Cloud computing
Undergraduate · CS / Programming
Syllabus focus
Topics typically covered
Standard syllabus
Cloud foundations
- IaaS, PaaS, SaaS; shared responsibility model
- Virtualization, containers, and orchestration overview
- Object storage, block storage, and CDN
- Load balancers, auto-scaling, and health checks
- Identity: IAM roles, policies, and federation (intro)
Architecture patterns
- Microservices vs monolith on cloud
- Twelve-factor app principles
- Serverless functions and event-driven design (intro)
- Message queues and pub/sub (intro)
- Multi-region deployment and disaster recovery basics
Cloud operations literacy
- Regions, availability zones, and latency tradeoffs
- Pricing models: on-demand, reserved, and spot capacity
- Managed databases vs self-hosted on VMs
- DNS, certificates, and HTTPS termination in the cloud
- Tagging, resource inventory, and basic governance
- Choosing build-vs-buy for common cloud services
STEM / applied
Hands-on cloud
- Deploying apps on AWS/Azure/GCP (provider varies)
- Infrastructure as code: Terraform or CloudFormation (intro)
- Kubernetes pods, services, and ingress (intro)
- Observability: metrics, logs, traces
- Cost estimation and FinOps basics
Security and reliability
- Network isolation: VPCs, subnets, security groups
- Secrets management and key rotation
- Backup strategies and RTO/RPO planning
- DDoS mitigation and WAF (intro)
- Compliance in regulated industries (survey)
Delivery and incident practice
- Blue/green and canary deployments on managed platforms
- Runbooks, on-call basics, and incident postmortems
- Autoscaling policies tied to SLIs/SLOs
- CI/CD to cloud targets with environment promotion
- Cost anomaly detection and budget alerts
- Capstone: deploy a resilient multi-tier app with IaC
Notes
Vendor-specific labs are common; concepts transfer across major cloud providers.