CSP launched Class2Go’s first production environment quickly and efficiently, at a fraction of the cost of an earlier online platform. Previously, CSP had worked with Australian Government departments to create MMEx—an online platform that allows health professionals across Australia to share patient information securely and efficiently. “Delivering the MMEx e-health platform cost $300,000 and it took three or four months to get the first production environment running,” says Professor Glance. “Using AWS, Class2Go cost about $200 for the first month and our current operating costs are only about $1,500 a month.”

AWS has helped enable CSP to adapt its production environment quickly and efficiently to meet Class2Go’s evolving requirements. “We’ve had great success in terms of up-time, responsiveness, and features like being able to seamlessly upgrade to a bigger Amazon EC2 instance when one runs out of memory,” says Professor Glance. “In terms of daily operations, it’s almost infrastructure that you can build and forget.”

“The MOOC space is a very significant development for tertiary education,” says Professor Glance. “One of the reasons that this has all been possible is that cloud platforms like AWS have been there to facilitate it.” AWS in Education, which evaluates academic research support proposals from accredited universities, awarded a $10,000 grant to the center to supplement its MOOC initiative. The CSP used the grant to provide 130 students with an Amazon EC2 instance each for practical exercises. “We’re calling this concept ‘bring your own server’,” says Professor Glance. “We think that the opportunity for students to have a bit of the cloud that follows them around their software engineering degree is a big one.” If the experiment is successful, the model will be rolled out for other courses at UWA.

The scalability of AWS has allowed CSP to lay the groundwork for future growth. “As we start piling on courses, we expect student numbers to increase from about 2,500 students to between 20,000 and 30,000,” says Professor Glance. “All it would take is to have one popular course and we could see anything upwards of 100,000 people accessing the system. Using AWS, we’re prepared to accommodate that kind of increase.”