  The NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) hosts the annual Sagan
Workshops, thematic meetings aimed at introducing researchers to the latest
tools and methodologies in exoplanet research. The theme of the Summer 2012
workshop, held from July 23 to July 27 at Caltech, was to explore the use of
exoplanet light curves to study planetary system architectures and atmospheres.
A major part of the workshop was to use hands-on sessions to instruct attendees
in the use of three open source tools for the analysis of light curves,
especially from the Kepler mission. Each hands-on session involved the 160
attendees using their laptops to follow step-by-step tutorials given by
experts. We describe how we used the Amazon Elastic Cloud 2 to run these
applications.
