Cloud systems and LAB

Module cloud systems

General learning objectives expected

Knowledge and understanding: students will acquire a precise knowledge and understanding of the conceptual foundations (i.e., fundamental concepts, problem classes and relevant solutions) pertaining to cloud systems.
Applying knowledge and understanding: students will become capable of applying solutions and paradigms learned within the course to practical contexts and scenarios, similar to, or derived from, those explicitly presented, thus perfecting their skills as cloud designers/architects/engineers. These abilities will be enhanced thanks to practice sessions and lab activities.
Making judgements: students will acquire the ability to assess the relative merits and limits of solutions proposed, within the course and in the literature, for problems and scenarios typical of cloud computing; this will enable them to tackle the actuall challenges potentially facing a cloud engineer/architect.
Communication skills: students will learn the terminology specific to cloud computing, and acquire the communication skills required to express and discuss, at a rigorous technical level, problems of interest for the field.
Learning skills: students will become capable to profitaby read and understand the scientific and technical literature in the field of cloud computing, in order to apply its results and solutions to concrete problems arising in the design and implementation of cloud ssytems.

Lectures will mainly consist in live sessions dealing with cloud usage, administration and development. These will be carried out by the lecturer and replicated, with suggested variations, by students, on their notebooks or lab workstations. As a framework and guidance for such sessions, lecture notes will be displayed during the lecture and shared with students through the Studium portal or the University's Teams platform. They will provide a precise record of the material presented, as well as pointers to the required reference technical documentation.

Should the course be delivered in blended or online mode, any necessary changes may be introduced with respect to what was previously stated, in order to comply with the planned syllabus and learning objectives.

This course aims at delivering the conceptual foundations essential for the development of cloud solutions and systems, and, more generally, distributed systems. As a concrete cloud example, the course will present Amazon AWS, chosen because of its rich and complete range of services and solutions, which make it the archetypal commercial cloud, as well as because of the free credit offered to educational institutions. AWS services treated will include storage, networking, access control and compute services (at the IaaS and PaaS level), possibly combined with load balancing and auto-scaling architectures, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI),  AWS, containers, their orchestration and the cloud.

1. Online documentation, detailed by lecture notes (published on the Studium portal or the University's Teams platform).
2. Lecture notes, organized into groups whose titles correspond to the topics listed in the “Course Schedule” section.

The final exam consists of an oral interview covering the topics discussed during the course and the analysis of a project carried out by the student individually. The project must involve the use of the technologies and tools presented during the course. 

The assessment may also be conducted online, subject to authorization by the competent academic bodies, if circumstances so require.

The evaluation criteria for the oral examination include: the relevance and accuracy of the answers, the quality of the presentation (including the correct use of technical language), and the operational skills demonstrated through concrete examples of cloud resource management.

Grading criteria are as follows:

• Fail: the student has not acquired the basic concepts and is unable to solve simple practical problems.
• 18–20: the student shows only minimal command of the fundamental concepts and/or manages to outline practical solutions with considerable difficulty and several errors.
• 21–24: the student demonstrates a basic understanding of the core concepts, limited ability to connect different topics, and can solve simple practical problems.
• 25–27: the student shows good command of the course content, good ability to connect concepts, and solves practical problems with few errors.
• 28–30 with distinction: the student has mastered all the course contents, can apply them critically and effectively, and solves practical problems completely and without significant errors.

Students with disabilities and/or Specific Learning Disorders (SLD) are required to contact, well in advance of the exam date, the instructor, the CInAP contact person for the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (Prof. Daniele), and CInAP, in order to request the implementation of appropriate compensatory measures.

AWS EC2.
AWS S3.
AWS IAM.
AWS networking.
AWS load balancing and autoscaling.
Containers and the cloud
Container  orchestration