I built this because I needed it.
I teach cloud computing. I wanted lab activities I could shape around what my students were actually struggling with — so I wrote the tool that lets me do it.
Where it came from
AWS Academy comes with a set of lab activities, and they are a reasonable place to start. But they are fixed. When half my class got stuck on the same thing, I couldn't add three more steps to walk them through it. I couldn't trim the parts we didn't need. I couldn't write a lab for the topic I actually wanted to cover that week.
That gap is the whole reason this exists. Clearbyte lets me write the lab myself, break it into small steps, and rework the specific step a cohort is stalling on — without waiting on anyone else's curriculum cycle.
Why it's cheap to run
Since I was paying for it, cost was a design constraint from the start. Clearbyte runs exclusively on AWS and is built entirely on on-demand services — Lambda, Step Functions, DynamoDB on-demand billing. There are no servers, load balancers or databases sitting idle between labs, so the bill tracks what is actually used rather than what is provisioned.
The same logic applies to the student side: an AWS account exists for the length of a lab and is destroyed afterwards. Nothing keeps running, and nothing keeps costing.
Who it's for
Other instructors. I'm not trying to build a company here; I built something for my own courses and it turned out to be worth sharing. If you teach cloud at a college or university and this would help your students, get in touch.
It's most useful if you already teach the material and want more control over how it's delivered. It is not a curriculum you drop in and walk away from.
What it actually does
You write the labs
Small, ordered steps you control, and can change between sections when something isn't landing.
It lives in your LMS
Labs launch from your course over LTI 1.3. Students sign in the way they already do, and scores return to your gradebook.
Accounts are disposable
Each lab runs in an account provisioned for it and destroyed when it ends. No lingering resources, no surprise bills.
Grading looks at the account
Work is assessed against what was actually built in AWS, rather than a screenshot pasted into a document.
If you want to see it running with your own course material, that's the easiest way to judge whether it's useful.