New Delhi: The Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), NITI Aayog, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced new initiatives to strengthen the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem in India, by empowering school students with cloud computing skills, and enabling entrepreneurs to build innovative education technology (EdTech) solutions on the cloud.

A Statement of Intent (SoI) was signed between NITI Aayog and Amazon Internet Services Private Limited (AISPL), which undertakes the resale and marketing of AWS Cloud services in India.

As per the SoI, AIM will leverage AWS Educate, Amazon’s global program that provides resources for students and educators to accelerate cloud-related learning. This program will introduce the fundamentals of cloud computing such as cloud storage, virtual compute power, web hosting, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and virtual reality (VR), to students at more than 7000 Atal Tinkering Labs (ATLs) in India. AWS will also conduct Faculty Development Programs (FDPs) for the personnel in-charge at the ATLs, and provide resources and tools at each ATL to expedite student learning, and enable them to create and build solutions on the cloud.

AIM will also adopt AWS EdStart, a virtual startup accelerator program that enables EdTech startups to develop innovative teaching and learning solutions on AWS. EdTech startup entrepreneurs and founders in more than 80 Atal Incubation Centers (AICs) and Atal Community Innovation Centers (ACICs), will be able to apply for AWS EdStart program benefits, such as AWS Promotional Credits, mentorship, and technical trainings, to help speed their growth.

Mission Director – Atal Innovation Mission, R. Ramanan said the collaboration with AWS will equip the talented youth of the country with digital and web-based tools that can enhance their creative and innovative capabilities, in turn helping the nation to grow manifold in its innovation and entrepreneurship network. “The education and tools will establish a strong foundation in cloud computing for students of ATLs across India, while the support of AWS EdStart for startups from AICs and ACICs will accelerate their productization and potential commercialization,” he said.

President, Public Sector – AISPL, AWS India and South Asia, Rahul Sharma asserted that India will need nine times as many digital skilled workers by 2026, according to the report Unlocking APAC’s Digital Potential: Changing Digital Skill Needs and Policy Approaches, prepared by strategy and economics consulting firm AlphaBeta, and commissioned by AWS. “AWS is committed to bridging the digital skills gap in cloud computing, and empowering entrepreneurs to build innovative products and services on the cloud. We are focused on helping customers deliver transformational change and experiential learning at scale. It is a privilege to team up with Atal Innovation Mission to foster ideation, curiosity, and innovation among India’s students and youth,” he added.

Other areas of collaboration between AIM and AWS include joint workshops, tech marathons, and national challenges to develop solutions on the cloud, while solving local community problems, or sustainable development goals (SDGs).

Google LLC debuted a more robust customer support service for its public cloud infrastructure platform today called Mission Critical Services, aimed at customers wanting to ensure that their most critical business applications will never fail.

Google Cloud Customer Experience Vice President John Jester told SiliconANGLE that some of Google’s cloud customers have extremely demanding environments, and that even a minute of downtime can mean millions of dollars in lost revenue.

Jester called out financial services, telecommunications and retail, all of which Google Cloud has focused on serving, as needing especially bulletproof applications in the cloud. And if anything unexpected happens, they also need nearly instant service to fix the problem. “What matters is that the customer’s application is always up,” he said.

To help these customers, the company has announced Google Cloud Mission Critical Services, which is one step up from its Premium Support service. MCS, as it’s called, is actually more of a consultative service: Google partners with customers from the get-go to ensure that their application infrastructure will always run without a hitch.

To do that, Google applies the same methodologies that it uses to support its own cloud infrastructure. They include a set of core concepts developed by its expert Site Reliability Engineering teams over the past twenty years.

Jester said Google will partner with customers that sign up for MCS on a step-by-step process that covers assessment, remediation and onboarding in order to bring their entire application architecture, including control, observability and measurement, into what it calls “Google-standard Mission Critical Operations mode.”

The assessment phase will involve ensuring that customer’s architecture is designed with the correct level of resiliency they need and that they have the correct balance of control and agility. It will also check that customers are instrumenting the right monitoring systems and signals, and assess how they are setting and raising service-level objectives to meet the required standards for their apps and services, Jester said.

Google’s MCS team will also help customers continually improve their application environments through biannual tune ups, architecture reviews and other ongoing checks to ensure no problems ever arise. Jester said Google’s engineers will quickly develop a deep familiarity with MCS customers’ workloads that will enable them to monitor, prevent and mitigate any impacts rapidly.

Indeed, MCS, which Jester said was nine months in the making, involves a five-minute service level objective for a response, compared with the Premium Support level’s 15 minutes. In those five minutes, Jester said, Google will set up a “war room” with experts who already know the company’s applications to address the problem.

“Not all cloud application workloads are the same, and some are much more critical than others,” said Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller. “This offering will be appreciated by customers that want and need extra robustness for their next generation applications. It will likely only be a few weeks before Amazon and Microsoft will respond with similar offerings.”