I was a sysadmin, consultant before going EE/CS and AWS consultant after that for Fortune 200. AWS is extremely overpriced for running a stable amount of resources. For a lab, it's trivial to buy some used, power-efficient enterprise servers to run in a second-tier co-lo, install Xen or KVM on bare metal managed by an IaaS solution similar to CloudStack. On top of that, a PaaS like CloudFoundry or CFCR.