For the past three weeks, Amazon Web Services invited federal workers to visit a posh space in Arlington to receive free training, co-work and get help from experts on the company’s services.
Called the AWS Federal Pop-Up Loft, the space attracted more than 3,400 registrants to learn new skills and get help navigating the company’s services.
“The level of customer engagement and participation at our AWS Federal Pop-Up Loft demonstrates the excitement around cloud technologies. Federal customers are working with both AWS and our partners to experiment with advanced services like machine learning in the cloud and to drive digital transformation,” Dave Levy, AWS vice president of U.S. government, said in a statement. “The loft is a place for anyone curious about cloud to learn, ask questions, and experiment with ways that you can benefit from cloud.”
The idea grew out of previous pop-up — and eventually permanent — lofts AWS has hosted in places like San Francisco, New York and Tokyo. But this is the first devoted purely to federal employees and contractors. And the hope is that it will become a mainstay in the D.C. metro area as well.
Throughout the three weeks, the loft was open, AWS experts held technical lectures on budding cloud-related topics like serverless computing and artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as how to use AWS services like Snowball Edge and Ground Station.
Check out what the Federal Pop-Up Loft looked like in the video below:
