Using Amazon web services to teach web-enabled database concepts
David Rilett, John Russo · Journal of computing sciences in colleges · 2013
Amazon offers cloud infrastructure through its Amazon Web Services(AWS). The authors taught a cloud computing course using AWS. Besides offering a general introduction to cloud computing, the course also enabled students to build a fault-tolerant web site with a database backend. Students were able to further hone their database skills by initially designing a database which would then be used by the web site to store information such as a shopping cart or payment information. The database itself was initially hosted on AWS using an instance running MySQL. Towards the end of the course, the students migrated their databases to the Relational Data Service (RDS) provided by Amazon. Additionally, students setup a virtual web server on several instances with S3 storage for all static content. Students also deployed an elastic load balancer which directs traffic to instances of the Web server. Figure 1 shows the initial design.