Two OPAIC Information Technology students competed in a series of cloud computing challenges last month, with one finishing fourth out of all entrants in New Zealand and Australia.

The AWS Jam Competition is a virtual cloud computing competition hosted by WorldSkills Australia alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Head of Information Technology at OPAIC, Dr Farhad Mehdipour, says the purpose of the online event is to give students from institutions in Australia and New Zealand the opportunity to face and troubleshoot challenges they may encounter in a real cloud-based environment.

OPAIC encouraged students in its new AWS courses to participate and Wisanu Boonrat and Ravi Kalaria took part.

Farhad said both students made a good attempt and Wisanu came away with fourth place overall.

Wisanu says competitors were encouraged to complete two AWS online courses before the competition: AWS Academy Cloud Foundations, for an overall understanding of cloud computing concepts, and the more advanced AWS Academy Cloud Operations.

He was a bit nervous going into the competition because he had struggled with the more advanced course.

“However, when it's time to compete, I felt relieved and enjoyed resolving the questions.”

He said the questions were not too tough and required a basic knowledge of AWS operations.  

“Also, there were many organisers who supported the competitors and made the event run smoothly.”

He says the competition was all about learning. It allowed competitors to learn more about how to use AWS to resolve real-world problems for customers.

It consisted of about 14 labs and competitors could choose which lab they wanted to work on (pictured above).

In each lab, there was an explanation of the task, such as building a static website for a local bakery, configuring the website’s security, and implementing online orders and delivery.

Participants could ask for clues about how to complete the task, with points deducted for each clue.