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Service Workbench

A web portal for researchers to accelerate their time to science

What does this solution do?

Service Workbench democratizes access to Amazon Web Service for researchers and teachers, allowing them to set up workspaces on cloud quickly and securely. This solution provides simple-to-use UI, access management tools, cost dashboard, as well as 5 built-in workspace templates (Jupyter Notebook, RStudio, EC2 Linux, EC2 Windows, EMR with Hail), customers can also self-define more workspace through CloudFormation template. Service Workbench on Amazon Web Services is a cloud solution that enables universities and research institutes’ IT teams to provide secure, repeatable, and federated control of access to data, tooling, and compute power that researchers need. By automating the creation of baseline research setups, simplifying data access, and providing price transparency, researchers can focus on research and accelerate their time to science.

Benefits

On-demand research environment capabilities

A self-service, couples-click, on-demand service for researchers to build research environments in minutes without having to know anything about cloud infrastructure or wait for research IT to respond.

Transparent view of total cost

Insight into currently accrued cost by cost centers and individual environments to manage budgets and charge-backs.

Collaborative data management and sharing

Multiple ways to manage and share datasets, seamless integration with Amazon Web Service Open Data Registry, makes it easy to collaborate on research across teams.

Solution Overview

Below presented are the architecture and the web portal of Service Workbench.

Static web assets (front-end UI) are stored in Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront distributes these assets.
Customers can choose OpenID Connect providers to provide authentication in all regions, or choose Amazon Cognito in regions where the Amazon Cognito user pool is enabled.
Amazon API Gateway provides Rest API for backend.
Amazon Lambda interacts with other Amazon Services to process the core logic of Service Workbench.
User, permission, product status and other related information in Service Workbench are stored in Amazon DynamoDB.
Amazon Service Catalog manage product templates in Service Workbench.
Amazon Step Functions orchestrates product's deployment, stopping, termination and status checking.
Use the Amazon CloudFormation template in Amazon Service Catalog to create the computing resources required for each product.
Computing resources can read the research datasets from Amazon S3.
Service Workbench administrators can release new products through Amazon Service Catalog.