofits not only meet their business needs but exceed them. So the same great technology is that some of our largest customers like Netflix and Capital One have access to. The smallest nonprofit have access to as well. So you have that same global platform. We have 18 regions around the world and we segment our regions off into availability zones and we have 53 availability zones within those 18 regions. So they want accessing our platform, we have access to that global infrastructure and you can scale resources up and down as needed. So you can imagine World Elephant Day, 364 days out of the year, they don't need the infrastructure that they need for that one day when they need to scale up. So using our elastic load balancing service they can dynamically load balance traffic and that can grow as they need. So we couple that with auto scaling and we can grow their fleet of back end servers right on up to as big as they need based on customers. So the more customers they get the more will automatically scale their environment and they're not having to do anything. They're not needing to sit there and go and manually deploy servers, strap in servers in a data center. It's kind of like the easy button. It's not even a button, it just grows automatically. We combine that with another service that we have called CloudFront which is a content distribution network. It allows you to leverage our global span. We have over 100 points of presence around the world that connect to our network. So you're able to leverage that and use it for caching and speeding up the page views. So even though your infrastructure might be hosted where we are sitting here on the east coast, you can serve that content locally from a cache location close to your user be it in another region around the world or even a different time zone. It will be served from servers that are close to them and they'll get a good user experience that also reduces your infrastructure costs because you don't need to deploy infrastructure globally or worry about managing servers in different locations around the world. You can just leverage our CloudFront service. And this even works with your websites you use today. We can work, put CloudFront in front of your on-prem resources and within a few minutes you're now distributing your content globally from around the world. So it's a very powerful technology and easy to use. Yes, fantastic. And just to reiterate, this was a very small organization that was very new to the Cloud and we were able to provide them with an elastic solution that allowed them to handle extreme traffic for one day. But even if you're seeing spiky traffic throughout the year, the same solutions and the same things James just talked about apply as well. Moving on to the next use case here. It's with the White House Historical Association and the main takeaway here is for data migration and storage, which is a common theme we see a lot with specifically nonprofits that just need to clear that first hurdle to begin their Cloud journey on AWS. How do we get our data onto the platform and where does it go and how can I store it the most efficient way? So we allowed the White House Historical Association to do this and then to utilize our different storage tiers, which we'll go into a little bit here to optimize their environment as well as make it the most cost efficient. So a little bit on the background of the White House Historical Association, their mission is to enhance the public's understanding and appreciation and enjoyment of the White House. Basically, they wanted to make an app that could bring the tours and the information that the White House provides to visitors of the White House, but they wanted to provide that to people that weren't in Washington, D.C. and could access it from a mobile device. So they wanted to make the White House experience educational and free and easy for the public to use. So from a technical standpoint, where they had to come from was they had a small digital library, but was looking to expand the volume and content offered to the online visitors to make the White House education more accessible, as I mentioned. It offers historical images including interior shots, exterior photos, really just files and photos that give you the history of the White House. So their main challenge was to develop new interactive experiences for the public and making sure that it was affordable for them and, most importantly, secure. And that's the main theme for every customer we have, whether they're nonprofit, whether they're for-profit, whether they're small, whether they're large. Security is absolutely our, what we call around here, job zero. And we lock down everything from an infrastructure standpoint on our end as tightly as it possibly can be, and we help you lock it down from identity access management tools and things like that on your end as you're getting set up. But back to the White House Association, so we needed to expand their digitization, storage, and sharing of historical artifacts. And just a couple of add-ons that they added to this project was they actually started a podcast at the same time, and they also created an augmented reality app at the same time as well. But those are just two add-ons to the main project here. And James is going to go into a bit more detail of the solution that we helped them with. Thanks, Brad. So I think one of the interesting things about this project is there was a lot of single-source content, so images and digital files that only existed in one location and were really susceptible to natural disaster or really in threat of just being wiped out of existence because they were a sole source. So it only made sense for the White House Historical Association to reach out to AWS to talk through how do we take these critical pieces of history and preserve them. And that's where our storage service, S3, our simple storage service really shines. So we offer three different tiers of it, and that goes from your typical just standard tier where you access. We have an infrequent access tier for data that you need rapid