Partner Success with AWS / Education / United Kingdom

October 2024
Teeside University
CirrusHQ

Teesside University London Opens New Cloud Labs with CirrusHQ on AWS

Learn how Teesside University worked with CirrusHQ and AWS to build systems for a new London campus, providing scalability as student numbers grew rapidly.

Computing

labs with minimal capital outlay

Scales

to support growing student and staff numbers

Access

to high-end compute systems for gaming and design courses

Accessible

to all students regardless of laptop specification

Overview

Teesside University wanted to open a London campus to expand its UK recruitment and expand the delivery of its business, gaming, and animation courses. It wanted to create a modern, adaptable facility while reducing environmental impact and unnecessary expense on fixed IT infrastructure. To achieve this, the university worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AWS Partner CirrusHQ to build a cloud-based infrastructure that students could access without high-specification personal devices. Using AWS also meant that systems were ready to scale as student numbers grew, which was crucial when starting a brand-new campus and building student numbers from scratch. All of this was achieved with vastly reduced capital expenditure, because it removed the requirement to create large, fixed computer labs that would be unnecessary with early student cohort numbers, and would be inflexible as the needs of students, and the university, changed and developed over time.

Teeside University

Opportunity | Building a Brand-New Campus and Courses from Scratch

Teesside University chose its new campus location within Here East, an innovation and technology campus situated at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London. The university’s vision was to give students access to an experience identical to the one that they would have in the gaming design computer lab on its Middlesborough campus. Building the Cloud Labs service in parallel with the work on the physical campus fit out ensured that the Labs would be ready when the campus opened in September 2023. The university also wanted to avoid unnecessary expense in building out excessive IT infrastructure that wouldn’t be fully used while student numbers continued to grow.

The system also needed to enable the university to change how courses are offered. Students enrolling at the London campus need to join their program at a variety of different intervals throughout the year, working in 6-week intensive modules as opposed to the more traditional autumn-to-summer academic cycle. This means that demand on systems would grow rapidly compared to a traditional university model, where enrollment is more fixed and might increase only on an annual basis. Such flexibility would be impossible using on-premises systems.

kr_quotemark

“We chose AWS and CirrusHQ because they shared our vision. It really felt like three partners working together—and it still does today.”

Chrisina Jayne
Professor and Dean of the School of Computing, Engineering, & Digital Technologies and Acting Dean and Director of the London Campus, Teesside University

Solution | Ditching Physical Labs for Cloud-Based Compute Accessible from Anywhere

The university approached AWS and another large cloud provider and invited both to create a proof of concept. “We chose AWS and CirrusHQ because they shared our vision,” says Chrisina Jayne, a professor and dean of the school of computing, engineering, and digital technologies and acting dean and director of Teesside University London (TU London). “It really felt like three partners working together—and it still does today.” “I don’t think we could even have considered this project without cloud—the scale of cost would have been unjustifiable”, says Andrew Gill, deputy director of IT and digital services at Teesside University. Using AWS made it possible to build the university’s Cloud Labs system, which was ready to scale as recruitment was underway and application numbers grew.

Instead of filling a lab with expensive desktop machines and deploying on-premises servers, Teesside and CirrusHQ built labs with large screens, keyboards, and mice ready for students to plug in their own laptops. They can then access the applications they require for their games design and animation courses flexibly on their own devices. The university provides funding for students who need help buying their own machines. It also makes loan devices available but leaves the choice to the student. The scalability of AWS means that systems can support 10 students as easily, and as economically, as it can support 1,000. “For very high-end animation, a very high-specification PC in a lab would have the edge, but it’s very close—and the advantages of easily accessing systems both at the lab and from home makes up for that,” says Jayne. To further enable this flexibility, the university uses AWS IAM Identity Center to provide single sign-on access and integrate easily with other systems.

The set of applications used by the labs runs on Amazon AppStream 2.0. This enables conversion of desktop applications into streamed-as-a-service applications without needing any recoding or refactoring. It also automates scaling with no need to think about infrastructure. The university also uses AWS Lambda to perform automated stopping of AppStream Image Builders outside of office hours, which further reduces unnecessary costs. On-campus attendance at TU London is 2 days a week—Mondays and Tuesdays for undergraduates, and Thursdays and Fridays for postgraduates. The university chose AWS because it enables these systems to scale up to meet this demand but keeps costs minimal when students are not using them. Teesside University uses Amazon FSx for persistent storage for user application settings, extending storage space for applications as required and for users within preset limits. The team tested system performance with staff, friends, and family. “The moment I knew we’d cracked it was when I logged in using the cheapest Chromebook we could find using Wi-Fi on the train,” says Gill. “And I could actually do it—with pretty poor network connectivity.”

Outcome | Streaming Applications for Gaming Design and Animation

With the Cloud Lab built by CirrusHQ on AWS, the university has the flexibility and scalability it needs to deliver its teaching model. There is also a positive sustainability impact to running systems on AWS. The university is in the process of evaluating the project through an environmental audit and expects to see a lower environmental impact because of this approach compared to using its own in-house systems.

Lessons learned in London will inform future technology strategy back in Middlesborough, partly because of the granularity of data available on how systems are used. “The team in London have been fantastic collaborators, and it’s been really fulfilling for us IT people to come to the forefront of an impactful project like this and create something with so much impact on students’ lives,” says Gill. “We’ve built a system that we could roll out anywhere in the world,” says Jayne. “We could work with one of our international partners in Madrid, Prague, or Singapore and set up a Cloud Lab on AWS there in a matter of weeks.”

 

About Teeside University

With its main campus located in Middlesbrough, England, Teesside University has over 22,000 students supported by over 2,000 academic and administrative staff. It was awarded an overall gold rating in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) 2023.

About AWS Partner CirrusHQ

CirrusHQ was founded as an AWS specialist. It works with educational institutions, enterprises, public bodies, and small and medium-sized businesses. Based in Livingston, Scotland, it helps customers improve cloud cost transparency and simplify management of cloud workloads.

AWS Services Used

Amazon AppStream 2.0

Amazon AppStream 2.0 is a fully managed AWS End User Computing (EUC) service designed to stream software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and convert desktop applications to SaaS without rewriting code or refactoring the application.

Learn more »

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources, making it the fastest way to turn an idea into a modern, production, serverless applications.

Learn more »

Amazon FSx

Amazon FSx makes it easy and cost effective to launch, run, and scale feature-rich, high-performance file systems in the cloud.

Learn more »

AWS IAM Identity Center

It is a flexible solution that can be used to connect your existing identity source once and gives your AWS applications a common view of your users.

Learn more »

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