Subject Overview

This subject introduces the essential principles, service models, architectures, technologies, operational practices, governance requirements, and emerging developments of cloud computing. It emphasizes practical architectural decision-making, secure service adoption, cost control, reliability, digital transformation, and responsible use of cloud and AI services.

Learning Goal

By completing this subject, students will be able to explain cloud concepts and terminology, compare service and deployment models, design foundational cloud architectures, select appropriate services, apply security and governance controls, evaluate cost and performance, and support reliable, ethical, and future-ready cloud adoption.

Syllabus

1. Cloud Computing Foundations

Learning Objective: Explain the evolution, characteristics, benefits, limitations, shared-responsibility principle, common terminology, and business drivers of cloud computing.

Category: foundation

2. Cloud Service and Deployment Models

Learning Objective: Compare IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, serverless, public, private, hybrid, multi-cloud, community, edge, and sovereign cloud models using practical selection criteria.

Category: foundation

3. Cloud Architecture Principles

Learning Objective: Apply abstraction, virtualization, elasticity, scalability, loose coupling, statelessness, automation, fault tolerance, and cloud-native design principles.

Category: core

4. Compute, Storage, and Database Services

Learning Objective: Select and configure virtual machines, containers, object, block and file storage, relational and NoSQL databases, caching, backup, and lifecycle services.

Category: core

5. Cloud Networking and Connectivity

Learning Objective: Describe virtual networks, subnets, routing, addressing, DNS, load balancing, firewalls, gateways, content delivery networks, VPNs, and private or hybrid connectivity.

Category: core

6. Identity, Security, Privacy, and Compliance

Learning Objective: Apply identity and access management, least privilege, authentication, encryption, key management, secrets protection, logging, vulnerability controls, privacy principles, and compliance requirements.

Category: core

7. Application Architecture and Cloud-Native Services

Learning Objective: Explain monolithic and distributed architectures, microservices, APIs, containers, orchestration, event-driven systems, messaging, serverless computing, and service integration.

Category: application

8. Architecture Design and Migration

Learning Objective: Gather requirements, assess workloads, choose services, create basic architecture diagrams, evaluate trade-offs, and apply migration approaches such as rehost, replatform, refactor, retain, retire, and replace.

Category: application

9. Automation, DevOps, and Infrastructure as Code

Learning Objective: Use foundational DevOps concepts, CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, infrastructure as code, version control, policy as code, and automated provisioning practices.

Category: application

10. Reliability, Performance, and Disaster Recovery

Learning Objective: Design for availability, resilience, scalability, observability, backup, recovery, redundancy, and disaster recovery using service-level objectives, RTO, RPO, and basic performance metrics.

Category: core

11. Cloud Operations, Monitoring, and Analytics

Learning Objective: Interpret logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerts, capacity indicators, and service health data to support incident, problem, change, and performance management.

Category: application

12. Cloud Economics, FinOps, and Service Decisions

Learning Objective: Estimate total cost of ownership, compare pricing and purchasing models, manage budgets and resource tagging, identify waste, optimize consumption, and evaluate vendor lock-in and service trade-offs.

Category: strategic

13. Governance, Ethics, and Responsible Cloud Adoption

Learning Objective: Explain governance frameworks, policies, risk management, data residency, auditability, sustainability, accessibility, ethical data use, organizational roles, and responsible digital transformation.

Category: strategic

14. AI Cloud Services and Emerging Trends

Learning Objective: Describe cloud-based AI and machine learning services, generative AI platforms, data requirements, responsible AI controls, edge computing, confidential computing, industry clouds, automation, and likely future developments.

Category: contemporary