Learn by doing. That’s the underlying philosophy behind a rapid use-case prototyping training model designed by NorthBay Solutions LLC, an Amazon Web Services Public Sector partner.

NorthBay’s AWS-trained staff works side-by-side in virtual simultaneous rooms to help information technology customers quickly come up to speed on cloud-based areas, such as database migration, application modernization, machine learning and artificial intelligence. The intensive two weeks of instruction, known as JAM Sessions, helped the University of Pittsburgh develop its data lake, and the joint effort has been recognized by AWS Public Sector with the “Best EDU Solution” award for 2020.

“We felt it was important to bring forth a solution that helped customers focus on a use case, but do it rapidly in a very concentrated way with our expert team,” said Jim Keller (pictured, right), NorthBay’s president. “How does a customer get started, prove the efficacy of AWS, prove they can get data out of their on-premises systems, and get into AWS and make it accessible? By the time we’re done with the two weeks, the customer achieves some success around the goal of the JAM Session, but more importantly their team has learned a lot about AWS.”

Keller spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, about the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. He was joined by Chad Burton (pictured, left), data and privacy officer at Pitt IT at the University of Pittsburgh, and they discussed how NorthBay’s training approach helped the school find new ways to improve data access for internal customers and the value of hands-on training to more effectively use cloud tools. (* Disclosure below.)

Rapid development

Learning more about what AWS could provide was an important prerequisite for Burton and his Pitt IT team. The JAM Session format of rapid, iterative development appeared ideally suited for learning how to construct a data lake that would be more responsive to the university’s needs.

“With our current process and tools, I have a hard time telling anybody how long it will take to get that new data source online and available to our data analysts or data scientists because it takes months sometimes and nobody wants that answer,” Burton explained. “How do we tighten our process and select the right tools so that we can say we’ll be two weeks from start to finish? The JAM Sessions really helped us prove that once you have the right skills and the right people you can do this rapid development and bring more value to our business.”

Even though instruction is now being done exclusively in a virtual environment, NorthBay’s hands-on methodology still applies as customers and members of the instruction team move quickly through use cases together to guide the development of a rapid prototype solution.

“We move fast; two weeks is not a lot of time to get a lot of rapid prototyping done,” Keller said. “We want to do side-by-side development; that’s the whole goal. We want to be able to do over-the-shoulder mentoring so that as Chad’s team members were executing, we could guide them as they go.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. Neither AWS, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE