Workshops on Cloud (Azure) About a month ago (before they took off for their vacation) some of my technology club members asked me if I could conduct some workshops on cloud. Being a lifelong Microsoft man, and something of an Azure expert, I told them that I could conduct series of short workshops (2 to 5 hours) for them and their friends. Now, they are back from their semester break, and I have to begin in 2 weeks.

This will appeal to a number of students as the cloud works with dot net, droid, web and iOS. I am expecting a decent audience (the workshop are has a capacity of 8, and I think it will fill up). These are folks who have never seen any cloud dashboard, AWS or Google or Azure. Further, these are folks who are interested, but have probably never even built a simple app and connected to a database. We are looking at a blank slate folks. Curious but currently without knowledge. So, here is what I am planning.


Overview about Cloud, specifically Azure
Why Azure (or in general, why cloud service versus say a database server)
Cloud Services (data services, web site services)
Virtual Machines (and then reconfiguring them to Active Directory, ADFS and FTP)
Using items from the marketplace to complete a project.
Pricing considerations between cloud providers (Azure, AWS, Google) and conventional solutions (like web hosting, blog hosting providers, VM providers, SQL db providers) 


These are things I am planning. I believe many of you are not just educators but work in the industry (similar to what I do, train and work). So, let me know what else I can add/remove here. Also let me know if you have any thoughts about the topic itself. and, if Azure itself is not the right fit, perhaps something else. 

If the topic itself is too broad, please leave a comment (before down voting if possible), and I will break up the question into many questions and link them up.
Here is a short list, of some ideas. You could not teach them all fully in a short time, some you may only introduce, discuss, compare:


What is cloud: Just one or more servers on the internet. The advantage is that you don't have to invest in hardware. Cloud is tech marketing speak for “Somebody else's computer”.
Cloud provider independence: Look at tools that allow easy migration to other cloud providers, such as docker-ce.
Cloud services vs my services on someone else's computer.
Gnu/Linux: This OS runs on 490 of the top 500 super computers, the other 10 run UNIX. It is also used by >60% of the web, and most of the internet infrastructure.
no-sql databases: such as couchdb, mongodb, et al.
no-cloud: The cloud sounds fluffy and distributed, but it is not. Look at fully distributed systems, such as ipfs. ipfs is a bit new, so future looking.
Configuration control: such as pupet, ansible, cf-engine. These can be used to deploy software, and keep servers consistent.
Focus on what service it provides to the user: A place to ask and answer questions vs a web site.