Course Outline of Record

Item	Value
Curriculum Committee Approval Date	10/27/2023
Top Code	070800 - Computer Infrastructure and Support
Units	3 Total Units
Hours	68 Total Hours (Lecture Hours 54; Lab Hours 14)
Total Outside of Class Hours	0
Course Credit Status	Credit: Degree Applicable (D)
Material Fee	No
Basic Skills	Not Basic Skills (N)
Repeatable	No
Open Entry/Open Exit	No
Grading Policy	Standard Letter (S),  Pass/No Pass (B)

Course Description

Formerly: CST C295. This course covers the fundamentals of building IT infrastructure in Cloud Provider Environments. This includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The course is designed to teach solutions architects how to optimize their use of the Cloud by understanding services and how they fit into cloud-based solutions. Although architectural solutions can vary, this course emphasizes best practices for the main Cloud Providers. It also recommends various design patterns to help you think through the process of architecting optimal IT solutions in the Cloud. Throughout the course, students will explore case studies that showcase how some cloud customers have designed their infrastructures and the strategies and services that they have implemented. Finally, this course provides opportunities for students to build a variety of infrastructures through a guided, hands-on approach. ADVISORY: IT C198. Transfer Credit: CSU.

Course Level Student Learning Outcome(s)

1. Explain concepts, terminology, and practices associated with cloud architecture design and setup.
2. Given a scenario, design, configure, and secure working cloud infrastructure.
3. Describe the six pillars of a well-architected cloud system: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.

Course Objectives

• 1. Describe how cloud adoption transforms the way IT systems work, the benefits of cloud computing, the principles to consider when migrating or designing new applications for the cloud, and the troubleshooting of common errors.
• 2. Describe why load balancing is a key architectural component for cloud applications, how to leverage the capabilities of cloud services to support automation, the makeup of system coupling to support the distributed nature of applications built for the cloud and database services for storing and deploying web-accessible applications.
• 3. Describe how the Well-Architected Framework improves cloud-based architectures, the business impact of design decisions, how to secure data at every layer in the application , the appropriate tools and services to provide security-focused content and the design principles and best practices of the Reliability pillar.
• 4. Discuss how to design systems that are secure, reliable, high-performing, and cost efficient, how to avoid single points of failure.
• 5. Identify the design patterns and architectural options applied in a variety of use cases, Identify the benefits of Infrastructure as Code, the design principles and best practices of the Operational Excellence pillar, and list cloud services that have built-in fault tolerance or can be designed for fault tolerance.
• 6. Create, manage, provision, and update related resources using Cloud Formation services, articulate the importance of making systems highly cohesive and loosely coupled, compare structured query language (SQL) databases with NoSQL databases, select compute, storage, database, and networking resources to improve performance, evaluate the most important performance metrics for your applications, and follow the best practices of eliminating unneeded costs of sub-optimal resources.

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Lecture Content

Course Introduction Review of Cloud Fundamentals Introduction to Cloud Architecting Designing Your Environment Regions Availability Zones Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) Integration of On-Premise Components Designing for High Availability (HA) Load Balancing HA across regions Outside Connections. Scalability Automating your Infrastructure Environment Configurations Infrastructure as Code Resource Grouping Decoupling Your Infrastructure Loose Coupling and their Strategies Communication between components API Gateways Serverless Architectures Designing Web-Scale Media Storing Web Content in S3 Buckets Caching with CloudFront Managing NoSQL Databases Storing Relational Data in Amazon RDS Student Project Well-Architected Frameworks Pillars of the Well-Architected Framework Design Principles Operational Excellence Principles of the Operational Excellence Drive Operation Excellence Security Principles of Security in the Cloud Preventing Common Security Exploits Securing Data in CloudFront Encryption in the Cloud Authentication in the Cloud Reliability Principles of Reliability Making Your Infrastructure More Reliable Improvement in Architecture Multi-Region Failover Performance Efficiency Principles of Performance Efficiency Improving Efficiency Best Practices Cost Optimization Principles of Cost Optimizations Trusted Advisor Dedicated Instances. Cost Calculators Troubleshooting Principles of Troubleshooting AWS Support Options Design Patterns and Sample Architectures HA Designs Stream Processing Sensor and Network Data Integrations. Application Backend Example Transcoding and Video Serving Final Project & Final Exam

Lab Content

Making Your Environment Highly Available Using Auto Scaling tools Using automation for Infrastructure Deployments Decoupling Your Infrastructure Implementing a Serverless Architectures Introduction to Cloud Development Tools Multi-Region Failover solutins for storage Go-Green solutions Sandbox Utilities

Method(s) of Instruction

• Lecture (02)
• DE Live Online Lecture (02S)
• DE Online Lecture (02X)
• Lab (04)
• DE Live Online Lab (04S)
• DE Online Lab (04X)

Instructional Techniques

This course will utilize a combination of lecture, hands-on guided laboratory assignments, classroom/discussion board student interactions, Internet problem solving, quizzes, tests, and troubleshooting assignments to achieve the goals and objectives of this course.  All instructional methods are consistent across all modalities.

Reading Assignments

Students are required to read the assigned chapters and complete exams, knowledge based assignments, definitions, and text-based scenario questions.

Writing Assignments

Writing assignments may consist of topics from class activities and discussions.

Out-of-class Assignments

Students are able to complete hands-on labs based on chapter topics utilizing cloud service providers' tools and Free Tier utilities.

Demonstration of Critical Thinking

Given sets of operational data, the student will be able to critically analyze the data and make recommendations on how to improve the operations based on those findings.

Required Writing, Problem Solving, Skills Demonstration

Given a scenario, students will be able to troubleshoot a specific problem, write a detailed outline of the tasks that need to be accomplished to rectify the problem, complete the tasks as outlined,  and test to determine if the problem has been solved.

Eligible Disciplines

Computer service technology: Any bachelor's degree and two years of professional experience, or any associate degree and six years of professional experience. Computer service technology: Any bachelor's degree and two years of professional experience, or any associate degree and six years of professional experience.

Textbooks Resources

1. Required Piper, Ben; Clinton, David. AWS Certified Solutions Architect Study Guide, 2nd ed. Indianapolis: John Wiley & Sons, 2019

Other Resources

1. Curriculum and labs are provided online at https://aws.amazon.com/training/awsacademy/ 2. Coastline Library 3. IT white papers and articles are available at no charge to all students at multiple sites as recommended by the instructor.