Teaching Network Administration Using the Cloud

Cloud computing is accelerating day by day as most of the enterprises looking to gain efficiency as they scale their computing resources, so cloud computing platforms are highly recommended to be used in education sectors to train students to comply with a new trend of cloud computing. Cloud computing can be used for IT practical courses like network administration, cyber security, computer security, etc. which will empower students with valuable and requisite hands-on experience. Clouds provide students and instructors with virtual machines to be accessed remotely. In this blog, we showed how students can manage their accounts and what kind of tasks they can perform after creating instances in their AWS accounts. The cloud platform used for this course is Amazon Web Services (AWS). We also elaborate on the advantages of cloud-based laboratories over using real labs which are the main reasons restrain from fulfilling the pedagogical objectives of courses. In findings, we conducted a survey among 20 students to know their views. In the end, we discovered limitations and recommendations for carrying out the network administration tasks using a cloud.

Technology advanced in past few decades, companies need experts who can assist their computer networks to work and improve them with the time. Network administrators considered as significant part of IT workforce (Vista Success, 2015). A network administrator is the one who is responsible for network administration tasks. These tasks include planning and designing of the network, setting up the network, troubleshooting, network security, authenticate and authorize users, execution and administration of regular backups, keep network up to date, monitor the network, maintain the network, and expand the network (Jennifer Pfeffer, 2016) (Craig Hunt, 1997). Network administrator extends to corporate WAN, LAN, Intranet, and the Internet. They are also responsible for maintaining reliable, secure, and efficient data communication network as users rely on the web of networking to communicate, store, share, and process information (Vangie Beal, 2017). Network administration includes various operational tasks which assist a network in running efficiently and smoothly. Maintaining network operations without network administration (Techopedia, 2017) is difficult.

In challenging economic time, corporates retain or hire new network administrators to enhance existing systems which increases productivity and reduces cost. Network administrators demand will continue to grow if companies invest in new network systems and improve the existing one. It will result in increased productivity and gain a competitive advantage. Demand for network security personnel also driven due to continuing growth in cyber-attacks. As a result, teaching network administration in universities becomes crucial, and it's playing a vital role in overcoming the shortage of skilled workforce in the field (Daniel Greenspan, 2016). Also, the nowadays role of a system administrator and network administrator changes to cloud administrator due to increment in cloud-based resources usage, so it also increases the scope for cloud administration. The objective is to offer network administration course using the cloud (Amazon Web Services) to provide a better learning environment in universities, to improve learning experiences and outcomes, and to experiment with cloud-based applications for network administration course.

The learning outcomes of this course not only require theoretical part but most importantly practical part where students can learn how to administer the network. We are promoting using hands-on and cloud-based network administration laboratories which incorporate adding users, creating groups, assigning roles, etc. It will allow students to gain individual skills locally and remotely which are high in demand. To provide cloud-based training laboratories should be comprised of features like Internet connectivity, isolated PCs with campus networks, and realistic lab environment, etc.

Background

Cloud computing is a virtualization technique in which play a vital role in providing the entire infrastructure and application with the flexibility and scalability of the computing processing power. Therefore, the success of the cloud computing depends on how the user configures the network and manage the cloud (Chen Fum, Yang Jia-Hai, and Zhan Shaobin, 2014).

The rise of cloud administrator which is blending network administrator and system administrator roles. Network administrators are required to have an awareness of application traffic flowing across the network, and how to design and implement networks to support those requirements whereas system administrators needed to aware of network topologies and operations. In future, they will be known as "Cloud administrators" (Lawrence Garvin, 2014).

