CLOUD-CLASSROOM: SELECTING THE RIGHT PLATFORM FOR VIRTUAL OPERATING SYSTEMS LABS

Abstract

The adoption of cloud computing in higher education has transformed the delivery of practical courses, enabling remote access to computing resources without the need for costly physical laboratories. This study focuses on selecting an appropriate cloud computing platform for building a virtual online laboratory to support the Operating Systems (OS) course. The research compares various cloud service providers and virtualization tools based on scalability, performance, cost, ease of integration, and support for OS-level experiments. A multi-criteria decision-making methodology is employed to evaluate leading cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), as well as open-source solutions such as OpenStack. Experimental results reveal that a hybrid cloud setup, combining commercial scalability with open-source flexibility, offers the most suitable environment for OS labs. The proposed solution enables seamless deployment of virtual machines (VMs), containerized environments, and kernel-level experiments, enhancing both accessibility and learning outcomes