Hi Charles, Great idea! I have just started a project with four students and now I read your post :-). Two of them will be software engineers, one will be an operations engineer and one will be testing engineer. I am eager to see how this role separation will play out and if it will work that the operations engineer will provide the software engineers with the necessary support. The technology stack I proposed to them equals yours except that they will use MAVEN (https://maven.apache.org/) instead of ANT. What I think you could add is more elaborate testing. For instance, web interfaces can be tested with Selenium (http://www.seleniumhq.org/). Web services are nicely testable with SoapUI (http://www.soapui.org/). Aiming in a similar direction, Moh and Alvarez-Horine published their experience from teaching cloud computing. [Moh, M. & Alvarez-Horine, R. A successful graduate cloud computing class with hands-on labs Frontiers in Education Conference, 2013 IEEE, 2013, 1156-1162] Best regards, Johannes