Case Study: U.S. Army Cyber School saves millions and modernizes training with OpenStack

The U.S. Army Cyber School OpenStack Use Case: Saving Millions and Making Changes for the Benefit of National Defense

The U.S. Army Cyber School (USACYS) needed a modern, scalable way to train and educate Soldiers for cyber defense while keeping courseware accurate, current, and efficient to maintain. Using OpenStack, the school moved beyond a small setup of borrowed servers and manual processes, and built a code-driven environment to support its mission-critical education program.

OpenStack helped USACYS grow into a 2,000-core cluster backed by a 4PB Ceph array, with a CI pipeline integrating Blackboard LMS, Heat, and an asciidoc-based curriculum-as-code repository. The result was higher courseware quality, better student outcomes, and major operational savings—reportedly millions of dollars in reduced platform TCO—while freeing instructors to focus on teaching and content creation.

U.S. Army Cyber School