A web portal for researchers to accelerate their time to science
Service Workbench on AWS will retire on November 30, 2024. We recommend that you explore using Research and Engineering Studio on AWS (RES). RES is an AWS supported, open-source product that enables IT administrators to provide a web portal for scientists and engineers to run technical computing workloads on AWS. You can get started by following instructions in the Research and Engineering Studio User Guide. Explore additional Solutions for Research in the Cloud on the AWS Solutions Library or by contacting your AWS Account team.
Service Workbench on AWS helps IT teams to provide secure, repeatable, and federated control of access to data, tooling, and compute power that researchers need. With Service Workbench, researchers no longer have to worry about navigating cloud infrastructure. They can focus on achieving research missions and completing essential work in minutes, not months, in configured research environments.
With Service Workbench on AWS, researchers can quickly and securely stand up research environments and conduct experiments with peers from other institutions. By automating the creation of baseline research setups, simplifying data access, and providing price transparency, researchers and IT departments save time, which they can reinvest in following cloud best practices and achieving research reproducibility.
Benefits
On-demand research environment capabilities
A self-service, three-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.
Pre-built, secure, and compliant environments
Pre-built, secure, and compliant environments for researchers to have simple access to data and tools that can be replicated across internal and external research teams.
Transparent view of total cost
Insight into currently accrued cost by cost centers and individual environments to manage budgets and charge-backs.
Open source AWS solution
A no-cost, AWS open source solution (Apache 2.0 license)—customers pay only for utilized downstream AWS services.
Overview
The diagram below presents the architecture you can build using the code example on GitHub.
Service Workbench on AWS architecture
Service Workbench on AWS deploys a test environment of Service Workbench with default settings, which provides the website hosted on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), made available through Amazon CloudFront. The web frontend authenticates using Amazon Cognito and leverages Amazon API Gateway to invoke the microservices (AWS Lambda functions and AWS Step Functions).
These microservices interact with Amazon DynamoDB to manage the content, users and AWS accounts in AWS Organizations to access data in S3 and instantiate out-of-the-box compute instances for Amazon EMR with Hail, Amazon SageMaker with Jupyter notebooks and Amazon EC2 with Windows and Linux operating systems. The CloudFormation templates for these compute instances are hosted in AWS Service Catalog for flexibility and to allow the simple addition of custom templates.
After you install Service Workbench on AWS, you can log into the web frontend using the root password and URL provided by the install process, create administrator- and end-user logins, associate an AWS account with Service Workbench on AWS and start testing it and its capabilities.
Additional resources
Features
Simplified account vending through AWS Organizations
Data and compute sharing to speed collaboration
Compute provisioning leveraging Service Catalog and CloudFormation
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