Can Students Build Their Own Cloud? What Open Source Gave Us, and What It Didn’t

This talk begins with a simple question: if students are to truly learn cloud infrastructure, what kind of environment should we give them?

At Aolda, a student cloud infrastructure group at Ajou University in South Korea, we did not want to stop at handing out server accounts. We wanted students to see how a cloud is put together, try things on their own, and learn by touching the systems behind the service. That goal led us to open source. Commercial solutions were expensive and convenient, but they also hid too much of the structure we wanted students to understand. So we built our environment around OpenStack, MicroCeph, Proxmox VE, and observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki.

Open source gave us many of the things we were looking for: flexibility, visibility, and room to learn by doing. At the same time, it exposed us to problems that are discussed less often. Documentation was uneven, learning paths were unclear, and some tools solved one problem while creating another. We learned that open source is not a shortcut around complexity. It changes the kind of work you have to do, and it forces you to think more carefully about what you are really trying to build.

That experience shaped not only our infrastructure, but also our student community itself. We had to decide what was realistic for students to learn, what level of complexity was worth keeping, and how to build a culture around shared study, experimentation, and responsibility.

This talk is not a tutorial or a polished success story. It is a practical account of why we chose open source, what it helped us build, where it fell short, and how those trade-offs shaped the direction of our group. We hope it will give students and small communities a more honest starting point for building with open source.