access to, but you're not accessing on a regular basis. Down to our archival tier, which is your archival storage, what you'd think of as a typical tape backup type that you'd put in a bank vault. And that ranges from a few pennies a gigabyte all the way down to archival where we're down to .4 cents per gigabyte. So a very economical solution to store data at scale. It's infinitely scalable. We have customers storing multiple petabytes of data in this data store. So whether you're storing a gigabyte or multiple petabytes, it'll scale to your needs. We also offer 11 nines of availability and four nines of uptime with this service. To put that in kind of perspective, if you take your image files of your family, you put them on a hard drive, you put it on the shelf. If you went back to that same hard drive for one year from now, three, five years from now, the odds are pretty good that that data will pieces of that data will have been corrupted and are no longer actually there. You've lost that data just from it sitting on the shelf. With RS3 and the 11 nines of durability, that means that it's pretty much statistically an impossibility that you'll lose data, which is pretty significant when you're talking about storing single source content that you want to be preserved in perpetuity. It's great for those type of use cases. With the White House, they were looking at over 7 terabytes of data and over 5,000 images. So quite a large amount of data. They tied into one of our other services called Snowball, which is our offline data import-export. So we send you a physical appliance, you load your data onto it, and then you send it back to us, and we load it up into our S3 storage service. So they've leveraged that. So that 7 terabytes would have taken a long time to transfer over just a standard internet connection. So it's a great option for customers that have a lot of data that they want to move over quickly without having to worry about doing some type of batch job or some type of nightly transfer over a limited bandwidth connection. So they were able to take advantage of Snowball to get that data into S3 quickly. So now that they did have all their data into S3, that's really where you can take a full advantage of all the AWS services. We have over 100 services that we offer, so it really is an abler to power your other services. So like their virtual tour of the White House and their mobile touring application were really enabled by having all of this content up in S3 and being able to do things that they had never thought possible before. You know, kind of disguised the limit once you start getting in and having everything in the cloud. You can start leveraging more cloud services and tying them together with a really immersive user experience. And for nonprofits in general, to be able to engage your customers or your donors in new and unique ways that you might not have been able to do before. Yeah, thanks James. That's a great point. You know, I mean, the main takeaway here was helping the White House Association transfer a large amount of data and just get it on AWS. But James is exactly right. Once it's there, we have over 120 services depending on what your mission is or what your vision is, there are an array of options to different ways to analyze, to visualize, and really just to use data to your advantage to advance your missions. Going on to the third use case, it deals with change management and cloud adoption. And we did this with Conservation International. Now the main takeaway here is taking large amount of data again, but now this time making sense of it and providing actionable insights for your organization and to bring to the public. A little bit on Conservation International, their focus is to make connections between human well-being and natural ecosystems. And they do this by actually partnering with indigenous groups in these areas to educate them on what's going on with the data as it pertains to nature, as well as provide them with financial support to actually take action on these insights. Conservation International has held 1,200 protected areas and interventions across 77 countries. They've committed to the protection of what are called biodiversity hotspots. They've identified 34 such hotspots around the world. And the model for protecting these hotspots has become a way for organizations outside of Conservation International to do different types of conservation work. So not only did they find a way to aggregate all the data together, but they've also opened up their model to other organizations that have a real impact going forward. And if that's something that your organization is interested in, that's absolutely a possibility. So a little bit about them from a technology standpoint. As I mentioned, they focus on relationships with communities have with their environments, specifically with the policymakers and how they can help their societies be more resilient to natural disasters, climate change, and things like this. So what they wanted to do was create an application to identify environmental stressors and make that data publicly available so that governments, local governments or just local influencers could digest it and actually use it to help the people in their communities. One example of this is in Ethiopia with the crops as they pertain to rainfall or the changing amounts of rainfall. They actually laid out and visualized the resilience of crops as it pertains to decreasing rainfall, which is something that is incredibly valuable to the people who make a livelihood farming the various crops that come out of Ethiopia. And as a result, where this data was visualized was actually on an app called Resilience Atlas. And James is going to go into a little bit more detail on that now. Thanks, Brad. So the apps that they were able to put together, Resilience Atlas, you can actually access it now in your web browser, resilienceatlas.org. It's a pretty interesting application. It's real-time. You can choose different layers that you want to enable or disable and see the map change and update in real-time. And