Amazon EC2 in Schools

I just saw an article on CNet entitled Cloud Computing for Students where a computer science professor, Phil Windley, writes about how he plans to use EC2 this semester for teaching his students more than how to write a simple single threaded program to learn a language. He will be teaching them how to write a BIG distributed, scalable application.

Students will be able to create as many machines as they need and use SQS to talk to each other.

The cost for EC2 is $0.10/hour of compute time. With some careful management of the EC2 cloud (like making sure machines aren’t left running when they don’t need to be) I’ll be able to do the class for (hopefully, much) less that $100/student. That’s less than the textbooks for many classes.

The cost is pretty low compared to the learning the students will receive. This type of experience will be invaluable in their careers.

I would love to hear more stories like this, if you know any please post a comment. And Phil, if you need some help with this project, don't hesitate to ask.