Cloud Based IT Suite

[matte53]

Hi All,

 

Has anyone had any experience in setting up a cloud based environment for Computer Science or any other purpose?

 

Our Computer Science teacher is wanting student restrictions to be relaxed which I'm not keen to deploy so I'm looking into the possibility of creating him cloud based VMs that are totally isolated and can be run without worrying about restrictions etc.

 

I've been looking at Google Cloud Platform or AWS as possibilities, does anyone have any experience of doing something similar?

 

Any advice would be great,

 

Thanks.

[AliG]

We use Cloud9 if it helps

[Blue_Cookeh]

Depending on the money, you could do exactly this internally using VMware vRealize and you'd have a much nicer experience than remoting into a 30 odd machines over the Internet. If you're set on going that way, MS recently announced a cloud workstation product where you can host Windows 10 in Azure.

 

I think I'd be trying to find out what the CompSci teacher's end goal is - by "relaxing restrictions" he could just mean he wants to be able to teach Python or something equally as deployable without faff.

[matte53]

Depending on the money, you could do exactly this internally using VMware vRealize and you'd have a much nicer experience than remoting into a 30 odd machines over the Internet. If you're set on going that way, MS recently announced a cloud workstation product where you can host Windows 10 in Azure.

 

I think I'd be trying to find out what the CompSci teacher's end goal is - by "relaxing restrictions" he could just mean he wants to be able to teach Python or something equally as deployable without faff.

 

I've not been in position long at my current role but the teacher was frustrated with how things previously worked and found things too restrictive and couldn't run a large amount of the software he wanted to. We've put a lot of this right for him but I'm now being asked to provide access to command prompt, control panel among others, all things that normally wouldn't be allowed in the environment, and open the computers up further than I would like to. The thinking behind the cloud based lab was rather than just saying a flat no to his requests, was to provide an environment completely restriction free, possibly running some form of Linux rather than Windows that will never be able to get onto our network. We only have A Level classes of 9 or 10 so it may be a relatively cheap solution.

 

I've never been asked to provide access at this level in any of my previous schools for Computer Science courses and they have always run fine with the staff happy.

 

@AliG - How do you find Cloud 9 works? Do you use if for a similar purpose as described?

Edited October 4, 2018 by matte53

[dhicks]

Our Computer Science teacher is wanting student restrictions to be relaxed which I'm not keen to deploy so I'm looking into the possibility of creating him cloud based VMs that are totally isolated and can be run without worrying about restrictions etc.

 

What is it he wants to teach - does it actually need a whole desktop VM to remote into, or would a command-line do, or a specific service? PythonAnywhere do a nice ready-to-go Python setup (Python, plus pretty much any library you can think of pre-installed), something like that might be appropriate.

[AlanD]

If students get relaxed restrictions then your network is at risk of being compromised... Certainly if the students are any good at it. Changing their ip address to be the as your gateway would probably cause some chaos...

 

I'd want to understand exactly what they need to do educationally... Not simply they need access to command prompt. I would use...and did use a virtual pc for this.. Which had no Internet access only to itself. And it simply reset the image at the end of the session back to the original clean one. We kept that image on the local hard disk because it worked better... Tried a network one but it started to get very sluggish with 10 or more sessions.

 

Also used Linux terminal server some years ago... Worked great.

[free780]

Could you not have an isolated vlan with standalone win10. The big issue Is authentication if Internet access is required. You could use 802.1x and radius or a capture page from your filter.

[fiza]

Why not follow the guidance here https://www.edugeek.net/showthread.php?t=95325

[fiza]

Gives students unrestricted access but without internet access and without the potential to cause chaos in your network.