on the back end, that's using our scalable infrastructure about before our auto-scaling and load balancing. So they're able to launch that and scale up and down. So whether it's just me on my computer here accessing the website, or some of our number of people on the call go to that website now, that back-end infrastructure will dynamically scale up and down. And they're only paying for the infrastructure as they need it. So obviously the infrastructure need for one person and several hundred people, or the day after launch, are able to scale up and down and meet that customer demand. The interactive web application is pretty unique in that they're able to take over 60 data sets that were siloed into individual data sets that were composed over 12 terabytes of data and combine them all together. So making useful models out of this disparate data set that really wasn't possible without being in a cloud environment. So having that flexibility to be able to use S3 for all of our storage, our database services like our relational database services that are fully managed, our Redshift, which is our data warehousing solution, it's our petabyte scale data warehouse, they're able to leverage all of these services and create this interactive application that really puts power in the hands of the average user to go onto this website and go in to make their own discoveries and leverage this data in unique ways. At the same time also providing this powerful platform to researchers and universities and other organizations that wanted to have access to it. So we see this a lot with nonprofits that have a lot of data. Being able to share it and exchange that data and make it more useful. So there's a lot of disparate data sets that we find as we talk to customers and it's a common use case for the advantage of our artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms and offerings in our platform. So you get advantages of all of that by using the cloud platform. Another unique thing that Conservative Conservation International is able to do was really leverage the elasticity of the cloud. So they leveraged what we call our spot market. So you have the ability to bid on excess compute capacity that is kind of just sitting around so they're able to spin up 120 servers for a few days, run their job, and then power it all down. And they're able to do this for a fraction of the cost of what it would have cost to do that on our traditional infrastructure. It also would have taken many weeks if they had done it on-prem in their traditional type of environment. So they're able to spin up these 120 servers, crunch through their data, and then power them off again, another really powerful use case of how using AWS can really empower nonprofits to do big things that really wasn't possible before cloud computing and taking advantage of all of the services that we offer. Yeah, thank you James. Just a couple of things just to reiterate. The spot instances is 100% a cost-saving measure. We have plenty of information on that on our site but definitely cost-saving measures and we have multiple different ways to utilize a cloud like that to optimize costs in that way. And the other thing is just bringing data together from multiple different silos. I think we can all relate to the fact that the data is coming at us from all different directions these days. And this is a great example of how we could, as James said, break down the silos and bring all the data together and make it into actionable insights. Just one of many examples we have of that because obviously it's a huge hurdle for many organizations, whether you're a small large or we're in between. There's just data everywhere and we need to find a way to aggregate it and communicate it. So moving on, those are our three use cases that hopefully resonated with pretty much everyone on the call with their overarching themes. Now we want to go into a couple partnerships that we have. Seema alluded to one earlier in regards to TechSoup and we'll bring that up after we talk about digital divide data. This is a relatively new partner of ours. It's a social enterprise that focuses on impact sourcing. What they do is they actually provide employment to youth from disadvantaged families with the training and certification for technical skills in AWS. Different things like data management, digital archiving, really these partners we partnered up with them specifically for nonprofits to provide a cost efficient way for nonprofits that might not have the funds for traditional managed service partners to utilize them to get their cloud environment started. Help them with the initial migrations we touched on a little bit. Help them with getting their account set up and everything like that. Really just helps you get clearly the first couple hurdles allows you to get familiar with the platform at very reasonable rates. We actually partnered with them to provide data. The first cloud academy class is what we're calling them. Was in Kenya 25 young adults 18 to 22 actually went through the training program a rigorous training program, got certified at the end every single one of them passed the exam and now they are certified solutions architects from AWS. They're very bright people that can do anything that our solutions architects can do and really help you get over the hump some of the obstacles that we see small nonprofits and small new customers in general face going forward. And that's something as Seema alluded to earlier we're going to have an email at the end here if you want more information on exactly what that offer looks like we will gladly send it your way if you email that address at the end. And secondly oh we wanted to do a poll question here just to gauge the community again would your organization benefit from using a managed service provider like digital divide data? Give you a couple seconds here so basically do you have in-house technologists or do you not? So it's actually a pretty even split here what we're seeing here literally everybody's answered it's 56 to 55 but very good to know and somebody just tied