Recently worked with Dr. Patrick Hosein to help deliver the University of the West Indies’ first ever Cloud Technologies course - it’s part of their MSc in Computer Science programme.

It was a challenging engagement that allowed us to help the students navigate how to get started with the Cloud. We had a good spread of concerns in the class, too. Students were software developers, involved in management and service delivery of IT services, researchers and lecturers.

We basically started with a definition - the NIST definition - of what Cloud computing is and built on that with examples, assignments, case studies and projects.

The NIST definition of a cloud service is:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.

At the end of the course, the students needed to build projects that demonstrated their understanding of what a Cloud Service is.  We saw projects that featured:

• Employee Task Tracking
• Academic Course Management
• Transport Ticketing Service
• Vehicle Tracking Service
• Health Data Management

All developed as Cloud Services. Most were challenged around the metering aspects and ideas that leveraged services other than exclusively web-based technologies were at a minimum.  However, they seemed to get that a implementing a Cloud Service has a number of considerations that go beyond just making software execute a core task remotely.

Most of the students utilized Microsoft Azure, as this was the primary platform we used for the course.  Azure was a good fit for us as they made it very easy for students to get on and interact with the platform - via Microsoft’s Azure Academic Pass. This pass gave students access to almost all of Azure - Storage, SQL, Machine Learning & Hadoop.  And any issues were sorted with a short email exchange.

Thus, as a first course, there are things we will have to improve on, but it definitely was a good experience and I’ll look out for more of those in the future.