Abstract
Knowing the advantages of public cloud services is important for undergraduate students that will work in the IT domain. The study of cloud technology should cover not only the theoretical aspects but should also give hands on access and experience with the management interface. Two important players on this market offer access to services as a free trial that allows testing and light cloud platform usage: Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. This paper compares these free services and their usability in an undergraduate laboratory at the Computer Science specialization and proposes a laboratory structure that should cover this process of investigation.
1 Introduction
There is a constant push in recent years from big companies such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon to attract internet users and businesses to their cloud services, but the strategy for these companies varies in regard to the free access offering. Some promote free software based on their solution, while others give free but limited access to their solutions. It could be argued that the best way to proceed in interacting with cloud technology in an undergraduate environment is to create a private cloud with free technologies such as Open Stack or CloudStack, however as most commercial applications will target public cloud platforms from Amazon, Microsoft or Google, having hands-on experience with these platforms at undergraduate level can give an advantage to the students. It is therefore important to compare the solutions that offer free access to the commercial level user interface and their usability in and educational environment (laboratory class), in order to test operating systems and services for undergraduate students.
6 Conclusions
This paper preselected comparatively the Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure platforms. A full four hour laboratory was used to make the students use both platforms and complete successfully the proposed tasks.
Both platforms proved not too difficult to use so a first time user can work on them without too much problems. Microsoft Azure proved to have the lease steep learning curve. Students were able to understand how services that are installed “in the cloud” are actually functioning and they were able to publish their own web site. Another simple application that can be created during this laboratory is a Google App Engine application that is deployed in the cloud and is accessed via the browser.
