Clouds and Light

The platform provides lab modules. Each of these modules provides an interactive training lab in cloud technologies which students can use to become more familiar with cloud services or cloud-hosted architectures.

Students work through modules by building out services in their own dedicated AWS learning account. As they work through the lab, the system can connect to their AWS environment and provide detailed analysis of their progress, with detailed feedback, thus providing the opportunity to correct errors or continue to more advanced topics.

A key issue with cloud training today is that most training and certifications are highly generic and don't reflect the architectures and processes used by many companies. Training courses and standard documentation may suggest the use of services which are not approved within a company, or network connectivity patterns which don't meet a company's security standards.

At the core of the Clouds and Light platform is that every training course can be customized, and students can be assigned a specific set of courses which may be unique to their environment.

Every user on the platform can create customized courses. Each course is held as a package which contains the student instructions, details for testing and feedback on their AWS build, images, and metadata.

Existing templates and courses can be cloned and edited to create new course content. Once published, the Markdown is converted to a rich HTML document with dynamic content menu, highlighted and copyable code blocks, callouts and info boxes, and a range of visual elements to structure the content and make it engaging.

This platform is designed to augment, not replace, teacher or instructor-led training. For classroom training, we aim to offer the ability to register students as a group and assign them a specific curriculum of one or more courses. Each of these courses can be adapted from a standard template or your own unique content.

Students will have their own individual progress reports, but the instructor can also have a whole class view of the progress being made by each registered student. This way they can focus their time and attention as needed. This will work with in-classroom training but can be even more useful when some or all of the students are remote, allowing their progress to be monitored even when they are not physically present and for the instructor to provide tailored assistance where needed.