Scalable Software Practice Environments Featuring Automatic Provision and Configuration in the Cloud

This paper describes an architecture to deploy scalable Software Practice Environments (SPE) to support the practice lessons that require computer resources that can be remotely accessed. The architecture enables (i) to dynamically and on-demand provision the required computing resources from different IaaS Cloud providers, (ii) to perform the automatic software configuration to satisfy the requirements of the practical lesson, (iii) to suspend and resume the virtual infrastructure in order to cut down costs during a course and (iv) to support different elasticity approaches in order to create scalable virtual infrastructures. The paper describes the proposed architecture and details a case study that involves deploying the virtual infrastructure of an online course on Cloud Computing with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on top of AWS itself. It also describes scalability approaches that can be employed to provide infrastructure access to SPEs for larger audiences, such as those found in MOOCs.