IIT Patna Offers Free Online Course On Cloud Computing via NPTEL: How to Apply

IIT Patna has organised this course while keeping in mind the growing usage of Cloud Computing in every industry. Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of computations, storage, applications, and other IT resources through a cloud services platform over the internet with a pay-as-you-go business model. Today's Cloud computing systems are built using fundamental principles and models of distributed systems. This course provides an in-depth understanding of distributed computing “concepts”, distributed algorithms, and the techniques, that underlie today's cloud computing technologies.

The cloud computing and distributed systems concepts and models covered in the course include virtualization, cloud storage: key-value/NoSQL stores, cloud networking,fault-tolerance cloud using PAXOS, peer-to-peer systems, classical distributed algorithms such as leader election, time, ordering in distributed systems, distributed mutual exclusion, distributed algorithms for failures and recovery approaches, emerging areas of big data and many more. And while discussing the concepts and techniques, IIT Patna will also look at aspects of industrial systems such as Apache Spark, Google’s Chubby, Apache Zookeeper, HBase, MapReduce, Apache Cassandra, Google’s B4, Microsoft’s Swan and many others. Upon completing this course, students will have intimate knowledge about the internals of cloud computing and how the distributed systems concepts work inside clouds.

Who can enrol in the course?

This is an Undergraduate computer science level course. But anyone can enrol in the course. The only prerequisite is you should know Data Structures and Algorithms. Further, Computer Architecture, Basic OS and Networking concepts will add to the knowledge resource. You also should have the desire to expand the horizon of your knowledge. Moreover, this course is a must-take as companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Facebook and start-ups working on this field need the same.

Timeline of the course

This Elective course has a duration of 8 weeks. It will start from 18 January 2021 and end on 12 March 2021. If you want the certificate, you have to give a proctored exam on 21 March 2021. The last date to enrol is 25 January 2020.

Who will teach this DBMS course?

The instructor Dr Rajiv Misra is working in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Patna, India. He has mentored the online courses on Cloud Computing, Advanced Graph Theory and Distributed Systems in the platform of NPTEL.

What will the course teach?

This is an 8-week-long course. Here’s the itinerary for the course.

W1: Introduction to Clouds, Virtualization and Virtual Machine
W2: Network Virtualization and Geo-distributed Clouds
W3: Leader Election in Cloud, Distributed Systems and Industry Systems
W4: Classical Distributed Algorithms and the Industry Systems
W5: Consensus, Paxos and Recovery in Clouds
W6: Cloud Storage: Key-value stores/NoSQL
W7: P2P Systems and their use in Industry Systems
W8: Cloud Applications: MapReduce, Spark and Apache Kafka

How to obtain a certificate from IIT Patna?

The course is free to enrol and learn. But if you want a certificate, you have to register and write the optional proctored exam. The fee for this exam is ₹ 1000. Also, the successful completion of the exam does not guarantee a certificate. To get a certificate, you need to get 25% from the assignments and 75% of the proctored certification exam score out of 100.

Final score = Average assignment score (>10/25) + Exam score (>30/75). If one of the 2 criteria is not met, you will still not get the certificate even if the Final score > 40/100.

This printable certificate will carry the stamp from both NPTEL and IIT Patna. Further, you can enrol in the course here.