Instructional Use of Cloud Services

Learn about AWS and Azure cloud services available to UC San Diego faculty and students.

Instructional/ Classroom Use of AWS Services

IT Services' Educational Technology Services division ("ETS") facilitates use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) for scheduled coursework across all departments and disciplines campus-wide. Students may incorporate a wide variety of AWS services into their studies, including EC2 Virtual Machines, ECS/Fargate Docker containers, S3 Storage, Lambda serverless functions, Elastic Map/Reduce clusters, etc.

Instructors (and TAs/ department staff) may request AWS services for their courses through the ITS/ETS Instructional Technology Request ("CINFO") tool:  https://cinfo.ucsd.edu/

Once a CINFO is received, ETS works with instructors to identify course requirements, submits a request for credits/ funding to Amazon, and handles all aspects of student account configuration and setup.

Student Non-Instructional/ Extra-Curricular Access

Microsoft's cloud service Azure offers free computing credits for students. To create an Azure for Students account, visit: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/students/

Click the green "Start free" button and create an account with your ucsd.edu email address. It will use a different UC San Diego sign-in page than usual — use your email address as your username, and your regular Active Directory password to log in, and complete the account setup process.

Once you have created your account, you may need to log out and then back in again, as the portal doesn't always recognize your student subscription on the first login.