A Method for Flexible Definition and Automatic Implementation of Laboratory Environment in Online Training Platforms

Cloud infrastructure enables individuals, organizations, and enterprises to offer scalable and elastic resources to support business operations remotely. The demand for digital transformation encourages communities and technical professionals to adopt cloud computing and automation platforms for facilitating their resource capacity, including operating systems, networks, and applications. Of cloud-based applications for social good, virtual education platforms play an important role to re-duce the cost and effort for trainees and trainers during practical courses, especially in the context of pandemics such as Covid-19. Nonetheless, the task of setting up practical environments with virtual machines, network elements, and software programs is the burden of the system that hosts many training courses with numerous trainees or resources. Hence, this research provides the mechanism for defining and automatically implementing the hands-on laboratory environments for information technology (IT) training. Specifically, we design and implement a concurrent scheme and local repository for deploying multiple environments with high performance in large virtual classrooms. The total time to finish environmental settings for learners is kept stable to meet the satisfaction of users in case of the remarkable growth in the number of environments and trainees.