This specialization is a four-course sequence of hands on project-intensive immersive courses aimed at computer professionals to give them an in-depth experience in developing different layers of a Cloud computing infrastructure including software defined networks, distributed runtime systems, application development, and network function virtualization. Each course (roughly 4-5 one hour videos) is organized as discussion of the technical details pertaining to that topic (from selected readings from research papers and other online resources). Each one-hour video is followed by a “hands-on workshop” assignment (roughly 2 hours of development work) which involves developing code and experimentation using a cloud platform of the concepts discussed in the one-hour video lecture. Applied Learning Project Each of the four courses has a capstone project that builds on the hands-on workshops associated with the lectures for that course. For e.g., in the SDN course, the learners are expected to design, implement, and thoroughly test a software defined network (SDN) for a distributed server to cater to a variety of services, from regular HTTP web pages to real-time applications such as sensor streaming and video players. Read more