cloud computing: Training the Next Generation Professionals

The large amount of buzz around cloud computing has prompted many engineering colleges in India to begin a discussion around setting up a Cloud Center of Excellence within their campus.  This appears to be an imperative, not only because these institutes need to train the workforce of tomorrow, but also because it promises to solve some of the resource constraints they face, as well as increase the level of collaboration they seek with other universities. Here is an interesting article by IBM professional

What aspects of cloud computing should students get practical experience with and how should colleges structure this? What is the minimum infrastructure needed to set up a “lab” in which students can get this experience?

Cloud computing is a new paradigm which requires business and IT to get on the same page – to have a common agreement on a final objective and to then align the IT deployment to meet this end. In an academic context, many students dream of writing an application which they can host and build a web business around, it would be most useful for each of them to understand how to do so at every level; to in fact develop and host an application at “webscale” – and by getting basic experience with building each layer of this stack, concurrent with theory in a classroom, understand the tradeoffs at each layer. I believe that this is in fact the best experience – to learn by doing something many cloud professional do in the “real world.”. The complete story can be read here.