Teaching Cloud Deployment

Abstract: In today’s IT-landscape cloud computing is one of the hottest topics. There are many emerging uses and technologies for the cloud. Deployment of applications is one of the main usages of the cloud today. This has led to companies giving developers more responsibilities with deployment. Therefore, there is a need to update educations in computer science by including cloud deployment. For these reasons, this thesis attempts to give a reasonable proposal for how cloud deployment could be taught in a university course.A literature study was conducted to gather information about topics surrounding cloud deployment. These were topics like cloud computing, service models, building techniques and cloud services. Then a case study was conducted on three different cloud services, OpenShift, Cloud Foundry, and Heroku. This was to learn how to deploy. Lastly, two interviews and a survey were conducted with people that have an insight into the subject and could provide reasonable information.Based on our case study, interviews and survey we concluded a reasonable approach to how deployment with cloud services could be taught. It can be taught with a theoretical and practical part. The theoretical part could be a lecture introducing Heroku and OpenShift, followed by an assignment where students deploy an application to them. The reasons we recommend Heroku and OpenShift is for Heroku’s simple and fast deployment and OpenShift for being more educative.We also realized that cloud deployment would work best as a stand-alone course. Because during the degree project it became clear how broad cloud deployment is.