I have another exciting news with regards to our ongoing activities in the area of Cloud computing research and education. The exciting news is that we will be offering a brand new course on Cloud computing from Spring 2011 at the IT University of Copenhagen. I just heard that the course proposal has received green signal from all the relevant stakeholders. I am quite excited to know the outcome of my proposal as I had put a significant amount of effort in designing this course; Moreover, I am also convinced that this course will serve professional development and educational needs of students with a diverse set of backgrounds as their employers have already been using some form of Cloud computing or planning to do so. Hence, this course will provide the practitioners and students with an excellent opportunity to learn about this new paradigm of computing.

For the interested readers, I am providing a brief synopsis of the course below. If you are interested in knowing more about the course details, I’ll be glad to answer your inquiries. 

The objectives of this course are to provide students with the fundamental knowledge, understanding, and skills required for designing, building, and evolving large scale IT systems and infrastructures to exploit cloud computing paradigm. This course will cover not only the computing and software related topics of designing and developing Cloud-enabled systems but also socio-technical issues involved in deploying new or migrating legacy systems on private, public, or hybrid Clouds. This course purports to provide the technical and non-technical knowledge necessary for exploiting the technological advances of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Data as a Service (DaaS). After completing this course, the students should be able to:

1. Demonstrate an in-depth knowledge of different concepts and mechanisms underpinning Cloud computing and its potential impacts on businesses.
2. Provide a detailed description of technologies and approaches enabling Cloud computing such as service-orientation, Internet infrastructures, virtualization, time-sharing, distributed computing, multi-tenancy, resource provisioning techniques, and protocols.
3. Analyse and explain key aspects of building for and/or migrating systems to Cloud such as costs involved, potential benefits, security issues, regulatory concerns, and standards.
4. Design and implement and/or migrate a medium size system following the principles, practices, and methods for building systems with and for Clouds.
5. Evaluate and select an appropriate public cloud provider using systematic approaches.
6. Rigorously assess the designed solutions for security and privacy concerns.