Cloud Computing and Software as a Service

Cloud computing is transforming the IT industry, opening the possibility for infinite or at least highly elastic scalability in the delivery of enterprise applications and software as a service (SaaS). Amazon Elastic Cloud, Microsoft's Azure, Google App Engine, and a few other offerings give both mature software vendors and new start-ups the option to deploy their applications to a system of infinite computational power with practically no capital investment and with modest operating costs proportional to the actual use. The course examines the most important APIs used in the Amazon and Microsoft Cloud, including the techniques for building, deploying, and maintaining applications. We learn how to use Cloud as the infrastructure for existing and new services. We use Hadoop, the open source implementation of MapReduce framework and RestFul Web services, to build very powerful and efficient applications. We also learn how to deal with not trivial issues in the Cloud: load balancing, caching, distributed transactions, and identity and authorization management. Prerequisites: familiarity with Java and XML. (4 credits)