1. Cloud Computing Course Stuttgart University 2015 Essay Topics kristof@us.ibm.com

2. Exams Write a short essay (8-10 pages) on one of the topics below (or a topic of your choice), with 30 minutes presentation Topics: Kloeckner: Discuss the importance of multi-tenancy for PaaS, and the various ways of achieving it in the layers from Virtualization to Middleware. Particular focus on DB Kloeckner: Relaxed consistency – discuss the various approaches described in the papers of Hohpe, DeCandia, Vogels and others. Advantages, disadvantages. Discuss one implementation in detail. Sippli: Microservices – Imagine your are a senior developer in a large organisation, and you are asked to build a new SaaS solution. You‘re free to pick a team of 6 people, and you‘re free to pick whatever technologies you like. – You decide to build this new solution with a Microservices approach. Discuss what skills you would be looking for in your team mates. Explain how you would start and lead your team from the first prototype to the first release of the solution. Discuss which tools you would pick to help you and your team, and why. Sippli: Experiences in building distributed apps in hybrid cloud environments Discuss challenges and solutions of building a hybrid SaaS solution.

3. Essay Topics continued Kloeckner: Discuss the properties of content-centric applications with an in-depth description of Hadoop and its applications, compare to Google Kloeckner: In-depth description and analysis of MS Azure Kloeckner: Discussion of warehouse scale computing, pros and cons of commodity infrastructure - Barroso/Hoelzl Kloeckner – Discuss the main considerations for performance of clouds Kloeckner – Discuss the major elements of cloud economics (including references like ‘Above the Clouds’ Spatzier: Explain the concept of pattern-based orchestration. What do the terms orchestration and pattern mean in the context of cloud computing. Can you give examples of standard or open source technologies related to pattern-based orchestration, and can you describe the base concepts of those technologies? Spatzier: Can you give an example for container orchestration technology and explain how pattern- based orchestration paradigms are applied? Can you explain the difference between that container orchestration approach and a more generic technology like OpenStack Heat?

4. Essay Topics continued Simon Moser: Explain the concept the various deployment options"Apps", "Containers" and "VMs" in the context of a PaaS Platform like Bluemix. Give examples of when to pick one deployment option over the other. Also explain on why someone wants to use e.g. dedicated or local bluemix installation over a public one Simon Moser: Explain the various component that a PaaS Platform like Cloud Foundry is made of and, for each of the components, explain what they are responsible for. Compare Cloud Foundry with one other PaaS platform like Heroku, Azure or AWS.

5. Essay Topics continued Boas Betzler: A retail company is going extending their customer loyalty program to recommend product offerings in their portfolio to customers social media footprint. A crawl&analyze component is pulling information once a week from social media APIs on the internet and matching it to the product portfolio. The application landscape consists of the following components: a web front end with 1 to n stateless servers, a web crawl&analyze component (4 servers, 1 TB storage), a product portfolio and recommendation database (2 servers in cluster, 500 GB storage) and an identity service. Discuss how the components of the application landscape can be mapped to a IaaS. What considerations are there for compute, storage, network? What are the choices and what are the pros and cons? How can a balance between cost and the need to scale be achieved (for example, during holiday season, the number of customer requests to the web front end can increase by a factor of 5)? What additional questions would you ask to better understand the need of the application?

6. Essay Topics continued Hub: Persisting data when using containerized applications Discuss the possibilities to persist data when using containers. Using plain Docker containers there is the term of Data Volumes and Data Containers, with Bluemix there is also the possibility to include services. Discuss and compare both aspects. Hub: Compare Docker containers to one other existing (and actively developed) container (like rkt or warden) Create and explain a criteria catalog which includes container features but also the developer ecosystem. Compare both container architectures theoretically but also include your practical experience. Breh: Name and describe the requirements from business perspective to the infrastructure management. Discuss how SDE supports these requirements Breh: Describe the resources of an operating model and discuss the role of SDE in the context of operating model improvement

7. Essay Topics continued Breiter: Explain what is meant by IT Operations Management and discuss the implications of bringing IT Operations Management to Hybrid Clouds from a "Managed From" and "Managed To" perspective. Schneider: For an IT enterprise as a consumer of Cloud Services.. what are the 4 compelling reason to consume cloud services ? Answer Chart 9: Flexible Pricing, Rapid Deployment, Standardized IT Service (highly automated and efficient), Self Service (no interaction with the cloud provider) Schneider: From the market experience, what are 4 (out of 5) situations/moments for IT enterprises to take cloud solutions ? Answer Chart 10: Enterprise Merger and Acquisitions, Service outages, New innovations, IT transformations -Heavy lifting, Create a private Cloud

8. Essay Topics continued Schulze: Review the OpenStack Architecture Design Guide (http://docs.openstack.org/arch-design/) and explain the major design principles of OpenStack to achieve massive scalability. Discuss for each of the OpenStack core components how these design principles are applied. Schulze: Describe the core components of OpenStack and how they interact with each other when two VMs, each with three additional volumes, are deployed using OpenStack Heat. Build your own DevStack environment and create a Heat template for this scenario. Document the Heat template and provide evidence that the Heat template has been successfully deployed into a stack. Averdunk: Discuss the Pro's and Con's of a DevOps culture from an IT Service Management perspective Averdunk: Discuss the benefits of a hybrid management solution compared to individual solutions for each operating environment / platform.

9. Essay Topics continued Staebler: essay topics on the EA-Patterns to enable companies to go to the cloud and practical consequences on the transformation to the cloud Why are there two totally different general triggers to bring companies into the cloud. Why is according to TOGAF one approach bottom up and why is one approach top down. Please explain and discuss why a TOGAF cycle on the technology layer can be 100% automated if the topology of the middleware and the application landscape is modeled using TOSCA? Please do research about famous internet companies (google, twitter, …) operating in the cloud how – they developed their technology in the last decades to grow their capabilities in the cloud (milestones, technologies, frameworks, …) – they influenced the worlds cloud philosophies – the digital transformation influenced their business