Teesside University London Opens New Cloud Labs with CirrusHQ on AWS

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.

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.”

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.”