Introduction to Cloud Computing
This was my intro cloud computing course at Purdue (IT222), a ten-week survey that paired hands-on labs with the concepts behind cloud adoption. It was genuinely introductory, and the framing matched that. Most of the technical work was grounded in Windows Server, Hyper-V, and PowerShell, then connected outward to how the same ideas show up in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
What it covered
The early units were virtualization and networking done locally. I checked Hyper-V compatibility, built virtual machines, installed Ubuntu, and set up virtual switches and the Remote Access role. A lot of the network side ran through PowerShell cmdlets like Get-NetRoute, Get-NetFirewallProfile, and Get-NetUDPEndpoint, which was comfortable territory given my sysadmin background. Storage came next with NFS and RAID, including the trade-offs of RAID 5's distributed parity.
From there the course moved up the stack. Security units covered key pairs with OpenSSL and Kleopatra, SSH, VLANs, and BPDU Guard. Later units got into application-level ideas: service-oriented architecture, containers with Docker and Kubernetes, blockchain, DevOps and DevSecOps, and infrastructure as code with tools like Terraform. The conceptual backbone was the NIST SP 800-145 definition of cloud computing and the CompTIA Cloud Essentials+ material, so terms like elasticity, the shared responsibility model, and the four phases of migration came up repeatedly.
What stuck
Two things were more useful than I expected. First, seeing the same concept on both sides of the fence. A local virtual switch and a cloud virtual network are the same idea at different scales, and that made the cloud services feel less like magic. Second, the writing-heavy assignments. Comparing provider SLAs and drafting a cloud adoption proposal forced me to reason about cost, compliance, and the human side of migration, not just the tooling.
The takeaway: this course did not make me a cloud engineer, and it did not pretend to. What it did was connect the on-premises skills I already have to the vocabulary and service models of the major providers, which is a solid base to build real projects on.