Empowering Undergraduate Students With Cloud Computing Skills: A Proposal for OpenStack-Centric Education

This innovative practice full paper presents the incorporation of cloud computing into Information Technology (IT) undergraduate programs and curricula which has become increasingly vital for upgrading and enhancing the delivery of teaching materials reliant on virtual machines, such as networking and network security lab exercises. Furthermore, the inclusion of cloud computing-focused courses in these programs will soon be imperative to address the rising demand in the job market for IT graduates equipped with cloud computing knowledge and skills. However, accessing cloud computing resources poses challenges. Public cloud computing services such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud impose significant cost and accessibility barriers on educational institutions and students. Conversely, conventional operator deployment of private cloud platforms like OpenStack presents hurdles in terms of the need for specialized expertise, training, and resource management and administration. This paper introduces a solution that simplifies the process of deploying small-scale OpenStack environments, making it comparable to the installation and setup efforts required for standalone virtualization environments like VMware Workstation (WS). Leveraging the kolla-ansible framework and tools, this innovative solution streamlines the deployment, configuration, and management of OpenStack, resulting in significant time and resource savings without the need for dedicated and highly trained resources. The paper provides our experience in migrating networking and network security lab exercises of two courses from the standalone virtualization environment, VMware WS, to our own private cloud computing platform based on OpenStack's All-In-One (AIO) deployment using kolla-ansible customization, configuration and automation tools. A detailed account of the updates and modifications of the lab exercises network setups and instructions required for the migration is also presented, including specific details of best practices and their configurations and implementation. Additionally, it offers a qualitative assessment of the students' experience in utilizing OpenStack compared to VMware WS for executing networking and network security-related lab exercises.