it up 56 oh that's really interesting thank you for your responses the second partner we want to highlight here are our gracious hosts TechSoup we have a partnership with them that really helps nonprofits sometimes just getting started to take care of all their costs depending on your environment needs we have a partnership with them that if you pay $175 you can get $2,000 worth of AWS credits and you can do that on a yearly basis so again really helpful for people just getting started even if you just want to test it out kind of run your own proof of concept we see that a lot we see people using the $2,000 for their entire first year spend and the third scenario is just getting used to the environment as they scale up it really reduces the risk that we know nonprofits can't usually take on a lot of the times because of funding and things like that in addition to the $2,000 you also get technical guidance as you can see the nonprofit office hours they're really good James are they every what every third Tuesday every third Wednesday of the month every third Wednesday of the month we host them and everybody's welcome you can just join usually the Solutions Architect have a topic that they talk about or want to highlight and then there's a Q&A session at the end where you can ask any questions whether it's on the topic or just in general and as you can see here trainings, case studies and coming soon there's actually an Amazon partner network nonprofit competency that's going to just focus strictly on nonprofits so like DDD that I just mentioned but just an entire partner network like that so that's coming soon as well that wraps it up for us what we're really hoping to get out of this is more questions from you what's on top of mind of TechSoup users that are just getting started on their cloud journeys feel free to provide any feedback if it was helpful if the cases were useful or helpful to you but really now we're hoping that we can use the rest of this time for questions that you have I'm just going to jump back in thank you guys for the helpful presentation again if you have questions for them feel free to email them directly at the email that you see here so now we're going to move into the Q&A so if you guys have questions please use the chat box and we have about 15 to 20 minutes to answer your questions I'm going to go ahead and start with the first one that I see here so the first question is we currently keep a lot of data on Google Drive but don't necessarily need to share it with the public are AWS services primarily for public sharing I think either of you guys could probably answer that question that's a good question so we have a few different options so all of our services are available through public endpoints and they need to be accessible public so we have the ability within your part of the Amazon Network it's called the VPC, a virtual private cloud that's kind of like an extension of a non-premise data center so you can spin up resources within that VPC and that's your private part of the network even though it's a multi-tenant environment no one else has access to that you can limit access to services like S3 to only originate from that VPC there's also a number of our services have a way to connect to them privately and not open them up to the world so by all means you can have private resources within AWS that's one of our strengths and the security that we have around that and we also have other solutions like our work docs is a similar document collaboration and sharing platform that you could look at leveraging as well that type of central shared document repository and you can do fine-grained permissions with that shared to public not shared to public and allow users to collaborate within your organization Great, okay so the next question is in terms of because AWS does offer so many different types of services what do you guys recommend in terms of where to start and is it just basic services or hosting a website do you guys have a recommendation especially if there's a lot of small nonprofits on the line what's a good starting point and progression after Yeah, that's a great question dealing primarily with startups or nonprofits that are just getting started up almost every customer uses our EC2 Elastic Abuse Cloud service as well as S3 the storage these are the building blocks of AWS these are what you're going to need pretty much every organization needs whether you're just starting or your advance in your cloud journey those are the two that you're going to want to start with and also there's a ton of resources online that we have that will walk you through step by step on exactly how to get started because ultimately it does depend on your needs but EC2 and S3 they're going to be an element of pretty much everyone's startup story and there's other documents online that can help you walk through the other services and to follow up on that we like to think in terms of workloads at AWS your typical website you see customers do like dev test type workloads so it's always good if you're starting a new application why not deploy it in the cloud why not think cloud first but if you're not deploying applications pretty much every nonprofit has a website and with these $2,000 tech soup credits for a wide majority of our customers that's more than enough to run your complete web infrastructure on AWS in a highly available manner with your public website pretty much every organization has one and you want to make sure that that's up and available especially if you're doing things like taking donations or that is your critical web presence you probably get more visits to that than any other resource you have so putting that on out there and getting that working and highly available is a great place to start Great okay so we have another question kind of along the same lines are AWS services used in place of traditional web hosting or do you still need a web host or does AWS act as a web host sure and the answer to that is it really depends what you're trying to do so if you're talking about your traditional hosting domain