Teaching in amazon EC2

As the trend of IT service consolidation continues to rise, organizations are now looking at hosting their services in the cloud to cut back on the costs of hosting their information systems locally. This presents an opportunity and challenge for higher learning institutions to prepare their students for the technology skills that are going to be in demand upon their graduation. In many aspects universities are already using virtual environments to teach many laboratory courses for distance students. However there is the need to introduce students to industry standard services that will better acquaint them with what is currently being used in the real world. This poster takes a look at the course 'Principles of System Administration' from the Networking Security and System Administration Department at Rochester institute of Technology and creates a foundation for moving the course over to the cloud using Amazon Web Services. It analyzes various cost scenarios, shortfalls of Amazon EC2 as a teaching platform, and proposes building a custom management system to better handle permissions.