How ITPU Students Learn AWS in a Real Cloud Environment with EPAM’s CloudOps Platform

Through a strategic partnership with EPAM, IT Park University has launched a CloudOps platform that allows students to gain hands-on experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS) — just like engineers in leading global IT companies.

This initiative marks an important step toward a new learning model where theory immediately turns into practice.

One of the biggest challenges in modern IT education is providing students with not just theoretical knowledge, but real, industry-relevant experience.

Until recently, hands-on cloud training faced three major barriers:

• High costs – open AWS accounts often lead to unpredictable expenses;
• Security risks – without strict guardrails, mistakes or data leaks are possible;
• Administrative overhead – managing hundreds of student accounts manually is inefficient.

EPAM solved these problems internally by creating a fully automated CloudOps platform — an “AWS Account Vending Machine” that is now implemented at ITPU.

Built on the principles of Cloud Operations (CloudOps), the platform fully automates the provisioning and management of AWS accounts.

It combines three key components: Cloud Governance, FinOps, and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC).

1. Enterprise-Level Governance and Security

The platform uses AWS Organizations for centralized account management.

When a student starts a lab, the system automatically:

• Assigns a dedicated, isolated AWS account;
• Places it into a specific Organizational Unit (OU);
• Applies a predefined Service Control Policy (SCP) that limits actions only to those required for the lab.

This ensures security by design and follows the least privilege principle.

2. Financial Control and Transparency (FinOps)

The platform integrates Cloud Financial Management mechanisms at the enterprise level:

• Uses event-driven cost monitoring to track all resource creation in real time;
• Automatically blocks actions that exceed predefined budgets;
• Terminates resources once limits are reached.

This pay-as-you-learn model enables ITPU to deliver hands-on training for just a few cents per student session.

3. Automation and Scalability with IaC

Following the Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) approach, all lab environments are defined using Terraform/OpenTofu and deployed via AWS Fargate and AWS Batch.

This serverless and automated setup allows the platform to scale to thousands of environments simultaneously, ensuring stability without manual administration.

Proven through more than 30,000 training sessions within EPAM, the platform now powers hands-on AWS learning for ITPU students.

• ⚙️ Scalability: environments launch in under 15 minutes;
• 💡 Real skills: students work in live AWS environments under enterprise-grade governance;
• 🔒 Security by default: zero-incident architecture;
• 💰 Cost-efficiency: high-quality cloud training at minimal cost.

The first labs have already been completed at ITPU, and students note that working in a real cloud environment helps them better understand how modern IT infrastructures operate.

This collaboration demonstrates how enterprise-level technologies can enhance academic programs. ITPU students now work with the same tools and architectural approaches used by engineers worldwide — from CloudOps and FinOps to Infrastructure-as-Code.

Together, EPAM and IT Park University are giving students something no textbook can — real experience.