This introductory course aims to expose students to both the theory and practice of cloud computing. The learning objectives include understanding of key cloud computing concepts, models, technologies and applications. The course consists of a mix of theory and learn-by-examples hands-on laboratories. Students will learn to write simple parallel programs including MapReduce and develop and run applications on both the Amazon and IBM cloud computing platforms.

 Topics include:

1.     principles of cloud computing – what and why, key business drivers, basic concepts and terminology, technical and non-technical challenges

2.     fundamental concepts and models – cloud characteristics, cloud service (delivery) models, reference architecture, cloud deployment models

3.     technologies behind cloud computing – resource hosting, main components in a datacenter, virtualization, multitenancy

4.     cloud architecture – how to organize (partition) resources, how to operate/manage resources to meet certain objectives, cloud bursting

5.     cloud applications and paradigms – cloud applications, challenges in developing applications, application development models – IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service), MapReduce programming model, K-means clustering using Elastic MapReduce, building a video-sharing SaaS application

6.     cloud infrastructures – cloud platforms, cloud interoperability and vendor lock-in, IBM Bluemix Cloud Services, Amazon Web Services, etc.

7.     cloud services hands-on – IBM Bluemix cloud - developing PaaS and SaaS applications, Amazon Web Services – developing IaaS, PaaS and SaaS applications