AWS update

Recently, Computer Science at CI, has made several new connections with AWS:

  • We are an approved member of the AWS Academy and we are authorized to deliver the AWS Academy Cloud Computing Architecture curriculum. I am the Central Point of Contact (CPOC), so if anyone is interested in being nominated to be an AWS Academy instructor at CI, please get in touch with me. [letter]
  • We are part of the AWS Educate initiative, and we were able to offer our COMP 529 students accounts with some credit. Note that an issue with AWS training accounts is that they close after the course is finished; to those students who are able, I would suggest to open your own (or your company’s) account so that as you learn the material you can build your own permanent infrastructure. A compromise is to build the initial infrastructure on a training account, and use “CloudFormation” to export it for re-instatement elsewhere.
  • Almost finished teaching COMP 529, “Cloud Computing,” for the first time using the AWS resources. We used the AWS Certified Solutions Architect official study guide .
  • I have been selected for the AWS Cloud Ambassador program, which offers educators recognition, professional development, and exclusive benefits for helping students learn about the cloud.
  • I have completed by own AWS certification as a Solutions Architect.

11 thoughts on “AWS update”

  1. This has been a great course. It was a terrific overview of the extensive services offered by AWS and I’m confidently looking forward to taking the AWS architect certification. AWS is a computer scientist’s playground and this was an excellent guided tour.

  2. By taking this course I can now confidently speak about cloud computing. Even better I can interact with AWS services and do things such as spin up an EC2 instance with a LAMP stack and WordPress website, use S3 as a long term storage for my backups, use Elastic Beanstalk to deploy a web app with Django, and instantly spin up a serverless database, to name a few. I feel this course has given me the solutions to many of the computer science problems I have face and will face during my academic path. I’ll be taking the Cloud Practitioner’s later this month and feel this course has prepared me to easily pass it.

  3. Thank you, Professor Soltys, for offering this course. I passed my Solution Architect Associate certification on April 2nd, 2019. It was a great help, thank you!
    At the time of starting the course, all the terminologies were very new to me, however, you explained each topic in such a succinct way which made me to keep on going; I gained a lot from the whole course. Your course is very well defined and articulate. All the Labs were awesome and it was really helpful for me in taking the Associate exam. Even better, your course allows me to put into practice aws services into my daily life. I registered my domain name with Route 53, deployed three-tiers application with AWS Load Balancer, EC2, RDS. It also interacts with S3 by using Java-s3 SDK. Moreover, saved me a lot of money(I was using a ftp server on a EC2 instance to upload my files). Thanks to your course, I can also use Amazon Cloud-Front Service to deliver content instantly. I gained so much experience from both your course and the AWS service. I feel very lucky taking this course. Without it, none of these things I built would have come to surpass. No number of words could ever show how much gratitude I have for you. I greatly appreciate your help!

  4. Thank you for an incredible course Dr. Soltys! I feel confident in my understanding of cloud architecture after this course. It has been impactful in my own projects as well as given me the voice to be a leader when talking about cloud architecture in the workplace. I’ll be scheduling my solutions architect exam soon and feel prepared from taking this course.

  5. This course was extremely helpful to me in my current job as a software architect, as we plan to move to cloud-based computing in the next few months. With your guidance and willingness to be flexible with my studies in the AWS course, I was able to study for and pass the AWS Cloud Architect – Associate exam.

    I am confident that AWS is another extremely practical skill set taught at CSUCI! I am looking forward to more Amazon-based courses in the future.

  6. COMP 529 – Cloud Computing is an upper level course offering. Provisioning resources with a click of a button is how web applications are getting deployed and will get deployed in years to come by. This course teaches concepts using AWS services. I am thankful to Dr. Soltys for offering this course. There is lot of hype about Machine Learning/Data Science role but they don’t see the big picture i.e laying out a cloud architecture/system design on which to run model. I suggest try exploring both and see what you like. This course will be an ‘eye opener’ for those who were only confined to doing web development(html/css, data structures/algorithms, nodejs/python/java), as it was in my case. Now that I know, I feel confident to study it in much greater detail in years to come by.

  7. This course gave me the skills to move all of my web hosting needs to AWS. By moving to AWS I was able to reduce my overall costs by two thirds compared to my old web hosting provider. I was also able to configure more custom features by using my own EC2 instance when compared to my old locked-down web host. This course was worth it!

  8. I took COMP 529 Cloud Computing with AWS taught by Dr. Soltys during the Spring 2019 semester and it quickly became one of my favorite courses that I have taken at CSUCI. We were taught the curriculum as outlined in the AWS Certified Solutions Architect official study guide, which had the added benefit of preparing us to take the certification exam for those who were interested. Overall, I came away with great foundational knowledge not only with respect to cloud computing in general, but how it is being leveraged by AWS to offer novel solutions organizations in industry and academia. I know that my experience in this course has provided me knowledge and skills that will be invaluable in my career as more organizations look to leverage the power of cloud computing.

  9. since last 10 years, I’ve been working as network/system administrator in various companies and on different projects, one of the main trends that since last 3-4 years has been expanding rapidly is cloud computing, hence when I heard that Professor Soltys wanted to provide AWS Architecture as one of our Masters courses, without any doubt I took it and now I am so happy for that choice and also very grateful from the professor for his extraordinary delivery ability to convey all of the aspects of this course to us, we had some very nice in-class and also homework exercises to do which I believe they were really useful for not just being engaged with concepts. I personally have plan to take AWS certificate in near future to not only boost my knowledge, but also for enhancing my resume.

  10. This was a wonderful course in which you will not only learn about AWS extensively and in great detail, but also you will strength concepts maybe previously learned or new to you related to security, databases and networking. I believe is definitely a course worth taking!!

  11. I took COMP 529 Cloud Computing course in Spring 2019. I found the course very detailed and instructive. I have previously setup EC2 instances at work, however taking this course has significantly increased my knowledge and comfort with AWS.

    Thank you
    Sivashankar Yoganathan

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