ECE course offered Fall 2024 - EEL6871

To: All Graduate Students

Welcome to the UF campus! I am looking forward to starting in-person classes and I want to bring to your attention a course that I will be teaching this coming Fall 2024: EEL6871 - Cloud Computing Systems Management. It covers the foundational knowledge and practical techniques needed to manage IT systems, ranging from individual computers to large-scale data centers.

The abbreviated syllabus for EEL6871 is available at https://www.acis.ufl.edu/eel6871-syllabus-abbreviated/. While the ideal pre-requisite course is either EEL 5737 or EEL 6892, you may be able to take this course if you already have some knowledge or experience in software programming, computer systems and systems modeling (e.g., an undergraduate course in control theory or AI).  If you have not taken any of the prerequisite courses but are interested in taking EEL6871 in Fall 2024 you can contact me by email (fortes@ufl.edu). Please include in your message a list of relevant graduate and undergraduate courses you have taken and a short description of your programming experience (including languages that you master and a 2-line description of the largest program you have written). If you have a resume, you can include it in the message.

PS 1 – you may find interesting the following non-technical article (https://www.zdnet.com/article/devops-now-most-sought-after-skill-survey-finds/) and the blog at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/advancing-azure-service-quality-with-artificial-intelligence-aiops/ .

PS 2 – If you are wondering about the course project and homework, here is a summary of what is tentatively planned for this semester’s offering of the course:

·         Homework 1 – Students get introduced to CloudLab, setup account and create an experiment – (1 week) – Aug. 27^th – Sept. 5^th

·         Homework 2 – Students learn Docker and Kubernetes using KinD. They modify the simple http webserver Docker image and deploy it in a KinD cluster. They deploy the KinD cluster on a physical node in CloudLab. Students learn the process behind KinD creating and managing the cluster which will help in deploying Kubernetes cluster using Kubeadm for the project. – (4 weeks) – Sept. 3^rd to Oct. 1^st

·         Midterm 1 – Oct. 3^rd

·         Homework 3 – Students model the provided application, applying the techniques described in the textbook. They use the model to design and implement P, PI, and PID controller. (3 weeks) Oct. 1^st to Oct. 22^nd

·         Project – Students deploy a Kubernetes cluster (Kubeadm) in CloudLab. Students use stress-tests as workload to model and design advanced controller(s). The controller scales-up and scales-down the number of pods in the Kubernetes cluster based on resource utilization. Students develop middleware to tune the controller(s) as necessary. Students manage the number of nodes in the cluster using CloudLab API. – (4 weeks) Oct. 22^nd to Nov. 22^nd

·         Midterm 2 – Dec. 3^rd

 

--José Fortes