Virtualization for Cloud and Edge

Recommended Prerequisites

Basic Unix skills; Basic networking and computer architecture concepts; Python programming.

Teaching Methods

The teaching methodology relies on two types of complementary activities that are strongly correlated both in terms of timing and content: lecture-based teaching, stimulating the discussion, interactivity, analysis and critical reasoning; execution of lab assignments.

Evaluation comprises three components:

- development of 2 laboratory assignments, addressing selected topics of the course (45%);

- development of 1 theoretic-practical assignment (development of one of the course topics) (15%)

- final written exam encompassing all the learning results (40%).

Learning Outcomes

The core objectives of this course are to study and discuss – both at theoretical and practical levels – the management of scalable and resilient IT infrastructures, from cloud to edge, including its planning and management (specification and design of data centres, O&M, resource management, energy efficiency in the data centre), the planning and administration of those services and the supporting communication mechanisms (resilience, quality of service, SLA-management, energy efficiency).

Throughout the course, students acquire key competences in terms of comprehension, analysis and synthesis of the covered topics, critical reasoning, planning and organization, problem solving, teamwork, autonomous study, and practical knowledge application.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

Planning and administration of scalable and resilient infrastructures and services for edge and cloud (datacenter, operations and maintenance, resource management).

High-performance communications resilience.

Observability and site reliability engineering.

Operations automation and infrastructure-as-code.

Virtualization of execution environments and computational resources (hypervisors, containers, orchestration).

Support infrastructures for microservice-based architectures

Cloud native service and infrastructure management, from cloud to edge.

Network virtualization, high-performance networking technologies, software-defined networking).

Quality of Service in high-performance communications.

Energy efficiency in high-performance communications.

Head Lecturer(s)

Paulo Alexandre Ferreira Simões

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Resolution Problems: 50.0%
Exam: 50.0%

Bibliography

-Arregoces, Mauricio, and Maurizio Portolani. 2021. Data Center Fundamentals. Indianapolis, Cisco Press.
-Hausenblas, Michael. 2023. Cloud Observability in Action. Manning Publications.
- Majors, Charity, Liz Fong-Jones, and George Miranda. 2022. Observability Engineering: Achieving Production Excellence. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.
- Poulton, Nigel, and Pushkar Joglekar. 2019. The Kubernetes Book: The Fastest Way to Get Your Head around Kubernetes. Birmingham, England: Packt Publishing.
- Poulton, Nigel. 2023. Docker Deep Dive: Zero to Docker in a Single Book. 2nd ed. Birmingham, England: Packt Publishing.
-Beyer, Betsy, Niall Richard Murphy, David Rensin, Kent Kawahara, and Stephen Thorne. 2018. The Site Reliability Workbook: Practical Ways to Implement SRE. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.
-Erl, Thomas, Ricardo Puttini, and Zaigham Mahmood. 2013. Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture. Philadelphia, PA: Prentice Hall.