Question

You and your team must make a recommendation to the director of information systems on which is the best cloud computing service for your school—from the perspective of the student. Do research on any three of the following, and then decide which service to recommend: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), IBM’s Blue Cloud, Sun Cloud, Google AppEngine, and Windows Azure Services Platform. What factors influenced your recommendation? (in word and excel)

Answer 1

Cloud computing: How does it bring innovation in education?

• Strong virtual classroom environments

• Ease of accessibility

• Extensive cost-savings

• Secure data storage

• Scalability

• Agility and innovation

• Greater reach for the students

• Minimal hardware requirements

Best cloud computing service for your school:

1. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Using Amazon EC2 eliminates your need to invest in hardware upfront, so you can develop and deploy applications faster. You can use Amazon EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage. Amazon EC2 enables you to scale up or down to handle changes in requirements or spikes in popularity, reducing your need to forecast traffic.

Features of Amazon EC2

• Virtual computing environments, known as instances

• Preconfigured templates for your instances, known as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), that package the bits you need for your server (including the operating system and additional software)

• Various configurations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity for your instances, known as instance types

• Secure login information for your instances using key pairs (AWS stores the public key, and you store the private key in a secure place)

• Storage volumes for temporary data that are deleted when you stop or terminate your instance, known as instance store volumes

• Persistent storage volumes for your data using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), known as Amazon EBS volumes

• Multiple physical locations for your resources, such as instances and Amazon EBS volumes, known as Regions and Availability Zones

• A firewall that enables you to specify the protocols, ports, and source IP ranges that can reach your instances using security groups

• Static IPv4 addresses for dynamic cloud computing, known as Elastic IP addresses

• Metadata, known as tags, that you can create and assign to your Amazon EC2 resources

• Virtual networks you can create that are logically isolated from the rest of the AWS cloud and that you can optionally connect to your own network, known as virtual private clouds (VPCs)

2. IBM’s Blue Cloud

IBM cloud computing is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM. IBM cloud includes infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offered through public, private and hybrid cloud delivery models, in addition to the components that make up those clouds.

Blue Cloud is an approach to shared infrastructure developed by IBM. The goal of IBM's Blue Cloud is to provide services that automate fluctuating demands for IT resources. The set of all the connections involved is sometimes called the "cloud."

The primary objective of the Blue Cloud project is to facilitate distributed computing within data centers, rather than performing tasks on individual machines or through remote servers. Blue Cloud makes use of virtualized Linux images and parallel workload scheduling. Blue Cloud also employs IBM's Tivoli software to provide demand-based performance by provisioning resources among end-users and monitoring the condition of provisioned servers.

The Blue Cloud concept arose as a result of IBM's research on an innovation portal called the Technology Adoption Program. Blue Cloud is supported by hundreds of engineers and developers worldwide and employs open-source software, standards, technology, and services. Blue Cloud offerings are expected to become publicly available in 2008 for systems with PowerPC and x86 processors.

3. Google AppEngine

Google App Engine (often referred to as GAE or simply App Engine) is a Platform as a Service and cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. Applications are sandboxed and run across multiple servers. App Engine offers automatic scaling for web applications—as the number of requests increases for an application, App Engine automatically allocates more resources for the web application to handle the additional demand.

Google App Engine primarily supports Go, PHP, Java, Python, Node.js, .NET, and Ruby applications, although it can also support other languages via "custom runtimes".The service is free up to a certain level of consumed resources and only in the standard environment but not an inflexible environment. Fees are charged for additional storage, bandwidth, or instance hours required by the application. It was first released as a preview version in April 2008 and came out of preview in September 2011.

Differences with another application hosting

Compared to other scalable hosting services such as Amazon EC2, App Engine provides more infrastructure to make it easy to write scalable applications, but can only run a limited range of applications designed for that infrastructure.

App Engine's infrastructure removes many of the system administration and development challenges of building applications to scale to hundreds of requests per second and beyond. Google handles deploying code to a cluster, monitoring, failover, and launching application instances as necessary.

While other services let users install and configure nearly any *NIX compatible software, App Engine requires developers to use only its supported languages, APIs, and frameworks. Current APIs allow storing and retrieving data from the document-oriented Google Cloud Datastore database; making HTTP requests; sending e-mail; manipulating images, and caching. Google Cloud SQ can be used for App Engine applications requiring a relational MySQL compatible database backend.

Per-day and per-minute quotas restrict bandwidth and CPU use, number of requests served, number of concurrent requests, and calls to the various APIs, and individual requests are terminated if they take more than 60 seconds or return more than 32MB of data.

Amoung three Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)​​​​​​​ is recommended for our school because:

AWS Educate is Amazon’s global initiative to provide students and educators with the resources needed to accelerate cloud-related learning. With the increasing demand for cloud employees, AWS Educate provides an academic gateway for the next generation of IT and cloud professionals.

What's new

• Seattle University Partners with Slalom to Improve Decision Making with AWS

• Changing the World, One Artificial Intelligence (AI) Application at a Time

• Prince William County Public Schools Commitment to the Cloud

• Lancaster University Powers its Online Services by Using Alexa

Explore education segments

Higher Education:

From data center migration to student data and analytics, AWS has agile and flexible solutions.

K12 & Primary Schools

Streamline district IT operations, save money, and keep student information safe in the AWS Cloud.

EdTech Companies

Innovate and build the next generation of online learning, analytics, and campus management solutions.

Benefits

• Support Student Success

• Security & Compliance

• Agility & Scalability

• Cost Savings

Alexa in education

Amazon Alexa is giving universities, EdTechs, and publishers new ways to support learning, engage parents and improve productivity. Whether helping a busy student study for a quiz while she commutes or making it easier for an administrator to access the latest enrollment statistics during a meeting, the possibilities with Alexa are endless. Find out how you can use voice technology to enhance your campus or EdTech product.

Case studies

More than 9,000 education customers use the AWS Cloud to lower IT costs, launch student analytic initiatives, and prepare students for STEM careers.

So Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is more beneficial compared to the others for our school.