Comparing the scenarios

The scenario you should select depends on your requirements. Table 1 provides a comparison of key features of these three scenarios.

Table 1: Comparison of scenarios

	Individual server environments	Limited user access to AWS Management Console	Separate AWS account for each user
Examples	Undergraduate labs	Graduate classes	Graduate research labs
Example uses	Labs or course work requiring a virtual server, AWS service, or separate application instance	Courses in cloud computing or labs requiring variable resource needs (such as HPC)	Courses for startups, thesis, or research projects
Separate AWS accounts required for each user	No	No	Yes
Major steps for setup	Create and allocate Amazon EC2 resources and associated credentials	Create IAM users, create policies, and distribute credentials	Create separate member AWS accounts plus the steps in the Setting up Scenario 2: Limited user access to AWS Management Console section
Users can provision additional AWS resources, resulting in additional charges	No	Yes, depending on IAM services provided to users	Yes, depending on IAM services provided to users
Users have access to AWS Management Console or APIs	No	Yes	Yes
User charges paid by the management AWS account	Yes	Yes	Yes, if consolidated billing is used
Separation between user environments	Yes, based on resource access configuration	Yes, if optional resource- based permissions are configured	Yes
Individual user credit cards or invoicing required	No	No	No, if consolidated billing is used
Billing alerts can be used to monitor charges	Yes	Yes	Yes

A large number of real-world use cases can benefit from implementing these scenarios. This section focuses on the education sector where multi-user, shared environments are required for setting up online classes, labs, and workshops for students. Both user and resource management are critical in these scenarios. Depending on your specific requirements, any of these scenarios can be used for setting up classrooms in the AWS Cloud. The following sections describe each of these scenarios in more detail.