The ability to control provisioning of an entire development stack in AWS is not just a fantastic opportunity for the enterprise; it is also a great way to let students learn using infrastructure that might otherwise be prohibitively expensive and difficult to procure. Understanding this potential to facilitate learning and train a new generation of cloud-native developers, Amazon offers educational grants for use of AWS services. I started using program about a year ago for my Database Topics class in the Mendoza College of Business, and Chris Frederick is looking into it for his No-SQL/Big Data class.

It can give students complete hands on with servers/services without the issues of spinning up servers in house!

A snapshot of services are below.   The main services I have used in the RDBMS class are EC2 and RDS.   Each student was able to have their own Oracle DB instance and able to have DBA privileges to run their own DB and in that way set up users, privileges, roles which would be much more difficult to do on a shared environment.   They could then work on projects without fear of bringing down another student’s database.  One of the other projects I did in a class, with the help of Xiaojing Duan, was to set up a PHP server to show integration with Facebook.   As you can see from the list below,  there are a LOT more services available for classroom use!