After introducing and exploring the vast benefits of the cloud computing, there is less demand for the network administrators as in the cloud computing there will be less physical equipment, and most of the management and monitoring will be configured remotely in the cloud with few steps. However, Cloud computing cannot replace the position of the network administrators in organizations as there is still need for the network administrator to perform the security jobs such as establishing corporate security policies and preventing denial of service attack against the company's internet connection. In my opinion, the best practice to achieve excellent network management is to utilize the both skills from the cloud and the network administrator. Cloud computing enrich the network administrators to experience new skills such being responsible for figuring out which hosted applications can accomplish organization's goals. Also, administrators will have the duty to find the best way to migrate date from one application to another application smoothly. Cloud computing will shape up the IT industry with its services and features. Nowadays, all IT service providers are maintaining their product in a way to be easier for the organization to adopt cloud computing concepts quickly. No matter the customers like to have the cloud computing or not, it will be a necessary infrastructure for any IT solution (Brien Posey 2011).

Recently, lots of the companies are adopting the cloud services and exchanging the services to other organizations or customers which all the communication occurs on the communication infrastructure which is the network. The infrastructure acts as a linkage between the end users who are consuming the cloud services and with the providers of data centres providing the cloud services. In the cloud's environment, there are large-scale cloud data centres which are in a different location across the world to provide the disaster recovery, load balance, and data redundancy to manage all storage nodes which are connected by the data centre network to deliver a specific purpose cloud service. With the fact, the extreme need of the internet to perform the cloud, many questions could be raised such as how to maintain an infrastructure that can handle a considerable number of the data centres and how to do network architecture affect cloud computing (Hamada Alshaer 2015).

Different universities are using a cloud to teach student network administration course like Amazon Educate, Manchester University, Lynda, Pluralsight, and the University of Phoenix.

Amazon provides with AWS educate due to increasing demand of cloud employees. It provides an academic gateway for future IT and cloud professionals. It provides educators and students with resources required to promote cloud-related learning endeavours. AWS educators include teaching assistants, professors, and teachers who gain access to AWS technology, training resources, open source content for their courses, and cloud community. Students gain credits for hands-on experience with AWS technology, content, job board, training, and career pathways. It turns a classroom into dynamic learning lab (AWS 2017). The Manchester University is one of the UK based university which offers network administration course with cloud computing in their BS degree. Students will study a balance of modules between network administration and cloud-based services. Students will end up with the skills to manage the cloud environment by applying the networks administration skills such as maintain servers, routers, content filtering and access control. What is more, as the security concern always an issue in the cloud environment, students can manage firewalls, anti-virus, intrusion detection, encryption and how to perform the penetration test (Manchester 2016).  Lynda is a leading online learning platform which offers network administration course using the cloud. This course offers for technical managers, network administrators, system administrators, and full-stack engineers. It teaches them how to establish private connections, configures subnets, route tables, and gateways, set up a virtual private cloud, implement VPC peering and peer routing, creates security groups, manages a private DNS, uses Route 53, and work with access control lists, etc. It is also designed to prepare learners for AWS Certified SysOps Associate certification exams (Sharif Nijim 2016). Pluralsight is an online learning platform which offers the course "AWS fundamentals for system administrators". This course covers core AWS skills and concepts which are required to start working on AWS and get AWS certified. Topics include AWS global infrastructure, how to use the AWS tier, AWS security measures, AWS networking, etc. They offer various levels of this course with different course duration. The University of Phoenix offers associate and a bachelor degree in networking and cloud technology with distinct options (Phoenix 2017).

The purpose of different universities to provide this course is to build awareness and understanding of network administration using cloud-based laboratories which will help them to target cloud administrator jobs through learning both skills through this course.

Contribution

In this blog, we will create a lab for students to teach network administration course both locally and remotely. There is no difference of the objectives need to obtain of the network administration course wither the course given locally or remotely. At the end of the course, students will be able to set up the servers, create users and to define the roles and privileges of the access for every single user, etc. using Amazon EC2. Student act as an administrator who provides access to the instructor to their server where network administration tasks will be carried out for this course.

With the cloud computing technology, there are lots of hardware saving, software and an even space saving the as considerable number of students can attend the class without having any concern if the classroom can occupy such substantial number of students.

