University

Cloud Computing Technologies

Cloud Computing Technologies

Course Hub

Jump to lecture notes, reusable concepts, source slides, and exam preparation.

Information

Professor for the supplied lectures: Fulvio Risso, Politecnico di Torino.
Semester: 2026-27, following the university dashboard.
Credits and exam format: not provided in the supplied material.

🚀 Current Focus

📚 Lectures

Lecture numbers 02 and 03 follow the supplied filenames. Lecture 01 has not been supplied. Lecture 03 has 116 PDF pages with printed slide-number gaps; its notes cite PDF pages explicitly.

🧪 Labs

No lab material supplied yet. Add lab notes under 50 Labs/Cloud Computing Technologies/ when needed, using Lab Template.

✏️ Exercises

No exercise sheet supplied yet. Use Exercise Template and link exercises to the concepts they test.

📦 Assignments

No assignments or deadlines supplied yet.

🧠 Concepts

Motivation and benefits

Infrastructure and implementation

CPU virtualization

Memory and devices

Linux stack, management, and mobility

❓ Questions

  • Which isolation guarantees depend on configuration and resource allocation?
  • When does further consolidation harm service quality?
  • How does virtualization enable cooperation across multiple physical servers?
  • Why can ring 0 guest code still be isolated from the real host?
  • What makes EPT page walks expensive, and how do TLBs help?
  • Which migration state is harder to preserve with passthrough devices?

📖 Resources

Source figures and product names are recorded as lecture material, including their historical dates; they are not a current market survey.

🎯 Exam Preparation

  • Explain the historical one-application-per-server rule
  • Distinguish configuration, temporal, and spatial isolation
  • Explain hardware sharing and the lecture’s lift-and-shift terminology
  • Explain idle power, consolidation, cooling overhead, and PUE
  • Describe agility, migration, duplication, and disaster recovery
  • Identify virtualization overhead and special-device limitations
  • Distinguish COTS hardware, OEM, and ODM as used in the slides
  • Draw the physical hardware / host OS / hypervisor / VM / guest OS stack
  • Explain partitioning versus arbitration of shared resources
  • Compare binary translation, paravirtualization, and the lecture’s hybrid virtualization
  • Explain why virtualization alone does not describe an entire cloud platform

Technologies and tools

  • State the Popek-Goldberg equivalence, efficiency, and resource-control requirements
  • Distinguish sensitive and privileged instructions; explain classical x86 T&E limitations
  • Compare DBT, classical PV, and hardware-assisted virtualization
  • Distinguish rings from VMX modes and guest syscalls from VM exits
  • Explain VMCS state/control and entry/exit overhead
  • Trace GVA -> GPA -> HPA and compare shadow page tables with EPT/NPT
  • Explain nested page-walk cost, tagged TLBs, and huge pages
  • Compare emulated devices, PV devices, and direct assignment
  • Distinguish IOMMU DMA protection from SR-IOV virtual functions
  • Explain ballooning and the limits of memory overcommitment
  • Use the lecture’s Type 1 / Type 2 / hybrid architecture taxonomy
  • Trace QEMU -> KVM -> guest and explain vCPU host threads
  • Distinguish libvirt, virsh, and virt-manager responsibilities
  • Explain Virtio queues, scatter-gather, vhost-net, ioeventfd, and irqfd
  • Compare cold, hot, and live migration state requirements
  • Explain L0/L1/L2, composed VMCS, and nested EPT

Practice without notes

  • Explain why three lightly loaded physical servers might be consolidated
  • Calculate PUE for a datacenter with 180 kW facility power and 100 kW IT power
  • Explain why cloning a VM does not automatically make an application scale
  • Count translation accesses in the lecture’s fully uncached four-level EPT example
  • Draw the Virtio network path with a QEMU backend and with vhost-net
  • List the state needed to preserve a running VM during migration

🗂 Course Structure

10 Courses/
├── Cloud Computing Technologies.md
└── Cloud Computing Technologies/
    ├── Lectures/
    │   ├── Lecture 02 - Introduction to Computing Virtualization.md
    │   └── Lecture 03 - Computing Virtualization Technologies and Tools.md
    └── Resources/
        ├── 02 - Intro Computing Virtualization.pdf
        └── 03 - Computing virtualization technologies and tools.pdf
20 Concepts/
└── Cloud Computing Technologies/

✅ End-of-week reset

  • Clear completed current-focus items
  • Review questions and add answers to concept notes
  • Link new lectures and exercises
  • Pick the next topics to review

Graph View

Backlinks