Obtaining a Cloud Computing Account

As noted on the Cloud Resources page, we do not require that you use actual cloud computing accounts for CS5412. This is because Amazon and Azure (Microsoft) and Google all charge for use of their clouds, and we don't wish to impose those costs on you. Many cloud projects for CS5412 use cloud computing tools, but are actually developed on computers running in the MEng or Ugrad computing labs. We won't mark you lower on your project for deciding to develop and demo it "in house" as long as the tools you use are ones that would also work in a real cloud-scale data center.

Cornell cannot pay for cloud computing resources for you or your group.

If you wish to obtain your own AWS account, visit this link. Please be aware that the free tier has mediocre to poor performance, and for this reason can be a challenge to use. Basically, these are shared servers, and as deadlines approach, they might have hundreds of people logged into each server.

If you wish to obtain your own Microsoft Azure account, visit this link. The performance of Azure academic servers is similar to AWS, but we have not had reports of severe overloads close to deadlines (at least, not in past years).

If you wish to obtain your own Google Cloud account, visit this link. The "free tier" of Google is a fairly recent innovation and we do not yet have much feedback from students about their experiences.