Teaching Cloud Computing in Indian Universities

SAPPHIRE was confirmation of the fact that Cloud Computing has fully matured and will most definitely engulf all areas of computing. We will have to teach our students Cloud Computing, to help them find any meaningful employment prospects. I am listing below few resources to develop your own curriculum to teach Cloud Computing at your university.

The first place to start will be what SAP is offering in the form of 8 webcasts for free. If it is coming free, naturally, it will be for selling something. SAP’s webcasts are to prepare the world to buy their ByD ERP solution. Business By Design (ByD) is a cloud based ERP solution, targeted mainly to SME (Small and Medium Enterprises). Register here  http://bit.ly/fRlF3M and attend this complete series of 8 webcasts.

The next you may like to check out what the world’s leading universities are teaching. Stanford is at the forefront, which created Google on it’s campus. Check out Stanford’s Cloud Computing course offer at http://scpd.stanford.edu/search/publicCourseSearchDetails.do?method=load&courseId=11815. The course is taught by the visiting faculty like CEOs of Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, VMware etc. With this kind of distinguished faculty, what a phenomenal course it will be? If any of our students are heading USA for post graduate studies, then Stanford is a place to go.

SAP UA is also introducing a course “Introduction to ERP with ByD”. I think everyone of us, who can afford, should attend the SAP Academic conference being hosted at Singapore from June 6^th to 10^th. I understand you will get hands-on learning of ByD and use the training material developed by SAP. You can then start offering this course to your students from the following academic year. Some 20 universities in India are being selected to start offering this course from next academic year. If you are interested, contact Rahul Sachdev of SAP India (rahul.sachdev@sap.com).

Beyond these introductory courses on Cloud Computing, perhaps your post graduate and research scholars would like to do some hands-on lab work on the technology. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is having a University alliance program, where Amazon EC2 or S3 products are available for use of the students for free. In addition there are ready developed courses, which are already being offered in US universities. AWS is conducting a course at various locations in US specially for Universities. Check out the details at http://aws.amazon.com/amazon-web-services-university/training-classroom/.  In addition, enroll your university for AWS education program and see what all benefits you can derive at http://aws.amazon.com/education/.  SAP and AWS have also announced a new tie up during SAPPHIRE. AWS will now make SAP Business Suite available as Cloud service. You can now have new SAP Business Suite servers (ECC6, CRM7, SRM7 etc.) within 20 minutes, ready to go.

You can also introduce courses on Cloud Development tools and platforms. You can teach MapReduce using AWS. To teach Hadoop, I guess, you just need a Linux server and the software is open source for free download. If you would look at the AWS user’s experience in teaching cloud at their Universities, it is very educative. http://aws.amazon.com/education/customer-experiences/#1 I also encountered an article published by UC Berkley Professor about how they have adopted Cloud Computing within UCBerkley. http://inews.berkeley.edu/articles/Spring2009/cloud-computing. Ruby on Rail is another tool popular in Cloud.

On the hardware front, 2 main enabling technologies are Parallel Computing and Virtualization. Here is some open courseware for teaching Parallel Computing. http://www.opencourseware.tk/2011/02/1-introduction-to-parallel-computing.html and https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/parallel_comp/

To conclude, I think, we will have to introduce courses on Cloud Computing at the earliest. For the start, we can offer “Intro to ERP with SAP ByD”, supplement it with some other introduction to general cloud computing concepts. Then work with our Computer Science colleagues and decide which other cloud development courses can be offered initially at PG level and within a year or two create something for undergrad level.

I am creating a 30 hour course on Introduction to Cloud Computing. If you want to teach the course at your university, then I will be happy to send the training material to you for free. If you want to me to teach any part of the course then, of course, you need to take care of my expenses. Please tell me what you think and if you want my course material then please click this link http://goo.gl/5Px2O.

End of whose world?

After a nice trip to Sapphire, a 4 day extravaganza, a treat in luxurious dream world  Orlando; I returned back home and the TV was blasting the same old doomsday story - "21st May 2011, End of the world, the believers are going to heaven and non-believers are going to hell".  If you have not as yet heard of the end of world story then listen to it here http://www.ebiblefellowship.com/outreach/tracts/may21/.

What a contrast from the opening Keynote theater at Sapphire! At Sapphire, I was getting an extremely optimistic message from all these thought leaders. Emergence of Cloud, cheap Memory, mobility with practically no limits to computing power, scalability, speed, geography etc. etc. At Sapphire these people are thinking that the world is going to have enormous change for the better - poverty reduction, education, prosperity for all etc. etc. The panelists were asked, "What do you think is the future?" There was a consensus amongst the panelists. The world is leading into the state of abundance of everything. If you have not already listened to the panel discussions that I am referring to then please visit online recording at http://www.sapphirenow.com/sessiondetails.aspx?sId=257. Please also check out the analysis by Rich Kaarlgard, Editor, Forbes of this business vision for 2015. http://www.sapphirenow.com/sessiondetails.aspx?sId=270

Forget the end of the world in next 5 months, in fact from 2015 and beyond the wonderful state of abundance of everything may be here. Moore's law is still doubling the computing power every 18 months. Cloud computing is growing at 15% compound rate, Cost of producing solar energy is going down by 30% compound. So many other indicators lead us to same conclusion.
So what will be the effect of these phenomenal technology innovations? By 2030, 85% of the world's middle class will be in BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries. With such a huge middle class, the markets and business will grow by 350 billion dollars every year. A higher percentage of women will be added to the paid workforce and this will add more than a billion to the productive workforce. By 2015, solar energy will start becoming affordable for all. That will lead the world to the days of unlimited cheap energy without any danger to the climate. Then even if the rivers can not meet the drinking water needs, world will be able to convert sea water for drinking. By 2030, all parts of the world will have abundant Water, Food, Energy, Housing, Health care, Education etc.

For near future, at Sapphire, new meaning was discovered for the famous equation of Einstein. E=m c square = m x c x (imc) and that translates into Enterprise = (equals) m (mobile technologies) x c (Cloud computing) x imc (In Memory Computing).  SAP is looking at the immediate future with this direction. The central theme of Sapphire was E-=mcsquare.
Who is right? The Dooms Day or Abundance? I think both are right.
Doomsday may indeed be here for those who are predicting it. Those who are predicting Dooms Day will be exposed in next 5 months and they will lose all their followers and funding. For all the rest of us, I think 2015 is the beginning of world of abundance.

At Sapphire, all these technological innovations were demonstrated that will change the world. We need to prepare ourselves to teach these technologies to our students. Here is a quastionnaire which lists all these new technologies that I thought we need to consider teaching in our Universities. Please click this link and tell me what you think http://goo.gl/t07QN