Private Cloud Course Beta Event

Scheduled for December 6^th – 9^th of this year is the beta testing event for Learning Tree’s Course 1215: Implementing a Private Cloud Solution: Hands-On.

A “beta” event is where selected individuals attend, free of charge, a Learning Tree course that is currently in development. In return the attendees provide the course development team with valuable feedback that is used to fine-tune the course prior to the first public release. To be considered as a potential beta attendee you must fill out the online questionnaire. Already the response for this course has been overwhelming.

I think this course is going to be really fun. We explore a variety of private cloud scenarios from hosted shared to on-premises dedicated. We hope our attendees take away an appreciation for when and why a private cloud is appropriate. Once we have established that we do get down and dirty with the how. We explore a variety of private cloud options; open-source and proprietary, on-premises and hosted. After attending this class you will be knowledgeable about the various choices you have when implementing a private cloud solution in your organization.

If you don’t get selected to attend the beta you can still attend the first public release. Or you can sign up to attend at an Ed Center and time of your choice. You can see the complete schedule here.

Either way, you have got to come to this class!

Kevin Kell

Learning Tree Private Cloud Course: What Do You Think?

We are in the early stages of development for our upcoming course title tentatively named “Building a Private Cloud: Hands-on”. The course will be written by Arnold Villeneuve. Yours truly will be on-board as a technical editor.

That gives me the opportunity to blog about the course as it goes from inception through to first public delivery. So, as the course development unfolds I will write about it here. Any comments that are made will be incorporated into the development process. That gives you, the prospective student, an opportunity to influence what will ultimately become the course. Pretty exciting stuff, eh? I know I am excited!

At this point we are looking over various possible course outlines. We have a pretty good idea about what we want to cover in the course but nothing is yet set in stone. Our course planning meeting next week will solidify things further.

In terms of what to cover, we have many options. Let’s consider a matrix of possibilities:

Service \ Deployment	Private	Hybrid	Community	Public
SaaS
PaaS
IaaS	X	X

Table 1. Possibility Matrix

So, since it is a course on private clouds, we have to at least cover the first column, right? I really do believe, however, that most people already equate private clouds with IaaS. Yes, there are definitely use cases for private PaaS (I like the Azure in a box concept) and even private SaaS, but these are less common. I think we should focus on IaaS.

But what about the second column? It is also my belief that most private clouds do not stand alone.  I think we have to cover ways in which private and public clouds can co-exist and collaborate. By definition this is a Hybrid cloud.

I think we should consider both on-premise and off-premise approaches.

I think we should cover at least two very different private cloud offerings.  Presently we are considering OpenStack and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Please tell me what you think!

Kevin

A Guided Tour of our Cloud Computing Course

Last week I had the pleasure of teaching Learning Tree’s course 1200: “Cloud Computing Technologies a Comprehensive Hands-On Introduction”. The course was presented in our beautiful Alexandria Education Center. The people there do a wonderful job of catering to the attendees and the breakfasts and snacks are tasty and nutritious!

The class was attended by a nice mix of people from various organizations and with a variety of backgrounds. It seems that cloud computing is intriguing to everyone from developers to IT professionals to managers. It is very interesting to get viewpoints from all these perspectives. I think the nice thing about the way our course is structured is that it does offer something for everyone.

The course flow is as follows:

Figure 1 Course 1200 Road Map

We start on the business side.  In the first chapter we define cloud computing. This is an interesting exercise because, even in August 2010, there are still many differing opinions on what is and what is not cloud! Next we consider the benefits of cloud computing. From here we dive into the technical details of the various cloud service models.

As the name implies our treatment of this topic is very hands-on. We do write code (gasp!) particularly when we cover PaaS. I was impressed to see the non-programmers getting involved with these exercises. I think that it is important to understand the basics from that perspective whether you will actually write the code yourself or not. We covered WSDL and Web Services as they relate to cloud computing. We used the Eclipse and Visual Studio development environments to create and deploy simple apps to Google AppEngine and Microsoft Azure.

Note that the technical treatment goes from the highest level of abstraction (SaaS) to the lowest (IaaS). I believe this gives the attendees a good overview of a wide spectrum of cloud technologies. When we return to the business side we ask people to consider the pros and cons of the various cloud offerings and types for their particular organizations.

It seemed to me that the attendees were most interested in IaaS, both public and private. I understand their reasons. I believe that a public cloud IaaS offers the least risk and lowest barrier to entry for anyone considering a cloud pilot project.

Thanks to all who attended last week’s event (you know who you are!)

For those of you who have not yet attended, please consider coming to our introductory course in cloud computing.

Our current schedule through December is:

Aug 25-27		New York enroll
Sep 8-10		Rockville, MD enroll
Oct 6-8		Philadelphia enroll
Oct 13-15		Los Angeles enroll
Nov 3-5		Reston, VA enroll
Nov 17-19		Dallas enroll
Nov 24-26		Ottawa enroll
Dec 1-3		New York enroll
Dec 8-10		Toronto enroll
Dec 8-10		Alexandria, VA enroll

Don’t forget you can always attend remotely (highlighted events) using the Learning Tree AnyWare system.

Hope to see y’all soon!

Kevin