Cloud Data Centers

Module aim

This module provides an overview of the field of cloud computing, and an in-depth study into its enabling technologies and main building blocks.

Learning outcomes

On successful completion of this module, students will be able to:

1. Explain the core concepts of the cloud computing paradigm — how and why the paradigm shift came about, and the characteristics, advantages, and challenges of the various cloud models and services.
2. Apply fundamental concepts in cloud infrastructures to reason about the trade-offs in efficiency, cost, and security, and to leverage and manage single and multiple data centres to build and deploy cloud applications that are resilient, secure, elastic and cost-efficient.
3. Apply software-defined networking (SDN) and outline its role in enabling the cloud computing system model.

Curriculum

Topic	Scope
Cloud service models	Cloud computing concept and characteristics; delivery and deployment models; IaaS, PaaS and SaaS; public, private, community and hybrid clouds; introduction to Amazon AWS and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Virtualization	The concept of virtualization and hypervisors; the role of a hypervisor; paravirtualization vs. full virtualization; containers and Kubernetes.
Cloud data-centre architecture	Data-centre topologies such as Fat Tree, VL2, and Leaf-Spine.
Cloud data-centre networking	SDN definition, Path Computation Element, Forwarding and Control Element, OpenFlow controllers, RESTful APIs, MiniNet.
Cloud security	Security issues such as DDoS attacks and information leakage, and countermeasures such as Virtual Private Clouds and firewalls.
New trends in cloud computing	Mobile Cloud Computing, Network Functions Virtualisation, and advanced resource management (Virtual Data Center embedding, VM/container-to-physical resource mapping).

Assessment

The module is assessed by continuous assessment and a final project — there is no written examination.

• Continuous assessment (in-lab, based on weekly tasks) — 70%
• Project (submission and demonstration at the end of the semester) — 30%

The semester runs Salesforce architecture in Weeks 1–5, followed by cloud data-centre architecture from Week 6 onward.