Possibilities include IBM Bluemix, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, Amazon etc. Have you any experience using these? In particular for A. spinning up VMs that students have been working on and B. Easily creating web service components for mobile apps (Android). Have you participated in Academic Initiatives for Cloud services?
(My cohort is studying online/by distance towards a BSc. in IT.)
For Java developers I recommend JBoss OpenShift. It's for free.
http://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing
Google Cloud Platform enables developers to build, test and deploy applications on Google’s highly-scalable and reliable infrastructure.
Eamon, it depends on how much management you want to place in the hands of the students, and which technology stack you are having students program with.
For example, with pure AWS/EC2 students can manage the entire process of configuring, packaging, deploying and managing VMs. The benefit here is that the VM they deploy can be running any stack they choose; the drawback is that there is a lot to configure and manage before they have a running app/service on the cloud.
In contrast, something like Cloud9 w/ Azure, or Heroku, makes deploying VMs a non-issue. The focus instead is on the app being built, and students use automated tooling to package and deploy their apps to the cloud. The benefit here is that students get to focus on the application, rather than the details of VM management; whether that is a drawback depends on you and the students.
With undergraduates, I encourage the use of the Ruby stack to build apps and services (with Sinatra and Rails) because of the rich framework API. I then have them deploy to Heroku, which I personally feel is fantastic, and students get lots of satisfaction.
You can let the advanced students use whatever cloud vendor and technology stack they want. (eg. encourage them to try Docker).
Also, I recommend Fox, A., & Patterson, D. (2012). Engineering Long Lasting Software, which was also available as an online course a while ago, maybe it still is.
Note: Other answers like Dropbox and Moodle, unfortunately, indicate these posters have no idea what you are asking. Or, maybe I don't.
I have my students develop on Cloud 9 and then port over to AWS. Don't develop on AWS as mistakes can happen and we had a database grow to 6 Terabytes and almost had to pay a large amount of storage data. We got a refund luckily but when we develop in cloud 9 and port over it allows students to learn how to port code and make changes to go live.
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