names you can register domain names with AWS you can transfer your domain names and use our highly available and fault tolerant domain name service called Route 53 we see some customers starting off with that so you can use your traditional host and leverage us for what we call name hosting you can also just fully move to AWS there's no need for your traditional web host and most web hosts that you go like you go to insert your favorite name here where you pay like five ten bucks a month that's on a shared infrastructure so someone else on that same server if they go under heavy load and get say like a thousand they become really popular and take off that can adversely affect your performance we don't do that type of provisioning at AWS we make sure that we have dedicated resources so we have a tier of service called light sale I'm sorry minor brain it's called light sale so it's specifically tiered toward that you know you only need like a single running server we have some easy management around it so within you know five to ten minutes you can click around the console and for a flat monthly fee it covers the server there's some quick start launches for things like WordPress and Drupal some common website platforms so you know in five to ten minutes you can have your website up and running in its basic form so we definitely have a wide range of services so even just your simple web hosting we can do that definitely you don't need to go have it maintain your third party and we can cover it with those tech soup credits so you're not paying anything extra for that great okay so we have some technical questions that are coming through so in regards to the resilient atlas app somebody was asking is this resilient atlas app running on a GIS application like ARC GIS I'm probably butchering that but yeah it's ARC GIS so I'm not specifically sure what they are implementing given how fast and responsive and scalable it is I'd say they necessarily aren't but we can certainly follow up if you send us an email and you have you want some more information around those type of use cases ARC GIS and geospatial data is something that comes up quite frequently with our customer base we certainly can run that on the platform and if you have more questions we can certainly dive in deeper okay so we have another technical question can VPC integrate with active directory yeah so they're kind of different your VPC is kind of like a networking your private part of the AWS environment in terms of networking so we can put a VPN connection onto that VPC so you can connect back to your on-premise environment which would allow you to extend your active directory into AWS that said we do have a number of other services as well like our AD connector which allows you to connect back to on-premise and do things like domain joins and other types of your typical domain interaction without actually having to set up a domain controller within AWS so we do have a bunch of different options there for deploying active directory and connecting into AWS very common for our customers to want to extend their existing directories into the cloud and again that email address we can pop it up before the end just so you have that if there's any other questions we can dive a little deeper into that and Seymour just for to clarify actually just jump back to one question if the question was does ArcGIS run on AWS the answer is yes to that I'm not sure if that was the question but if you need more information just please email us yeah that was the question and then I'll just pull up the email really fast in case if people didn't get a chance to write it down okay so another question is can AWS be used as a backup that syncs continuously so yes is the short answer because the longer answer is it really depends on your use case we have a very flexible platform so we fully support a hybrid type of cloud so if you have on-premise resources that you'd want to backup into AWS that's another very common use case where we see customers have an on-premise server or on-premise systems and they want to be able to back it up to the cloud definitely that's supported services like S3 are a great place to do that economically too if it's just archival backup you can use Glacier at 0.4 cents or 0.4 cents or 0.4 GB so definitely a very cost economical way to store that data we also have products like our storage gateway which allow you to extend cloud storage to on-prem in a hybrid manner so it's all backed up to our massively scalable and flexible cloud storage we still have access to it on-premise and there's third party applications too that backup applications that utilize S3 I use one on my desktop that does a daily backup and I've actually used it so my system had crashed before I'm not going to say what platform it is but it crashed and I was able to pull all my data back down from S3 before I even had my new computer ready to get up and running so definitely a great case for backup and just to add real quickly, you're here in Jamesay it depends on your workload a lot which is actually one of the beautiful things about AWS in the cloud is that it really is personalized to exactly what you need so you're only paying for what you use what you need with AWS specifically you can turn services on and off at will there are no contracts so if you're getting benefit out of it you can scale up, if you're not you can turn it off and you stop getting charged right away so the flexibility is absolutely one of the greatest advantages Perfect, okay so I think this will be probably our last question so can you go into a little bit more detail the difference between S3 and CloudFront and then also another I guess part of the S3 somebody was asking to provide a significant number of images to a website, is S3 effective alone or does it need to be combined with CloudFront? Okay that's both good questions and a great follow up to one another CloudFront is our global content distribution network it can be used in front of S3 S3 is a regional service where we are in US East we have the US East 1 region so if your files are stored in that region and you want to access, say you have images on your website trying to put both those questions together you have images on your website and you'll have users in Europe well you might want to put CloudFront storing your files directly from CloudFront so if a user accesses your website from Europe they're not reaching all the way back to the US to download that image it'll be cached in Europe and served with a lot lower latency and then you're not paying that back called data charge because you're paying the data charge rates that are from CloudFront and not from the S3 directly sort of a little bit of a discount there in terms of cost overall it really it's only benefit act putting CloudFront in front of your website in front of your S3 bucket in front of an elastic load balancer the possibilities are pretty endless in what you can just put it in front of and it's easy to get up and run it's not like some of the legacy providers where you have to go out and sign a contract and negotiate rates and negotiate bandwidth you can go up click through the console today in under 5 minutes and be serving your content globally which is pretty powerful especially for a nonprofit that doesn't have the budget to go out and make those big contracts with CDN Perfect, so I lied there's actually a couple really good questions that just came in if you guys don't mind answering them so somebody was asking how does AWS integrate with databases so we use QuickBooks, Microsoft Access and a donor database which is a file type supported Sure, so in S3 you can upload any type of file that you'd like we don't care what type of extension is it can go up to very large sizes as well for single files so pretty much anything you can run on-prem today you can run in the cloud so in terms of your traditional relational databases we try to make things easier for you wherever we can so our relational database service is definitely something we see a lot of nonprofits take advantage of you're not having to deploy your underlying application your relational database and the operating system you don't need to manage that we take care of that heavy lifting for you that's one of the things that having a DBA go and manage the database and do operating system updates especially in smaller organizations with limited staff there's so much more powerful things like getting into business analytics and artificial intelligence and machine learning so we like to take care of that we call it undifferentiated heavy lifting so wherever we can help our customers do things better and quicker we really try to do that so RDS is a great service for databases Okay and then there's another really good one so I'm going to go ahead and ask it if you guys don't mind but the question is do you have the cloud setup the application that backs up to the cloud some are still not comfortable with putting everything mainly on the cloud in case their internet stops working So I mean there's third party applications so you certainly could use something like like a time machine or windows backup locally and then back that data up into S3 you know when you're using a cloud service you do need that cloud connectivity I know the client I run on my laptop I frequently travel I might be on an airplane when there certainly is not enough bandwidth to do that backup but I just pause the backup application and wait until I have a good internet connection again so there's ways around that and using third party applications to kind of queue up and wait until it's actually a good time to do that backup is a good way to handle that but you do need a connection to do that backup we do have another few services for applications one of which is called workspaces so it's a virtual desktop in the cloud one of the advantages of using a service like that is it's backed up nightly you don't need to worry about the backup we handle that for you so there are additional services that you can use to really leverage your business and give remote parties access a number of advantages to using things like workspaces and also AppStream 2.0 is another one of our application streaming services so you can stream applications directly from any modern web browser so we see customers use that for that exact reason to simplify their backup and give more accessibility options to their users All right, perfect Okay, so I think that covers most of the questions for today Thanks again for your presentation I just have a few things to cover before we close out today's webinar so just really quick it's always fun to see what people learned in the webinar today so if you guys don't mind just chatting one new thing that you learned in today's webinar and then after the webinar is over you should receive a post-event survey that feedback is really helpful to us because it helps us dictate what kind of content you guys enjoy and if you're finding what we're providing valuable so it's about 10 questions just to understand kind of where you're at in your cloud technology process so it can give us some guidance on future content and then for social media if you guys are on social media we have Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter we love, social media loves so if you guys want to give us a like or a follow we post a lot of valuable content on there including blog posts and upcoming webinars we also have a blog which is blog.techsoup.org again we post a lot of tips and tricks and impact stories and things that you guys might find interesting and then also we have several webinars coming up in March so we have a series of QuickBooks webinars we also added a couple new ones on the 20th we have Okta and City Year are going to be sharing their story about single sign-on and then on the 27th we have a digital I'm going to try to remember the name digital trends in fundraising for 2018 so I'll make sure the website is updated with all of this information alright so thanks again to our presenters and then also I just want to take a moment to thank our webinar sponsors ReadyTalk and thanks to you guys for attending today's webinar