In this lecture, I am going to give you an overview of our off-premises lab.

First, we are going to talk about utilizing the Cloud for an off-premises lab.

The Cloud refers to a network of remote computers that are all connected together to provide some type of service.

“Cloud Computing” which is what we are going to use for IT Labs refers to the practice of utilizing servers over the Internet versus using your own computer.

So we can use Cloud computing to create our own IT Lab.

Now, there’s a couple of advantages and disadvantages to using the Cloud for your IT Lab.

Let’s start with the advantages:

You don’t need a powerful computer to run your own IT Lab. Some of you might not have a 64-bit computer or you can’t run Windows Server on your laptop or computer just because it is too slow. This is where the Cloud, or using the Internet, or resources over the Internet can be a huge advantage because it can allow you to run your IT Lab.

You can also access it anywhere you have an Internet connection whereas if you set up your on-premises lab generally you have to be at the site where you are using the servers. Although it necessarily has to be the case you could set up remote management for your lab but generally, if you set up an off-premises lab you can access it anywhere where you have Internet connectivity.

Also, you can turn it off and on, increase or contract your IT lab meaning you can add servers to it as many as you like, there’s no limit whereas if you are running an on-premises lab you can only run as much as your hardware can handle which maybe are one or two, maybe five VMs at a time whereas in the Cloud you can run a hundred if you like and if you want to pay for it.

Now, let’s talk about the disadvantages:

There’s one main disadvantage that we want to talk about.

It generally costs money to rent the resources for your IT Lab. So when you are using Cloud Computing you have to pay for that computing power or that processing power.

Most Cloud providers like Azure and AWS all provide free tiers so you can set up IT labs for free but at some point, you are going to end up having to pay money to rent your servers.

Let’s talk about what we are going to accomplish in this section?

First, we are going to create an off-premises IT Lab with AWS or Amazon Web Services.

By the end of this section, you are going to understand the free tier of AWS.

We are going to register at AWS.

We are going to create and configure an EC2 instance which is just a Virtual Machine.

We are going to configure port rules so that we can connect to our Cloud VM.

We are going to terminate our EC2 instances and our off-premises lab because I don’t want you to be getting accidentally charged because you set up an IT Lab and then you don't want to use it or something like that.

So at some point, you are going to want to turn off your EC2 instance and I want to make sure you understand how to do that so you can do it at your own pace. Keep in mind that you don’t have to terminate it in this section if you don't want to.

So that’s all we are going to cover in this overview.

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