Cloud computing is a widely used buzzword that indicates the use of various services, such as software development platforms, servers, storage and software, over the Internet, often referred to as the cloud.
This course introduces the technologies at the foundation of cloud computing, i.e., hardware and software concepts and primitives that enable cloud computing to work, such as hardware-assisted virtualization and lightweight virtualization (cgroups, namespaces). In addition, it presents the main software platforms (e.g., OpenStack, Kubernetes), architectures (e.g., network infrastructure) and tools (e.g., Ansible) used in modern cloud computing.
This course, offered in English, is available to all MSc-level students in Computer Engineering at Politecnico di Torino. This site refers to Academic Year 2024/2025.
General knowledge about computer architecture and computer networks.
The course is taught by Fulvio Risso, and Stefano Galantino.
Lectures are streamed live, as well as recorded and made available on the official teaching portal at Politecnico di Torino. Recordings are available only to enrolled students. Recording are made in a “best effort” way; some class recordings may not be available due to technical problems (e.g., a crash in professor's laptop) or for copyright problems (e.g., seminars given from non-Polito people).
To facilitate the interactions among students, and from students and professors, we created a dedicated Slack workspace. Please join at https://cloud-polito.slack.com/join/signup .
This course includes several labs, focusing on the most important topics presented in the lectures.
Labs represent a key helper to pass (successfully) the exam. Please note that the exam may include a practical exercise.
Labs will be delivered through CrownLabs; please make sure you have a valid account, which may be required also during the exam.
Students with high average mark (>27/30) can ask to replace the exam with a personal project. The project can focus on either research, engineering, or bibliographic topics. In most cases it requires a short presentation (30 mins) in which the student discusses the achieved results.
The list of proposed projects is available at the Project page.
The exam includes a variable mix of exercises, open-answer questions, and closed-answer questions. In addition, a practical exercise to be carried out directly on CrownLabs is also possible.
Students whose grade exceeds a given threshold have the possibility to ask for an additional oral examination. This consists in one question, whose outcome can improve or worsen the grade of the written examination.
More details about exam rules are available in the slides presented at the beginning of the course.
Unfortunately no textbook is available for this course. Slides and labs will be delivered during the course are are available in the Syllabus page.
A previous version of this course, called Cloud Computing, was available till Academic Year 2022/23 at https://sites.google.com/frisso.net/cloud.