A Collaborative Classroom Activity for Teaching Cloud Architecting

Abstract

We present a collaborative classroom activity aimed at helping students improve their cloud architecting skills. The activity is a collaborative design exercise where students are given a (synthetically generated, realistic) set of cloud components and are asked to think about how they could be integrated into a single architecture while considering possible real-world use cases, how the components could be connected, and whether additional cloud components are missing from the design. The lists of components provided to the students are synthetically generated to mimic real cloud architectures from a recent public dataset. Instructors can seed the generator with specific components to generate a list suitable for a specific type of architecture; e.g., FSx (Lustre) for HPC, Elastic MapReduce (Hadoop/Spark/...) for Big Data, or Lambda@Edge for edge computing. We present observational and questionnaire-based results from two runs across two semesters (18 students in semester 1 and 49 students in semester 2) in an undergraduate Distributed Systems and Cloud Computing class at ESPOL university in Ecuador. Student responses highlighted the positive value of the activity and showed that they were highly engaged and applied critical thinking and teamwork during the exercise. Our synthetic generator tool has been released on GitHub so that others can use it or adapt it.