As there will be two ways to participate in the network administration course; attend classes or access lab remotely. Therefore, there will be two diverse ways to set up the lab which is traditional lab and cloud-based lab. In both directions, students will learn and get benefits from the course, but the difference is that those who will use a traditional lab will experience the actual hardware, unlike cloud-based labs. On other hands, having a cloud-based lab led to a variety of students to learn online through distance learning program with cost-effective fees and it requires less equipment to buy.

Physical labs lead to lots of difficulties such as managing resources, space and teachers to handle a substantial number of students in the lab. Cloud computing is a significant change in the computing's environment. In section 4, we conducted a lab using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to be the platform to support the lab exercise in the network administration course. Experiencing this lab will show that using the cloud service is an added value in the educational sectors where it saves lots of money and increases the number of students to attend the class (Chuan Yue, Weiying Zhu, Gregory Lynn Williams and Edward Chow 2012).

THE AWS CLOUD: A BRIEF OVERVIEW

One of the best cloud services that keep going and rising is Amazon Web Services (AWS), and it is a collection of integrated cloud services where the people who develop the systems and IT administrators utilize to establish, managing and deploying systems or applications via a universal network of data solutions such as data centres. Through AWS – one of the best and most public cloud computing solutions which offered by Amazon.com where the user can have the freedom and the choice to establish and deploy what he/she want based on the needs by using the equipment's, tools, apps and frameworks. AWS gives a set of computing and networking services to meet your application requirements with considering virtual machines or servers, configuring the firewall, also set up Internet access, assign IP addresses. AWS enable users to utilize the networking services and compute services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) which offers virtual servers in the AWS cloud with application services, databases and storage to provide a complete platform for the cloud computing, storing data and query processing over a vast range of apps. (Amazon EC2) Gives the capacity of computing and servers inside Amazon's datacentres—that is resizable, and the user can utilize it to establish and host applications. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a form that includes software set up (for instance: application server, software applications and operating system). Through "AMI" the user can start an instance or multiple instances (as shown in the below figure.) and an instance is a copy of the Amazon Machine Image that is function and operates as a virtual server on a host computer in Amazon's data centres (AWS 2014). The figure given below shows that users can launch multiple instances from Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

Fig. 1. Launch of Multiple Instance Using AMI (AWS 2014)

Amazon offers several and several types of platforms such as Windows or Linux via AMI and the users regardless their purpose of creating or choosing the OS to have the freedom to select which type based on the needs/requirements. If students want to connect to one of the types of the instance, then they should know that connection to these instances must be secured either by using RSA private key or another way.

METHODOLOGY

To conduct this research; initially, we do a research about related work then we experiment network administration tasks using AWS cloud which we discussed below. After that, we conducted a survey of 10 questionnaires among 20 IT students using surveymonkey.com and came out with some actual results.

A. Manage Student Account

Initially, we created one instance for all students where we faced limitations like more than two students cannot access the same server at a time and limited access to the server to carry out administration task. It notifies users to log out to allow another user to access the server. To overcome this issue, we planned to allow students to create their accounts on AWS. They will create an instance in their AWS account. It will help them to learn two skills at a time AWS cloud and network administration.

B. Post Cloud-Based Laboratory

During the lab, we allow students to create their accounts on AWS then to create the instance using Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Base (ami-0185e161) which is part of teaching them network administration course. Once student created the account using a key, then they will be allowed to access the remote access desktop. The student will log in using key created during creation of an instance. Each student has an administrator access to their server.

Fig. 2. Access remote desktop connection (Administrator)

A student can add users, remove users, give permissions to users, create groups, add users to groups, server management, local group policy, etc. They will add instructor named as “IT_instructor” and add them in remote access group to give access to their machines. Once student grants access to instructor we tested using instructor credentials to access server, and it was successful.

