Course Information for CLASS Advanced Spring 2024 Cohort

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

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

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.