Sustainable solution for static IPv4s for AWS EC2

[learner-long-life]

The planned setup for the Web Engineering course asks students to start a free tier EC2 instance on AWS.

This can be free, even though billing info is requested. For new accounts, that students were asked to create just for this class, this covers their instance for the first 12 months afterwards, 750 hours for a t2.micro instance per month (there are 720 hours in a month).

However, the elastic IP address incurs charges after the first hour, which is new and that I wasn't aware of until today. I've asked students to disssociate their elastic IP addresses so far.

We need a new solution that lets students host web applications and services at a fixed hostname for demos, and to demonstrate infrastructure knowledge. I'm open to suggestions and discussions, and if someone has spare cycles, some implementation help is appreciated @pswish @kvothethm @WinstonShine @aquinnallen and anyone else reading. Some off-roading 4x4 infra will be involved.

Possible Workarounds

• Use AWS organizations
  • this is meant to consolidate billing across multiple accounts. I added a few students to our organization with @pswish and will need to wait 24 hours or so to see if the billing charges for services collect in the way we expect.
• Use Google Cloud Education credits
  • this will involve learning a new cloud stack, but Google has granted us $50 credits per student. See the end of this description for more details, any interested students are welcome to use that link.
• Use a REST interface / dynamic-dns setup
  • the mail.arcology.builders DNS server supports a REST interface

Dynamic DNS

Run a cron job, or on-startup register the new IP address with this curl

 sets laptop.mydomain.com to point to the IP address of the machine you are executing curl on
curl -X PUT https://mail.arcology.builders/admin/dns/custom/laptop.mydomain.com

Google Cloud Credits

Dear Paul Pham,

Congratulations! Your request for Google Cloud Education Credits has been approved. The details for your student credits are as follows:

Name: 

Email Address: 

School: The Evergreen State College

Course: Student Originated Software

Course Start Date: 1/8/2024

Students’ email domain(s): @evergreen.edu

Students can request coupons from the URL and redeem them until: 5/8/2024

Coupons Valid Through: 1/8/2025

Number of Coupons: 45

Face Value of Coupon(s): USD 50.00

Please share the following information with your students so they can request their coupon code. We’ve drafted this email template below so you can just cut and paste and email this out to your class.

--------------------------

Dear Students,

Here is the URL you will need to access in order to request a Google Cloud coupon. You will be asked to provide your school email address and name. An email will be sent to you to confirm these details before a coupon is sent to you.

[Student Coupon Retrieval Link](https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgcp.secure.force.com%2FGCPEDU%3Fcid%3DWfgK8P7t2FAuaq5lWoQiD3A20bVlEibrqWorEiWafxP6sGLS%252FylEKSrfHcJ980%252Fr%2F&data=05%7C02%7Cpaul.pham%40evergreen.edu%7C91eba4c51a8a45a9c4ed08dc116747b8%7C22adcff7c06f49a68f2050711c40ddaa%7C0%7C1%7C638404382502241924%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C41000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=1sl6aVc1KI0U6zyfWLpMt98nftr9H0Le8M%2FBZ7cL%2FOI%3D&reserved=0)

    You will be asked for a name and email address, which needs to match your school domain. A confirmation email will be sent to you with a coupon code.

    You can request a coupon from the URL and redeem it until: 5/8/2024

    Coupon valid through: 1/8/2025

    You can only request ONE code per unique email address.

Please contact me if you have any questions or issues.

Thanks,

Paul Pham

--------------------------

Additional Information

    Please redeem staff and TA coupon(s) as soon as possible to ensure there are no issues.

    If applicable, you will receive a separate email regarding staff coupons.

    If you need any additional coupons please contact CloudEduGrants@google.com. 

    Please join [our community](https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgroups.google.com%2Fg%2Fgooglecloudfaculty&data=05%7C02%7Cpaul.pham%40evergreen.edu%7C91eba4c51a8a45a9c4ed08dc116747b8%7C22adcff7c06f49a68f2050711c40ddaa%7C0%7C1%7C638404382502241924%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C41000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=yNJHEYhhOgntf%2FKt4KYFv2G4l96A1%2FRmgwff%2FJ8gS44%3D&reserved=0) of other faculty recipients where you can share questions and ideas. We’ll be sending an invitation to your inbox soon.  

    Please serve as the point of contact for your students, staff, and TAs on any questions or issues and we’ll work with you to resolve them.

    If you're a [Google Workspace for Education](https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fedu.google.com%2Fproducts%2Fproductivity-tools%2F&data=05%7C02%7Cpaul.pham%40evergreen.edu%7C91eba4c51a8a45a9c4ed08dc116747b8%7C22adcff7c06f49a68f2050711c40ddaa%7C0%7C1%7C638404382502241924%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C41000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=LZoqf0lfsUX67T6mbhrryYrsaR80uogf1jqyDC3U%2FD0%3D&reserved=0) school, please ensure your domain is enabled for Google Cloud. 

If you have any questions, please contact CloudEduGrants@google.com.

Thanks,

Google Cloud Education Programs Team

[pswish]

For the which provider issue:

1. There is this option: https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/. I tried to sign up but couldn't create an account (sent them a help ticket)

2. IBM Cloud Academic Initiative: IBM offers free access to IBM Cloud resources for faculty, students, and researchers through the IBM Cloud Academic Initiative. This program provides hands-on experience with IBM Cloud services.

3. Oracle Academy: Oracle Academy provides free cloud credits for educators and students to access Oracle Cloud resources. This program aims to support teaching and learning with Oracle Cloud technologies.

The other providers are similar to Google.

[learner-long-life]

Thanks for these links.

For the which provider issue:

1. There is this option: https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/. I tried to sign up but couldn't create an account (sent them a help ticket)

AWS Educate appears to only offer sandbox credits. It may be worth time for TAs to sign up and experiment, but I suspect these are not publicly accessible machines with IPv4's that anyone can type into their browser, outside of the AWS private network.

I'll look into the IBM and Oracle clouds.