What is the NET+ AWS Program?

The Internet2 NET+ AWS program is both a community-driven and crafted vehicle for contracting AWS and an active professional peer community that meets regularly to learn from each other and industry experts, share and document best practices, and innovate to advance the research and educational missions of their institutions.

Many Internet2 member and non-member institutions take advantage of this service offering. If your institution is one of them, this wiki will provide details on how to make the most of your participation in the program by interacting with AWS staff and peers from other subscribing institutions. 

NET+ AWS Program Basics

Contract

There are now two options for the NET+ AWS contract, the longtime contract with TD SYNNEX (formerly DLT) and a new contract with Four Points Technology. Both agreements provide a number of contractual and operational benefits designed for the needs of the research and education community.

Program Benefits

Some of the benefits common to both include:

• A customer agreement created through a process involving a group of member campuses that incorporates community best practice terms, access to a Business Associate Agreement for HIPAA workloads, and access to AWS GovCloud for sensitive workloads.
• A Data Egress Fee Waiver that refunds egress charges up to 15% of an account's monthly spend for eligible accounts.
• A common minimum discount for all subscribers, regardless of their cloud spend.
• The ability to enable support on an account-by-account basis.
• Ready access to the NIH STRIDES Initiative with discounts and enhanced support options.
• 800+ Gb/s of private peering capacity to the Internet2 Network for member institutions.
• A framework for enterprise-scale consumption, including the option of a single institutional bill or direct billing to account holders, with a variety of payment options, including credits.
• A community advisory board to drive continued benefits for all subscribers.
• An active facilitated peer community working together on best practices of adoption, use, and innovation with AWS.

To all members, Internet2 also provides:

• 800+ Gb of network peering between AWS and the Internet2 Network, accessible from most Regional Connector networks.

Eligibility

This program is open to all Internet2 higher education, affiliate and federal affiliate members as well as non-member US higher education institutions. If you are looking for details on how to join the program, please click Sign Up on the NET+ AWS webpage or email netplus@internet2.edu and ask about NET+ AWS.

Frequently Asked Questions

Find answers to your questions about the NET+ AWS program, NIH STRIDES, and links to the resellers' documentation on the NET+ AWS Frequently Asked Questions page.

Learn More about NET+ AWS

For more information about your NET+ AWS contracting options email netplus@internet2.edu and ask about NET+ AWS.

Related Services

AWS Direct Connect through Internet2 

Learn how to reach AWS Direct Connect using Cloud Connect, leveraging Internet2 and your regional’s infrastructure to allow shared, dedicated Layer 2 and Layer 3 access with up to 5Gbps of connectivity.

Cloud Infrastructure Community Program (CICP)

NET+ AWS subscribers pay an annual program fee to support the management of the contracts, the reseller relationships, the program maintenance, and the community activities. The NET+ Cloud Infrastructure Community Program opens the door to the benefits of the NET+ AWS program and is a requirement for subscribing to the program. More details, including fees, are on the CICP page. To get a view into the topics, discussions, and benefits of CICP, visit the program wiki and calendar.

CICP Benefits

NET+ Community Activities

A key benefit of the NET+ AWS program for subscribing institutions is participating in the Cloud Infrastructure Community Program. Any member of a subscribing institution's community is eligible to join. In addition to an email discussion list, we host a series of regular events for program subscribers. They include:

• Bi-weekly NET+ AWS Technology Share calls where campus cloud enablement professionals, cloud engineers, developers, and others meet to discuss their challenges, share lessons learned and collaborate to find the best answers for their institutions' AWS deployment. AWS solutions architects and DLT support engineers regularly attend and participate.
• Quarterly NET+ AWS Town Halls welcome experts from AWS to present targeted topics to the community. Past Town Halls covered Ransomware, AWS Academy, Research Support Tools, Security Lake, Generative AI and more. We encourage subscribers to suggest topics we can work with AWS to bring to us.
• Quarterly NET+ AWS Strategy Calls are home to strategic and directional conversations. This is an opportunity to discuss the role of cloud in IT strategy with your peers. The intended audience is cloud and infrastructure leadership, but anyone working on your AWS team is welcome to attend. Once a year we invite AWS EDU leadership to join us and encourage campus infrastructure and IT leadership to come.
• Quarterly NET+ AWS Tech Jams are technical deep dives on a specific issue facing one or more institutions. We put a couple of subscriber schools in the "hot seat" to lay out their challenge and ask technical experts from AWS to talk through the problem and its solutions. The rest of us watch and learn, tossing in our own questions as well. Example topics are building compliant environments, enforcing policies for FinOps best practices, bending Control Tower to your will, etc. The December Jam is devoted to a rapid-fire recap of the announcements coming out of the annual AWS re:Invent conference that are most relevant to the NET+ subscriber community. Always a highlight of the year.
• To get an idea of the topics covered in the NET+ AWS quarterly calls visit the Cloud Infrastructure Community Program Calendar

CLASS: Cloud Learning and Skills Sessions

• Access to Cloud 101 on demand
• Priority registration for CLASS training
• Discounted registration and payment vouchers to for-fee CLASS trainings
• CLASS program details 

Data Benchmarking Project

Internet2 aggregates community usage data to provide subscribers with unique campus-internal insights and community-wide comparisons. The tools also help users identify community members with experience in specific technologies, creating opportunities to connect and learn from their peers. 

Service Evaluation Resources

A fundamental function of the NET+ program is to gather the information that all institutions do for their due diligence work prior to acquiring an IT service. A group of peer institutions gathers for a service evaluation and pilot program. Below are some of the assets gathered for the NET+ AWS Service Evaluation.

Accessibility

• Voluntary Product Accessibility Template® (VPAT)

Identity

• NET+ AWS Portal Identity Guidance - For end-user self-service AWS account requests

• InCommon-enabled Group to role mapping for AWS Accounts

Information Security

• Higher Education Cloud Vendor Assessment Tool (HECVAT) - contact your AWS account manager. If you don't know who that is, reach out to NET+ AWS Program Manager, Bob Flynn (bflynn@internet2.edu) and he will connect you.