AWS recently announced the end of development for Research and Engineering Studio (RES).
Existing deployments can continue, with the final release supported until September 2027.
It’s an interesting moment to ask a bigger question.
What does a modern research platform actually need to do?
Consider a researcher working on a drug discovery project.
They don’t want to configure AWS accounts, navigate IAM permissions or work out how to connect SageMaker Studio to the correct datasets.
They want to log in, select their research project, open their tools and get on with the science.
Sounds straightforward.
Except behind that simple experience is a rather complicated infrastructure problem.
Which datasets can they access? What compute resources do they need? Are they working individually or collaboratively? Who controls costs? How are results preserved and made reproducible? What happens when the project finishes?
We’ve been exploring exactly these questions with organisations developing cloud-based research platforms, including initiatives spanning AI, drug discovery and genomics.
One research initiative we’re engaged with is exploring how scientists could launch their research tools directly from a purpose-built portal, with the appropriate compute, software and data access provisioned behind the scenes.
And one thing has become increasingly clear.
The researcher experience is only the visible part of the problem.
A portal provides the front door. Behind it, you need a way to connect researchers to approved data, provision the right environments, enforce policies, manage costs and handle the infrastructure lifecycle.
Trusted Research Environments add further requirements around sensitive data, researcher access, auditability and controlled outputs.
The challenge isn’t simply making these environments secure. It’s making them genuinely usable and repeatable across different research projects.
That’s where we see an important role for Sandbox Studio, providing the AWS environment orchestration and governance layer beneath research portals and specialist scientific tools.
Not replacing the portal. Not replacing scientific applications. And not, by itself, replacing the broader controls of a Trusted Research Environment.
Connecting the pieces so researchers can work without becoming cloud infrastructure experts.
Because the real measure of a research platform isn’t how sophisticated the infrastructure is.
It’s how little the researcher needs to think about it.
Reference: AWS Research and Engineering Studio end of support.
Written by
James Simpson · Co-founder, Sandbox Studio
James leads product at Sandbox Studio. He has spent more than a decade helping organisations adopt AWS safely, and now focuses on giving every team fast, governed access to the cloud without the operational overhead.
