Amazon has launched a programme to help attract students to its cloud services

Amazon has launched the AWS Educate in a bid to help educators and student cultivate cloud-centric development and operations skills, and attract the next generation of users to its cloud services ecosystem.

The company plans to offer students and educators credits for AWS cloud services and make available cloud-related educational content for teachers to use as course materials. Amazon said the move is intended to help train up students on cloud, which it said it becoming the default environment for developing and deploying greenfield applications.

“For years, the AWS educational grants program has put cloud technology in the hands of educators and students, giving them the ability to put big ideas into action. We’ve seen students develop assistive computer vision technology in collaboration with the National Federation of the Blind, and aspiring entrepreneurs take a web startup from conception to launch within 60 hours,” said Teresa Carlson, vice president, worldwide public sector, AWS.

“Based on the feedback and success of our grant recipients and the global need for cloud-skilled workers, we developed AWS Educate to help even more students learn cloud technology firsthand in the classroom. We’re pleased to offer AWS Educate to educators, students and educational institutions around the world,” Carlson said.

Students and educators at any educational institution can join the programme and can apply to redeem AWS credits for a range of its services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Glacier.

Programme participants will also get access to online training materials and app testing labs, collaboration forums and materials uploaded from other educators.