CloudStack University

Introduction
CloudStack encompasses a large body of knowledge, from system administration, network administration, storage management to software engineering and open source practices. Currently all our content is spread out among the Wiki, SlideShare, YouTube etc. There is a need to create a stand alone "course" that any new comers can take at their own pace to learn the various facets of CloudStack. The course can be composed of slide decks, videos and even exercises.
At the end of course, "students" would understand Open Source and the Apache Way, they would have a global view of the field of Cloud Computing and what CloudStack provide. They would also have deployed their own CloudStack cloud and be aware of the many features. They would also understand how to participate in the community and become an integral part of it, through our multiple interaction channels: IRC, Mailing lists, JIRA, Review Board etc.

Vision:
The syllabus of the course would follow a traditional one-semester long calendar of roughly 16 weeks. We would have one lecture per week ( ~45 minutes given via webinar and recorded for later view, note that some of the topics will be hard to cover in 45 minutes). Once recorded the course could be taken as a self-paced course by anyone. Additionally the content could be formatted for sites like iTunes university. While we would use this course for CloudStack it should contain generic information applicable outside the CloudStack realm.

Content:
Below is some example of content, while we can re-use existing presentations, we will also need to create new one from scratch to fit with the syllabus. Videos can be recorded and posted on youtube as well as taken from already available videos. The goal being to create a cohesive set without overlap.

Tentative Syllabus (some slides as examples):

"Midterm"
At this stage, students understand what CloudStack does, the main components that are needed and the choices available to them. They start building their own cloud and start thinking about their end of the semester project . In a 2 day CloudStack bootcamp setting, students work in the evening to get CloudStack running and identify their topic of presentation for the next day (ok fine 3 days).

9	Hands-on CloudStack deployment with DevCloud	Putting it all together with DevCloud, run CloudStack on laptop, compile CloudStack from source	Prasanna ?	DevCloud and CloudMonkey from Sebastien Goasguen
10	REST Web Services and Query APIs	Introduction to REST and Query APIs, review EC2 API and CloudStack API. Demonstrate various clients (e.g CloudMonkey). Show how to interact with CloudStack, how to make a request, how it maps with EC2 etc	Rohit ?
11	Version Control and how to contribute	Basics of version control in software engineering, getting started with github and submit your first patch to CloudStack. A second part could cover advanced version control: reverts, tagging, merging, bisecting etc	Sebastien ?	Git 101 for CloudStack from Sebastien Goasguen
12	CloudStack software architecture	Describe the CloudStack architecture, go through setting up a development environment. More in depth than the slides showed on the right. Setup eclipse: http://markmail.org/thread/pgvwzvtohabsaqwi and cover the main components of the orchestration and the plugins.		CloudStack Architecture from CloudStack - Open Source Cloud Computing Project
13	Writing a Plug in	Walk through of how to write a plugin, e.g Nicira Plugin	Alex	Orchestration & provisioning from buildacloud
14	Case Study #1	A company that has deployed CloudStack in production presents its use case with technical details		Cloudstack at Spotify from Noa Resare
15	Case Study #2	A company that has deployed CloudStack in production presents its use case with technical details
16	Student Challenge	Students present their own CloudStack work, deployment, new plugin, API use etc
17	Exam and informal certification	A course without an exam is not a course, we wrap up with a multiple choice questionnaire and a nice diploma

Outcome
Students finish the course with a clear understanding of CloudStack, how to set it up, how to contribute to it and how it is used in industry.