• Please join the ISIS course (tba), which we will use for distributing this lecture's resources and for the communication during the course.
• At the beginning of the semester, we will announce the dates for all zoom live sessions (Q&A + tutorials).
• With this course we have a limited capacity of 120 participants. We will provide information on the registration and selection process in the first lecture and on ISIS.

The lectures cover the main methods, technologies, and practices of cloud computing.

The first part of the lecture presents virtual resources: We will look at the fundamental concepts and technologies that are used for operating virtualized data centers, focusing on system virtualization (virtual machines) and OS-level virtualization (containers). Then, we will see how sets of virtual resources can be managed effectively, discussing central methods and technologies for managing large sets of distributed virtual resources, including the ideas behind the DevOps movement and the Infrastructure-as-Code paradigm.

The second part of the lecture presents distributed cloud applications: We will see how virtual resources can be used to build scalable applications, looking at typical system architectures (e.g. three-tier applications and microservice architectures), at distributed state and consistency models, and at techniques for developing data-intensive applications (e.g. using data-parallel distributed processing systems like Hadoop, Spark, and Flink). Afterwards, we will also discuss platforms that further raise the level of abstraction for users, allowing them to fully focus on their applications, without the need to manage and operate any distributed infrastructure/systems for their scalable and fault-tolerant cloud applications. In this part of the lecture we will look at PaaS services (e.g. managed execution environments and data stores provided by Platform-as-a-Service clouds) and serverless computing architectures (using FaaS/BaaS services).

Finally, the lecture will give an outlook that goes beyond clouds in data centers, looking at recently emerging distributed computing paradigms such as Fog computing.

The tutorial sessions complement the lecture by building up working knowledge in the concrete usage of technologies and services.

The tutorial sessions cover five assignments. Each assignment starts with an introductory tutorial session, has a duration of two weeks, and ends with a discussion or demo session. Assignments will be solved by teams of 3-4 students.

Each assignment is graded separately and together the assignments account for 50% of the final grade.

There will be a written exam at the end of the semester, accounting for 50% of the final grade.

The course materials (lecture recordings and slides, tutorial slides, assignments) as well as the links for the live Q&A and tutorial sessions will be disseminated via the ISIS course.

• Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Herbert Bos: Modern Operating Systems, Pearson, 2015
• Jez Humble, David Farley: Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases Through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation, Addison Wesley, 2010
• Martin Kleppmann: Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems, O'Reilly, 2017

• This course is an "Integrierte Lehrveranstaltung" with 4 SWS (6 ECTS/LP)
• This course is part of the module Cloud Computing which is creditable to students of:
  
  • Master Informatik as a compulsory elective module in "Kommunikationsbasierte Systeme"
  • Master Technische Informatik as a compulsory elective module in "Informationssysteme"
  • Master Wirtschaftsinformatik as a compulsory elective module in "Informations- und Kommunikationssysteme (IKT)"
  • Master Wirtschaftsingenieurwesen as a compulsory elective module in "Informations- und Kommunikationssysteme (IKT)"
  • Master ICT Innovation as a compulsory elective module.

This course is targeted at Master students of computer science and computer engineering.

There are no formal requirements for taking this course. We do however assume knowledge from the mandatory courses of the bachelor's program in Computer Science / Computer Engineering (semesters 1-4) and recommend that our course "Distributed Systems" has been taken previously.