Course Title: Cloud Computing

Course Code: CSEC-7408

Credit Hours: 3(3,0)

Description: This course gives an introduction to cloud computing and related techniques, issues, ecosystem and case studies. Students will learn and understand about such fundamental distributed computing "concepts" for cloud computing, how these techniques work inside today’s most widely-used cloud computing systems and various research papers will be studied and reviewed to get the idea of current areas of research and study in cloud computing as well as practical work of cloud based scheduling algorithms.

Intended Learning Outcomes: 

At the end of the course the students will be able to:

  • Understand about fundamental concepts of distributed computing, how these techniques work inside today’s most widely-used cloud computing systems
  • Understand Techniques that are widely being used in cloud computing field
  • Understanding of Iaas, Paas, SaaS, CaaS etc.
  • Latest research in cloud computing
  • Practical knowledge of cloud platform

Course Schedule:

Week 1: What is Cloud Computing? Different perspectives, Properties and characteristics ,  Benefits

Week 2: Distributed systems, Characteristics of DS , Design goals, Types of distributed systems, Overview to Datacenter, Networks, Scheduling

Week 3: Perspectives, Service and deployment models of Cloud computing, Service models: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS

Week 4: From IaaS to PaaS, PaaS and SaaS properties, Issues, characteristics and Implementation

Week 5: Web Services Delivered from the Cloud, Communication-as-a-Service (CaaS), Advantages of CaaS, Fully Integrated, Enterprise-Class Unified Communications, Monitoring-as-a-Service (MaaS), Protection Against Internal and External Threats, Delivering Business Value, Real-Time Log Monitoring, Enables Compliance

Week 6: Modern On-Demand Computing, Amazon’s Elastic Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Characteristics,  Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS),  Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). Practical Demonstration of Amazon EC2 server.

Week 7: Virtualization, From emulation to virtualization, Goals of virtualization, Types of Virtualization Hosted and Hypervisor, Server Virtualization, CPU Virtualization.

Week 8: Memory Virtualization: Background,  Virtualization Techniques: Emulated TLB, Shadow Page Tables, Hardware supported Memory Virtualization, Nested Page Tables

Week 9: Latest research trends in CC (i.e. Dockers, Kubernetes, Load Balancing, Security issues etc. )

Week 10: Cloud Federation: Characterization and Conceptual Model, Voluntary or independent model, Horizontal, Vertical, Hybrid model, Architectural models for cloud federation: Semantics based, Market-oriented, Reservoir, Market-oriented, Reservoir, Service oriented architecture, Conceptual Model, Segments in a Federation.

Week 11:  Presence in the Cloud,   Presence Protocols,  Leveraging Presence,  Presence Enabled,  The Future of Presence,  The Interrelation of Identity, Presence, and Location in the Cloud,   Federated Identity Management, Cloud and SaaS Identity Management, Federating Identity, Identity-as-a-Service (IaaS), Compliance-as-a-Service (CaaS), The Future of Identity in the Cloud

Week 12: Presence Protocols: XMPP, SIMPLE, SIP

Week 13: Privacy and Its Relation to Cloud-Based Information Systems,  Privacy Risks and the Cloud, Cloud Security Challenges, Security in an interconnected world, cloud security risks, Attacks in a cloud environment, top threats, Security, a major concern for cloud users, Privacy, Trust. Operating systems security,

Week 14:Virtual machine security, Security of virtualization, Security risks posed by shared images, Security risks posed by a management OS, XOAR - breaking the monolithic design of TCB, Terra a trusted virtual machine monitor, Security services, IDS, IPS, Honeypots, Firewalls, Packet analysers.

Week 15: Mobile Internet Devices and the Cloud

Assessment Criteria:

Sessional : 20 Marks (Assignments + Quizes + Presentations)

Midterm/Term paper : 30 Marks

Final Exam: 50 Marks

Readings & Refrence Material:  

  1. Cloud Computing Implementation, Management, and Security by John W. Rittinghouse and James F. Ransome, Taylor and Francis Group. ISBN 978-1-4398-0680-7

  2.  Architecting the Cloud: Design Decision for Cloud Computing Service Models (SAAS, PAAS and IAAS) Publisher: Wiley India Private Limited; ISBN-10: 8126550333

  3. Cloud Computing Theory and Practice by Dan C. Marinescu. ISBN: 978-0-12404-627-6.

  4. https://www.vmware.com/pdf/virtualization.pdf

  5. https://www.vmware.com/pdf/virtualization_considerations.pdf

  6. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270581440_Cloud_Federation_characterization_and_conceptual_model

Class Schedule:

Thursday 11:00 - 2:00 PM

Course Material