EduCloud: A private cloud tool for academic environments

Cloud computing emerged in the last years as a novel approach to deal with computational resources. The amount of resources available seems infinite, resources are charged per use (usually by the hour), provisioning or releasing resources is performed on demand and quickly. In addition, everyday more and more features are included by cloud providers in their cloud services menu. These novelties impose a shift in the traditional paradigm to build, manage and use computational resources. Therefore, there is a need to prepare current and future IT professionals to comprehend this new paradigm. This paper presents EduCloud, an academic private cloud tool that provides a simple environment to comprehend and experiment cloud computing concepts. EduCloud can be easily deployed using standard local computing resources, without the need of special hardware or access to external resources. It can be used to evaluate how a cloud computing environments works (e.g., cloud portal interaction, provisioning/decommissioning of resources, etc), and also to implement and experiment new strategies for cloud resources management (e.g., automatic scaling strategies, new billing models, etc) using standard computing resources.