I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Arizona State University was a member of AWS educate, more so since my year of free trial ran out last month and I just payed my first bill for the Amazon instance I use for data collection. Amazon Web Services provides an easy to deploy, easy to scale cloud computing environment. With AWS educate, I can deploy research servers that I have full control over, or get my students to have a taste of cloud without having to deal with school bureaucracy.
The WP Carey IT department has gone through serious restructuring the past two years and has been unresponsive to my requests. AWS enabled me to deploy the needed server in one afternoon and has been a delight to work with for the last year. The Educate program provides up to 200$ for educators and 100$ for students to use in AWS services as well as access to AWS related courses and content. The 200$ will roughly pay for 10 months of my research server. That means, I won’t have to deal with IT department for almost another year.
Although I have not yet used AWS for a teaching case, I am looking forward to integrating this as a project for my Computer Networks and Distributed Systems class.
Irfan's Adventures 
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