Prof. Dr. Kristof Kloeckner (CTO IBM GTS, retired)
Gerd Breiter (IBM Distinguished Engineer, retired)

Webinar Series. 1.5 hrs/week on Thursday at 15:45, starting on October 15.
Exercises (Übungen) will be held online each Tuesday at 17:30, starting on October

https://unistuttgart.webex.com/meet/kristof.kloeckner

The sessions will be taped, videos and charts will be posted on ILIAS and the Technology Partnership Lab website.

Cloud Computing has become an important enabler for digital transformation across all industries, accelerating business cycles and serving as a crucible for new technologies. While many new applications are cloud native from the start, managing the transition of applications to the cloud and ensuring enterprise quality of service remain important challenges. Cloud Computing both enables and requires deep changes in organizations and processes.

Enterprises are often using hybrid clouds, i.e. a mix of public and private clouds with different stacks and architecture styles. Containers have become an important means of ensuring consistency in multi-cloud environments. Serverless computing approaches have become popular and help to reduce management overhead. According to a 2023 study by Datadog, more than 70% of AWS clients and 60% of Google Cloud clients use serverless solutions.

All major cloud service providers are offering platforms that assemble services for applications and provide integration into hybrid multi-cloud environments, attracting developer communities and partner ecosystems. Increasingly, industry or domain-specific platforms are emerging, for instance for AI and Machine Learning or the Internet of Things.

In this course, we will focus on the practical problems facing cloud teams in enterprises and startups. We will examine the state of the art from a developer point of view and discuss best practices for real-life cloud services. We will assume some basic familiarity with core cloud technologies and principles. Our course is taught by practitioners with deep experience in building and managing cloud platform services and cloud solutions and advising clients on their cloud journeys.

Topics include:

• The state of the cloud market, in particular enterprise requirements on cloud
• Cloud security
• Cloud migration, transformation of application portfolios for the cloud and cloud native application architectures
• Management of multi-cloud environments (including private and hybrid clouds)
• State of the art in container orchestration, event management and serverless computing
• Building complex cloud services – architecture and process considerations, with real-life examples. DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering
• Best practices for balancing agility and resilience in the cloud service lifecycle
• AI and Big Data in the Cloud
• Edge Computing, Internet of Things, Home Automation

The course will be held as a combination of lectures, participant discussion and hands-on exercises using AWS Learner Labs.

To gain credit, participants will complete a capstone project, submitting a paper of around 6 – 8 pages and coding a demo/prototype. Use of a coding assistant is encouraged.

The course and the exercises will be delivered on-line only, we require participants to be present for at least 50% of the sessions. Code samples can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/kristofrk/Cloud-Course-2026 .

The course is open to participants from local companies, who can get access to the course materials through the Technology Partnership Lab (TPL):

Protected: Lecture Materials WS2026/27: Practical Cloud Topics – Platforms, Applications and Best Practices

Agenda
Note: End of Lecture period 2/13/26. Break 12/23 to 1/6. Allerheiligen: 11/1
Sessions each Thursday, 15:45

• 10/15 Intro and Cloud Basics (Kristof Klöckner)
  • Core Concepts (Recap)
  • A walk through a commercial cloud (AWS)
• 10/22 Overview of Cloud Native Architectures and Best Practices Frameworks (Kristof Kloeckner)
  • Some basic principles: Loose coupling, eventual consistency
  • Architecture Styles
  • AWS, MS & Google Architecture Guidance
  • Well-architected Framework
• 10/29 Best Practices Frameworks Part 2 (Kristof Kloeckner)
• 11/5 Hybrid Cloud Security (Rhonda Childress, ex Kyndryl)
• 11/12 Containers & Container Orchestration (Wolfram Richter, Red Hat)
  • Kubernetes, OpenShift, Operator Concept, Service Mesh, Security, Use cases)
• 11/19 Serverless 1 – IBM Code Engine (Simon Moser, IBM)
  • Potentially OpenShift Serverless
• 11/26 Serverless 2 – AWS Lambda and Serverless Stack (Kristof Kloeckner)
  • Examples of modern serverless applications
• 12/3 Multi-Cloud & Commercial Clouds (Kristof Kloeckner)
  • Azure, Google Cloud Platform
• 12/10 Multi-Cloud Management (Dave Lindquist, ex Red Hat)
• 12/17 Observability (Chris Bailey, IBM Instana)
• No lecture on 12/24
• No lecture on 12/31
• 1/7 Transforming Applications for the Cloud (Isabell Sippli, IBM)
  • Migration, Replatforming, Refactoring
• 1/14 DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (tbd, IBM)
• 1/21 Big Data in the Cloud (Albrecht Stäbler and dibuco team)
• 1/28 AI and Cloud (Bala Rajaraman, IBM Fellow) – to be confirmed
• 2/4 IoT & Edge (Gerd Breiter) & Wrap-Up (Kristof Kloeckner)
• 2/11 Wrap-Up (Kristof Kloeckner and Gerd Breiter)