Teaching Programming on Cloud: A Perspective Beyond Programming

This paper presents the design and implementation of a programming on cloud course. Teaching programming on cloud embraces topics of the cloud service model, architectural patterns, REST APIs, data models, schema free databases, the MapReduce paradigm and quality of services such as scalability, availability and security. The design of this programming course focuses on the breadth of the essential topics and their intrinsic connection as a roadmap. This enables students with programming skills but no cloud computing background to achieve an overview of the structure of a cloud-based service. This further guides students to make design decision on what (and how) technologies can be adopted by means of a practical project development of a service application on cloud.