Fig. 3. Access remote desktop connection (IT_instructor)

Then students create a folder name “Student A – Shared Folder” with subfolders “Assignment”, “Course Materials”, “Homework”, and “Notes”. The instructor has access full access to “Student A – Shared Folder” folder whereas for subfolders has access to only “Homework” and “Assignment” subfolder. Once student grants access to the instructor to the folder we tested using instructor credentials to access shared folders. Both student and instructor got same screen and folders appearing. However, When IT instructor wants to access “course materials” or “Notes” folder, he won't be able to access because Student didn't give him permission. On the other hand, he can access assignment and homework folders.

Fig. 4. Shared folder

MAIN ADVANTAGES FOR USING THE CLOUD

Cloud computing plays a vital role in any environment public, private or even educational sectors. With the all good impacts of the cloud computing, we will focus on the advantages of the cloud computing in the education sector as the lab is evidence for the cloud as high impact on the education. Cloud computing is not about reducing the cost of the equipment, money or equipment, but it also provides a creative and practical environment to make the work done smoothly and efficiently. The following are the main advantages we experienced while preparing the lab (Sameer Bhatia 2014) (Salesforce UK 2015).

A. No Hardware Required

By using the cloud web services, we didn't require any need to the hardware to configure and maintain the hardware while preparing the lab. It's a great deal in the cloud computing, as there is no need to spend money to buy multiple hardware. Universities can save lots of money by adopting the virtualization concepts in their classes and labs.

B. No Software Required

One more interesting advantage is that there is no need to install any specific software or upgrade the software, everything managed by the cloud which helps in saving time to install the latest version of the software and as well as saving the money. As we noticed from the lab, students and instructor didn't bother about the version of the installed servers which is a major and critical point need to be considered while managing an IT class or before performing any configuration.

C. Reaching to more students at one time

As the class or lab is conducting virtually, many students can attend the class without the concern whether the class can occupy many students or not. Cloud computing, help lots of people to have their education remotely.

D. Increased collaboration

Cloud encourage the collaboration between others. So, people can share a different type of files or folders and add changes in the files based on the privileges assigned to each type of access. Any changes added to the files will be applied right away on the files. So, the users who access to the files will be up to date with the all changes as done by students in a lab. Student creates a folder "network administration" with subfolder and gives privileges to an instructor.

E. Work from anywhere

Cloud allow students to access from anywhere either they are in university or at their home. Just they need an internet connection to work on network administration tasks.

LIMITATIONS AND RECOMMENDATION FOR USING THE CLOUD

Sometimes remote desktop is denied due to reasons like remote access to the server is not enabled, the remote computer is turned off, or remote computer is not available on the network. The recommendation for this is to allow the remote user like Instructor to access the server by adding in remote access group from computer management.

Access machine is limited by two users only able to access at the same time. So, we suggested using their accounts to overcome this limitation but still if a student as an administrator allow different users to access the system they will not be able to.

CONCLUSION

Cloud computing platform has many useful features could be used in different areas and fields and this paper, we approved that cloud computing is vast and it is a deep internet-based world where the user can utilize and benefit from it. The importance of cloud computing is in cloud computing platform uses and objectives. One of the applications we mentioned in this research is the educational purposes or teaching uses. By going through certain phases, this paper concludes the best practice of using AWS cloud for academic purposes practically for example 1) student can build his/her instance (machine) by using EC2 option.2) configure the machine based on needs. 3) grant permission for the teachers on the machine, so they will be able to put the marks for the students or put some feedback on student 4) restrict instructor permission on some folders on the machine (student act as administrator on the machine). This way, the student finds out how cloud computing can serve them educationally and academically. In additional, practicing cloud computing services make students learn cloud computing management skills and enhance using the cloud capabilities as their role needs on the practice.

Finally, keep exercising the cloud computing features will allow students to discover more and more of the features that would help them in their future career while in this way a student will be able to plan professionally before building machines, grant permissions or making a decision related to systems and apps.

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