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HND IT Year 2 Advanced Core

Unit 3: Cloud Computing

An advanced blueprint evaluating cloud infrastructure paradigms, covering IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, virtualization security, and distributed deployment automation patterns.

Module Overview

What is the Cloud Computing Module?

The Cloud Computing module provides an immersive exploration into modern distributed web engineering. It transitions student knowledge away from local hardware dependencies into serverless networks, cloud virtualization, and dynamic resource auto-scaling.

By constructing modern container orchestration models and multi-tier production networks, you learn to manage web platforms capable of handling millions of requests. This competency directly targets high-tier global infrastructure developer and DevOps engineer positions.

Core Competencies

  • Container Orchestration: Configuring automated pod systems within Kubernetes clusters.
  • Infrastructure-as-Code: Composing descriptive scripts to generate fully automated cloud topologies.
  • CI/CD Optimization: Building secure deployment paths using advanced staging pipeline tools.
Curriculum Matrix

What You Will Study

1. Virtualization & Infrastructure Deployment

Analyzing structural paradigms dividing public, private, and hybrid cloud ecosystem frameworks

Configuring virtual machine templates, hypervisor layers, and software-defined networks (SDN)

Managing distributed storage arrays, object repositories, and structural cloud data pools

Deploying infrastructure solutions utilizing infrastructure-as-code configuration scripts (Terraform)

2. Platform Architecture & Containerization

Architecting distributed microservice solutions utilizing decoupled REST and gRPC API designs

Isolating codebases into modern lightweight application containers via Docker systems

Orchestrating microservice pods, replica counts, and ingress networks using Kubernetes solutions

Configuring elastic load balancers and horizontal pod autoscale rules matching active demand peaks

3. DevOps & Automated Deployment

Constructing continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines (CI/CD) via GitHub Actions

Implementing zero-downtime rolling updates, canary configurations, and automated pipeline rollbacks

Monitoring infrastructure telemetry using performance trackers like Prometheus and Grafana dashboards

Securing identity boundaries via advanced IAM permission tokens and cloud secret management platforms

UNIT METRICS

Structure & Parameters

Official Unit CodeUnit 3: Cloud Computing
Academic Tier LevelBTEC HND Level 5 (Year 2)
Delivery MethodPractical Deployment Labs & Architecture Portfolio
Allotted DurationFull Semester Term
Total Credit Value15 Credits Assigned
Minimum Passing BarPass / Merit / Distinction
Primary Core FocusCloud Infrastructure Engineering & DevOps
Enroll in Cloud Engineering Lab