I'm regularly invited to provide guest lectures on cloud computing at University of New South Wales and University of Sydney - about few times a year. It typically is a two or three hours talk in distributed computing course or similar subjects.
This year I had the opportunity to give lectures involving hands-on: CS9243 in U. of New South Wales and COMP2121 in U. of Sydney. When preparing for them, I've looked up the Internet to search simple but practical hands-on material but it turned out not many were available. So, I've created the material myself and decided to open source it here.
The material in this repo is what I used at U. of Sydney. The lecture consisted of a two-hour talk followed by one-hour hands-on session. To make the lecture practical I used AWS as an example and discussed the details throughout the talk. And, therefore, the hands-on session asked students to play with AWS.
The great thing about AWS is they offer free usage credits for educators and you can apply for it. But setting up an account for a course is bit tricky. There are two ways to provide students access to AWS:
- Providing one AWS account for each student
- Sharing one AWS account with all students
One account per student is ideal since it gives perfect isolation between students and they can do whatever they want. I took this approach in one course. Problem is you need to create accounts for all students, i.e., create a new email address, open AWS account, register a credit card (you cannot ask students to use their own credit cards for the course), etc. It apparently does not scale.
There were 50 students in another course and I decided to go with the "one account for all students" approach.
Here is what I did:
- Create a new AWS account
- Create an IAM user with minimum privilege. `iampolicy.txt' is the policy used in the course.
- Create an AMI used in the course.
Launch an Ubuntu instance, create a new user, copy
service.shand setup cron.
Students access to AWS web console or make API calls through the IAM user. What the user can do was quite limited - the user cannot even terminate instances. But it is required for prevent mistakes in the shared environment, e.g., deleting other students instances by mistake.
iampolicy.txt- IAM policy set for students accountservice.sh- A script installed in an AMI used in the coursedist- All files in this directory were distributed to students
Note that the credentials in this repo had been revoked already. I just kept it for record.