Course Syllabus

CSCI E-90 Cloud Computing

Lecturer: Zoran B. Djordjević, PhD, Enterprise Architect, NTT Data, Inc.

Lectures: Fridays beginning Sept. 4th, 5:30-7:30PM, Rm 306, 1 Story St, Cambridge

Optional labs: Saturdays beginning Sept. 12th , 10:00-11:30AM online only

Course Description: Cloud Computing has transformed the IT industry by opening the possibility for infinite or at least highly elastic scalability in the delivery of enterprise applications and software as a service (SaaS). Amazon Elastic Cloud, Microsoft’s Azure, Google App Engine, and many other Cloud offerings give mature software vendors and new start-ups the option to deploy their applications to systems of infinite computational power with practically no initial capital investment and with modest operating costs proportional to the actual use. The course examines the most important APIs used in the Amazon and Microsoft Cloud, including the techniques for building, deploying, and maintaining machine images and applications. We will learn how to use Cloud as the infrastructure for existing and new services. We will use open source implementations of highly available clustering computational environments, as well as RESTFul Web services, to build very powerful and efficient applications. We also learn how to deal with not trivial issues in the Cloud, such as load balancing, caching, distributed transactions, and identity and authorization management. In the process we will also become very familiar with Linux operating system.

Prerequisites: Familiarity with Java, Python or C#.

Course Materials:  Detailed handouts with references to material on the Web will be handed every week. There is no required text book.

Grading:  Practically every class will be followed by a homework assignment. Grades on the solutions for class assignments constitute approximately 85% of the final grade. 15% of the grade will be earned through the final project. Final projects will be assigned/selected three weeks before the end of the class. You will produce a paper (10+ pages of MS Word text, 10+ PowerPoint Slides, a working demo, 15 minute YouTube Video of your presentation and a brief 2 minute YouTube video that might be presented to the class on the day of final presentations. Several students will be invited to present their final projects live to the entire class. 95% or higher gives you an A, 90-95% gives you an A-, 85-90% a B+, etc.

Communications: zdjordj@fas.harvard.edu, cscie90@fas.harvard.edu

Tentative List of Class Topics