AWS Public Sector Blog
From computer lab lines to global access: Boston Architectural College’s cloud transformation with Amazon AppStream 2.0
Students at The Boston Architectural College (BAC) once faced a difficult choice during midterms and finals week: arrive early to claim one of 180 campus workstations, or risk missing a critical project deadline. Professional design software—such as Autodesk Revit, AutoCAD, and Adobe Creative Cloud—requires high-end hardware that many students can’t afford, leaving them dependent on limited on-premises labs.
Nearly 85% of BAC students balance full-time jobs with their studies. For these working professionals, traveling to campus and waiting in line created barriers to education and added pressure to already demanding schedules. The pandemic heightened these access issues, driving students online and expanding BAC’s virtual population. As online enrollment grew, the equity challenge became even more pressing.
In this blog post, learn how BAC worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to eliminate computer lab lines, reduce infrastructure costs, and deliver professional design software to students across seven global Regions using Amazon AppStream 2.0.
Serving students with limited resources
BAC serves approximately 1,000 students across architecture, landscape architecture, interior architecture, and other specialized design programs. Many students are first-generation college students or transfer students completing their degrees, with a growing share participating online from locations worldwide. BAC also runs a pre-college summer academy that recently included nearly 100 high school participants from around the world who joined remotely and accessed professional design software through the cloud.
Every program depends on graphics-intensive software, with students frequently running multiple applications at once. These demanding workflows, combined with heavy demand spikes during exams, exposed the limits of traditional approaches. “Prior to the pandemic, we had about 180 computers with all of our software on them, and that was it,” said David Hansen, former director of academic technology at BAC. “If it were a busy time of year, like finals or midterms, people would be standing in the hall, staring down other students waiting for a seat to open.”
On-premises virtual desktops (VDI) were too costly for BAC’s budget. While a third-party cloud vendor quickly enabled remote learning during the pandemic, its fixed-capacity pricing meant they were paying peak rates year-round. Annual costs reached $180,000, with little flexibility to expand globally.
Finding the right cloud architecture with AWS support
When BAC’s vendor contract approached renewal, the high cost and limited coverage prompted the college to evaluate alternatives. To compare options, BAC ran parallel pilots: one with Amazon AppStream 2.0 and another with a leading cloud provider. At first, the latter option seemed like it might be a natural fit given the college’s existing technology investments.
But after weeks of testing, the alternative pilot still hadn’t produced a functioning graphics workstation. “We never got past the point where we could stand up something and see how it works,” said Carl Jaspersohn, systems architect at BAC.
In contrast, the Amazon AppStream 2.0 pilot progressed smoothly from the start. Beyond strong technical performance, the AWS account team provided hands-on guidance throughout the process, including complex implementations such as VPN connections, cloud domain controllers, and a multi-Region architecture. Instead of leaving BAC with documentation to figure it out on their own, the AWS team worked directly with the college’s small IT staff to resolve challenges as they arose. “It was obvious after a month or two that AWS was a much easier platform for us to spin up,” said Jason O’Brien, associate vice president of information technology at BAC.
The pay-as-you-go pricing model of Amazon AppStream 2.0 was especially important, as it gave BAC the ability to scale up during finals and midterms, then scale back down afterward to match actual demand. With a renewal deadline looming, that flexibility—combined with AWS’s collaborative support—proved critical. “Our third-party vendor told me directly that it’s not going to save you money because you’re going to have to hire more people to run it,” Hansen said.
However, that didn’t end up being true. AWS helped BAC build automation and management tools that reduced overhead and required minimal ongoing maintenance compared to the vendor-managed model.
Building a global, desktop-first virtual studio
Today, when BAC students need to use the college’s design software, they can open any web browser, whether they’re at the school computer lab, on a laptop in a São Paulo café, a desktop in a Seoul office, or even a tablet at home in Boston. Within moments, they’ll have access to a full Windows desktop with all their professional tools—even if they’re running a $300 off-the-shelf laptop.
This Amazon AppStream 2.0 environment spans seven AWS Regions (US East, Oregon, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Seoul, São Paulo, and Sydney) and delivers the same experience regardless of location or device. “The AWS account team has been really amazing at working through these technologies with us so that we could go from ‘I don’t know anything about it’ to having a VPN between our data center and US East,” Jaspersohn said. “We then built a hub and spoke from there to all the other regions.”
BAC deliberately chose a desktop-first approach rather than publishing individual applications, as architecture students rarely work in a single program. A typical workflow might include modeling in Revit, rendering in Enscape, making touch-ups in Photoshop, and compiling everything in InDesign—all within the same session. The virtual desktop replicates this studio workflow exactly as students would experience it on campus workstations.
Key implementation details include:
- One consistent image across Regions. BAC maintains a single standard image that mirrors the on-campus labs, refreshed two to three times per year to align with license cycles and semester starts.
- Scalable automation. Scripting the Region-build process reduced new deployments to a push-button task, making expansion fast and consistent.
- User experience and support tools. With FSLogix profiles and custom help desk tools, students retain a consistent Windows environment, and the IT team can quickly resolve stuck sessions.
“We cannot possibly have systems that require full-time people to manage when all of us have multiple responsibilities,” Hansen said. “This is a system that works very well and does not require a lot of handholding and poking. It’s been extremely reliable.”
Licensing has also been straightforward. With ample floating licenses (for example, Autodesk allocations sized for the student population), BAC can run the same image globally without hitting license limits.
Transforming access while reducing costs
The shift to Amazon AppStream 2.0 reshaped both BAC’s budget and its reach. Annual spending dropped from $180,000 with a third-party vendor to under $100,000, even as the college expanded from two AWS Regions to seven. The added flexibility also gave students about 100 additional virtual seats on top of the 180 campus workstations, ending the long lab lines that once defined finals.
For students, the change has meant greater freedom in how, when, and where they work. Learners can now model, render, and edit from their offices during a lunch break, from their apartments in the evening, or from a coffee shop on the weekends—all without worrying whether their personal device can handle the workload.
Faculty have embraced the reliability as well, encouraging students to experiment with demanding workflows. “The faculty like it and immediately adopted it,” Hansen said. “It feels like something we’ve had forever.”
For most, the system has become background infrastructure that they simply expect to work. Support tickets are rare, and the most common issue is students losing sessions after stepping away for too long.
At the same time, BAC continues to maintain its 180 on-campus workstations, providing students with both cloud and physical options depending on their needs and preferences.
Creating a blueprint for educational equity
BAC’s use of Amazon AppStream 2.0 has become central to its mission of accessible education. What once limited students to campus labs is now available to learners anywhere, on almost any device—supporting working professionals, transfer students, remote learners, and even pre-college participants from around the world.
With expansion to an eighth AWS Region on the horizon, BAC is positioned for continued growth. Its experience demonstrates how the right cloud architecture can deliver both global reach and operational simplicity for institutions facing similar challenges.
Learn how AWS helps institutions build, deploy, and scale education solutions. Contact us today.