Overview

Publication date: June 2023 (last update: September 2023)

Important

Research Service Workbench on AWS will no longer be supported starting on December 1st 2024, and will not receive any addition features. For more information, check the Research Service Workbench on AWS GitHub repository.

Research Service Workbench on AWS is a backend API designed to empower AWS partners to more easily build self-service portals for research institutions, allowing their researchers to create and manage secure research computing environments. RSW builds on AWS services including Amazon S3, Service Catalog, and AWS Systems Manager to deliver comprehensive, cutting-edge capabilities in less time while meeting the high bar for security and governance demanded by regulators and funding agencies.

Using a custom built portal provided by a partner, built on Research Service Workbench, research IT departments can more easily work with partners to deliver a self-service portal with a comprehensive catalog of tools tailored to the needs of the researchers they support. Using a portal built using RSW, researchers can create, access, and retire environments without needing to be experts on cloud infrastructure or security. They can work individually or collaborate with others on the same data, with RSW securely orchestrating the connection of research environments to Amazon S3. Furthermore, environments are deployed in specific AWS accounts and Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), allowing connectivity to resources on and off campus. Institutions are fully in control of their data, data flows, and AWS footprint. They can scale investments in IT and security across multiple research programs, reducing duplicate effort and freeing up resources to focus on science.

This implementation guide provides an overview of the Research Service Workbench on AWS solution, its reference architecture and components, considerations for planning the deployment, configuration steps for deploying the Research Service Workbench on AWS solution to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

Use this navigation table to quickly find answers to these questions:

If you want to . . .	Read . . .
Know the cost for running this solution. The estimated cost for running this solution in the US East (N.Virginia) Region is USD $ 140.98 a month.	Cost
Understand the security considerations for this solution.	Security
Know how to plan for quotas for this solution. Make sure you have sufficient quota for each of the services in this solution.	Quotas
Know which AWS Regions are supported for this solution. Not all services used in this solution are available in all AWS Regions.	Supported AWS Regions
View or download the AWS CloudFormation template included in this solution to automatically deploy the infrastructure resources (the “stack”) for this solution.	AWS CloudFormation template

This guide is intended for solution architects, business decision makers, DevOps engineers, data scientists, and cloud professionals who want to implement Research Service Workbench in their environment.