Welcome to CS 398 - Applied Cloud Computing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign!
CS398 ACC was created to help students navigate the data-intensive world of cloud computing with a curriculum that is focused on a practical skill set for industry work or academic research.
Students will learn by using a large course cluster on popular cloud platforms such as AWS and GCP. Some MPs will require processing 20 ~ 60GB of real-world data sets on the course cluster. Throughout the course, students will learn how to approach large data challenges and how to think at-scale.
This course will introduce service-level cloud computing technologies including Hadoop, Spark, and distributed databases, as well as concepts such as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), Cloud Functions, and containerization. After taking this course, students will have experience with cloud computing platforms and will have been introduced to the processes necessary to build scalable cloud applications.
This course is an introduction into cloud computing. We define cloud computing as the usage of services or infrastructure from the Internet (what we refer to as the “cloud”) instead of self-hosted solutions.
This course will address two levels of cloud computing: IaaS and PaaS. IaaS is short for infrastructure- as-a-service, meaning that we will talk about different cloud computing systems and platforms (like AWS or GCP). We will go in depth about what these different systems are and what differentiates them. We will also give students a chance to use these in practice to have a firmer, hands-on experience on what they do. We will also have a brief overview of virtualization.
The second type of cloud computing we will cover is PaaS, which is short for platform-as-a-service. These are managed-infrastructure solutions that are hosted remotely, which can be used through an interface like SSH.
Throughout the course, we will also cover various common cloud computing applications. Some of the technologies that we cover are Hadoop, Spark, Messaging Queues, and SQL/NoSQL stores. While we won’t go through this software in detail, students will use all of these technologies in real-world settings through assignments.
We hope that students will have an opportunity to learn and explore something that they could not do on a normal basis. We welcome ideas and suggestions about what to cover.