Course Information for CLASS Advanced Spring 2024 Cohort

The CLASS Advanced Spring 2024 Cohort will be held from April 29 – May 10. 

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To help you prepare for the Spring 2024 offering, here is a detailed schedule of the previous CLASS Advanced Program, which was held in two parts.

Week 1 (April 29 – May 3): Intensive Training, including hands-on labs, case studies, and best practices.

Note: Each day began at 8 a.m. PT / 11 a.m. ET and ended at 2 p.m. PT / 5 p.m. ET. 
Course Outline (example only, and not limited to):
Introduction to the cloud (~ 1 hour)
–Patterns of moving to the cloud (lift and shift vs. native architectures), objectively evaluating cloud platforms, Cloud best practices
IAM user management (~ 4 hours)
— Users, groups and roles, Cloud security principles, tie in with enterprise authentication systems, security case studies, and best practices
Cloud storage and databases (~ 3 hours)
— Introduction to Cloud storage fundamentals, SQL/NoSQL data stores, tiers of Cloud storage, data migration, performance, and cost considerations
Networking and data movement (~ 2 hours)
— Networking fundamentals: VPC, firewall rules
Containerization (4 hours)
— Docker, Kubernetes, container orchestration, container lifecycle management
Computing, elasticity, and scaling (~ 4 hours) 
— Virtual machines, images, snapshots, Serverless compute, load balancers, auto-scaling with load balancing, load testing tools
Cost management (~ 4 hours)
— Deep dive into cost models of clouds, exploring billing dashboards, Well-architected Frameworks
AI, Deep Learning, Machine Learning (~ 4 hours)
— Intro to AI / ML / DL native systems on the cloud, Jupyter notebook environments, end-to-end ML on a cloud system
Multi-cloud Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) (~ 4 hours)
— IAS tools overview and deployment (Terraform, etc.), CI/CD

Week 2 (May 6 – May 10): Hands-on, small-group projects

Participants were invited to submit project topics that interested them. Each project had 4 – 5 cohort participants and one subject matter expert (SME). Examples of project ideas:
— Using Terraform for multi-cloud and/or hybrid workloads 
— Deployment of Jupyter Notebooks using Kubernetes on AWS, Azure, and GCP and analyzing out-of-the-box solutions (e.g. Sagemaker, Lightsail, etc.) vs. custom builds
— Utilizing containers and serverless deployments for event-driven applications 
— Network configuration for on-premise and across all three cloud providers

Meet Your CLASS Advanced 2024 Instructor:
Jason Smith
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Jason is a vice president at Innovation in Software, an IT technology company based in Northern California, where he leads the technical training and consulting team.

With 20+ years of experience in solving complex problems and technological challenges in both startup and enterprise environments, he has a proven track record of delivering creative and effective solutions for technology adoption, integration, and automation.

His core competencies include public cloud and cloud-native technologies, such as AWS, GCP, Azure, Docker, and Kubernetes, as well as automation, systems architecture, monitoring, and performance tuning. He is a certified GCP Solutions Architect and trainer.

The goal of the projects was to build reproducible and scalable solutions that the cohort will share openly on Github. There will be a final presentation on May 10, 2024.