Customer Stories / Education
Vocareum Offers Amazon Lightsail to Help over 50,000 Cloud Learners Build Cloud Skills
Learn how Vocareum in the education industry offers Amazon Lightsail to help its customers spin up new test environments quickly and cost efficiently.
Empowers instructors
to deploy sandbox environments quickly
Serves over 50,000 students
using Amazon Lightsail
Makes it simple
to control cloud costs and usage
Achieves
virtually limitless scaling
Offers a variety
of labs and services to improve learning outcomes
Overview
Cloud-native education technology company Vocareum wanted to help its customers create better digital-learning experiences for their students. To do so, Vocareum needed to provide a fast, simple way for instructors to deploy sandbox environments where learners can experiment with web and application development to meet their course objectives.
Vocareum, like many other education technology companies around the globe, had used AWS in the past. However, they decided to offer Amazon Lightsail as an option to build simpler and smaller applications with low-cost, preconfigured cloud resources. Educators on Vocareum’s learning platform can now use Amazon Lightsail to spin up new test environments, scale their resources with predictable pricing, and better serve their students with hands-on learning experiences.
Opportunity | Creating Sandbox Environments Using Amazon Lightsail
What’s great about being built on AWS is that our company can offer a broad and growing range of labs to support the learning community.”
David Lin
Vice President of Business Development, Vocareum
Solution | Scaling in the AWS Cloud to Support Global Learners
Since Vocareum began offering Amazon Lightsail in 2021, over 50,000 users have adopted the service. Instructors and students find it simple to launch Amazon Lightsail and get started quickly, making the solution a popular choice for both guided assignments and independent projects. Students use Amazon Lightsail when engaging in hands-on learning about cloud computing, ML, artificial intelligence, web development, and more. “Amazon Lightsail is a complete experience,” says Lin. “Learners get access to databases and scaling as part of the Amazon Lightsail feature set, which offers them flexibility and control.”
Vocareum’s customers also find monitoring and optimizing their cloud costs to be simple when using Amazon Lightsail and other AWS solutions. Instructors can set a budget and restrict the resources that students use for each assignment. “For instance, we can say that inside a given lab, we want to give learners access to $20 worth of AWS resources,” says Lin. “We can also restrict how much time students are allowed spend in an AWS account. This way, we can provide a sandbox environment constrained by budget and policy so that as students learn, they are using resources efficiently.” Vocareum’s cloud lab solution is actively deployed in, and is an integral part of, many AWS Education Programs, including AWS Academy, AWS Educate, and AWS re/Start, through which learners gain practical, hands-on technical skills training.
Using AWS, Vocareum can also scale as needed to make its hands-on labs accessible to a growing number of learners. Students can access the labs through their web browsers using a laptop or desktop computer without having to install any special software. Educational institutions don’t need to use their own data centers to support learning, and neither does Vocareum. “We can scale virtually infinitely in the AWS Cloud and support learning globally,” says Lin.
Outcome | Adding More AWS Services to Teach New Skills
By adding Amazon Lightsail to its service offerings, Vocareum has made it simple and cost efficient for its customers to support students as they learn, experiment, and prepare for new opportunities. As demand for employees with cloud skills continues to accelerate around the globe, Vocareum plans to continue adding AWS solutions to its repertoire to help institutions meet changing needs. For example, as interest in ML grows, Amazon SageMaker—a solution for building, training, and deploying ML models—is becoming more popular among Vocareum’s customers.
“What’s great about being built on AWS is that our company can offer a broad and growing range of labs to support the learning community,” says Lin.
About Vocareum
Vocareum is a cloud-native education technology company that provides digital learning and training solutions to educational institutions. Vocareum was founded in 2012 and today serves more than one thousand institutions and one million learners.
AWS Services Used
Amazon Lightsail
Amazon Lightsail offers easy-to-use virtual private server (VPS) instances, containers, storage, databases, and more at a cost-effective monthly price.
AWS Academy
AWS Academy provides higher education institutions with a free, ready-to-teach cloud computing curriculum that prepares students to pursue industry-recognized certifications and in-demand cloud jobs.
AWS Educate
AWS Educate is open to any individual, regardless of where they are in their education, technical experience, or career journey.
AWS re/Start
AWS re/Start is a cohort-based workforce development training program that prepares individuals for careers in the cloud and connects them to potential employers.
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