CS208: Cloud Computing and Cloud Networking
UC Riverside, CS 208, Winter 26
Course Description
Building on top of operating system virtualization techniques, and the ubiquity of communication networks, cloud computing has become an enabling technology to deliver elastic and scalable computing to users at a low cost. There are a number of popular cloud platforms such as Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Google’s App Engine etc. Cloud Computing also depends on large scale data centers. The proper design of the data center’s networking infrastructure is also important for the success of Cloud Computing. This course introduces recent trends and challenges of cloud computing and data center networks. In particular, topics include virtualization, hypervisors, containers, cloud resource management, data center networking and cloud networking. We will discuss OpenStack, an open source software environment for creating cloud platforms. Also covered will be special topics such as replication, disaster recovery for cloud data centers and virtual private clouds.
See below for more details.
Logistics
Lecture: Tuesdays and Thursdays 5:00-6:20 PM
Location: Olmsted 1212
Instructor
K.K. Ramakrishnan
Email: kk at cs dot ucr dot edu (will read and respond to emails on Tue & Thur: before the end of the night, whenever possible)
Office: Winston Chung Hall 332
Office hours: Tuesdays, 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm
Teaching Assistant
Hongmiao Yu
Email: hyu125 at ucr dot edu
Office hours: Friday, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Grading
- Homework: 15%
- 4-5 Homeworks
- Get familiar with CloudLab concepts in the first few weeks @ beginning of the course – will help for project work
- Mid-term: 25%
- Feb. 10, 2026
- Final: 30%
- March 12, 2026 (in class)
- Project: 30%
- Student Selected ORIGINAL Project
- Proposal – 1 page; discuss with instructor – week 2,3.
- Presentation of Project proposal, Outline of Approach – Week 4,5 (2 students per group; 5 minute presentation)
- Final Project Demo, Report – ‘final exam day’ (Thursday, March 19, 2026 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm)
- Each student group (at most 2 students in each group) presents for 20 minutes, introducing problem, detailing solution and demonstrating that its working.
- Use CloudLab for Project
- Attendance: (Extra 5%)
5% EXTRA CREDIT for attending all the classes
Readings
- Book (will only be used (very sparingly) for introductory material)
- “Distributed and Cloud Computing – From Parallel Processing to the Internet of Things”, by Kai Hwang, Geoffrey Fox and Jack Dongorra, Published by Morgan Kaufmann.
- The class will be focused on topics taken from papers on cloud computing and cloud networking
- Main material will be from slides – extracted from papers
- Will contain references to the papers that students are responsible for reading for complete understanding
- Some may be distributed online (eLearn.ucr.edu)
- Those papers and standards documents are required reading
Syllabus
- Introduction to Cloud Computing
- Virtualization: OS Virtualization, Hardware support, Memory Management
- VMs-Different Hypervisors; Linux and Docker Containers; Comparison
- Networking the Cloud: VM Replication and Migration, Speculative Execution
- Failure Resilience and Disaster Resilience with Cloud Computing
- Containers and CNI Deep Dive; Challenges with Container Migration
- Orchestration: OpenStack; Borg/Kubernetes
- Data Center Networks Overview
- Software Defined Networking, OpenFlow and Programmable Networks
- Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)
- Serverless Computing, Serving ML Workloads