Cloud Computing has transformed the IT industry by opening the possibility for infinite or at least highly elastic scalability in the delivery of enterprise applications and software as a service (SaaS). Amazon Elastic Cloud, Microsoft’s Azure, Google App Engine, and many other Cloud offerings give mature software vendors and new start-ups the option to deploy their applications to systems of infinite computational power with practically no initial capital investment and with modest operating costs proportional to the actual use. The course examines the most important APIs used in the Amazon and Microsoft Cloud, including the techniques for building, deploying, and maintaining machine images and applications. We will learn how to use Cloud as the infrastructure for existing and new services. We will use open source implementations of highly available clustering computational environments, as well as RESTful Web services, to build very powerful and efficient applications. We also learn how to deal with not trivial issues in the Cloud, such as load balancing, caching, distributed transactions, and identity and authorization management.
