There are many kinds of cloud resources available to students. You can apply for them directly on sites like Amazon.com, Microsoft's Azure, Google Cloud, etc.
If you wish, you can set up a local cloud system on computers right here at Cornell. If you do this, I recommend that you use the widely-popular "Open Stack" software, which includes open source (free) versions of a wide variety of cloud technologies. You can just download and run this package on your own computer or the machines in the MEng lab or UGrad lab, for free. While it won't be an exact match to Azure or AWS, Open Stack has quite a large range of powerful tools. Many companies use it for their cloud infrastructures, so this is a professional quality option, not just some sort of instructional tool.
For our purposes in CS5412, we will consider any project that uses standard browser-based interfaces on a mobile device or client desktop devices and then has servers that use any kind of standard cloud software as their infrastructure to be an acceptable cloud-based demonstration. To connect sensors to the cloud, you should use SSH, HTTPS, or HTTP.