Building a cloud-based solution: creating an accessible CIT curriculum
Teresa D. Riley, Wei Hao · Journal of computing sciences in colleges · 2014
Northern Kentucky University (NKU) has Computer Science/Computer Information Technology curricula that require students to have administrative access to both Unix and Windows operating systems. These classes range from introductory classes to graduate level classes. The current system is to supply access to virtual machines (VMs) that are created for and assigned to each student. Current equipment is unable to meet the full storage and compute requirements of the number of VMs that are needed. Replacement of the current system of providing students VMs at NKU is proposed in this paper. It is proposed that this system be replaced by cloud computing resources, specifically Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) with Elastic Block Storage (EBS). EC2 with EBS provides the required computational power and persistent storage. In addition, shortcomings that the current system has could be eliminated. According to the published Amazon prices, this could be accomplished at or below current costs.