Sonatype uses the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud, better known as EC2, for all our training lab machines. Most of our students use a training workstation for 3-4 hours per class. Since we often have bursts of custom training activity, it wouldn't make sense to own real, physical hardware to support training. If we were maintaining our own hardware, we would have to either maintain enough capacity to teach several classes simultaneously, or limit the number of classes we deliver. For Sonatype's training effort, instantiating machines as needed is the right thing to do, and is exactly what the cloud is designed for.
Sonatype has leveraged AWS's great command line APIs and written scripts on top of them. We just invoke "instantiate-lab-machines-small.sh 10" and poof, we have pristine machines for the students, all running VNC as a service (for remote desktop access) and pre-setup with the latest version of Maven, Eclipse, and the m2eclipse plugin. No teardown. No hardware maintenance. No hassle. We even have a subsequent script that lists the machines hostnames for each copy-and-paste into the email that goes out to the students.
While our overhead for training infrastructure is smaller than ever, our use of AWS is much more than just the reduction in cost associated with cloud-based hardware. We're much more agile, because it takes us 10 minutes to create infrastructure. I don't even want to imagine owning these lab machines. As our training offerings expand, we'll be using more and more of these lab machines. I can foresee a day when we'll literally have a set of AWS machines around the clock to serve our training offerings. Until then, the hour pays it -- the raison d'etre for cloud based offerings.
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