We are once again seeking mentors for our Fundamentals of Cloud Computing course at Boston University, offered this Fall semester (September 3 – December 20, 2025). Our goal is to finalize the list of student projects as soon as possible.
About the Course
Those of you who have participated before can probably skip to the last part of this email; for those of you who haven’t, Fundamentals of Cloud Computing is a senior/graduate-level course. It includes a semester-long, capstone-style project. Each project is proposed and supervised by an industry mentor and completed by a team of 5–7 students. Students are expected to dedicate 5–8 hours per week to the project over the 13-week term, with biweekly presentations to track progress.
While students will spend time learning new technologies, past teams have delivered impressive results—from useful tools, to popular mobile apps, to open-source product enhancements.
What We’re Looking For
We invite you to propose a project suitable for a team of 5–7 students. The goals of these projects are to:
- Provide hands-on experience with Cloud technologies
- Simulate agile development team dynamics
- (Ideally) Produce a useful artifact
Projects are typically (but not always) open source, and students will share their design and implementation details with instructors and peers as part of the evaluation process.
Project Selection & Team Formation
Students will rank their project preferences and be assigned based on interest and a skills survey. You can expect a motivated team with relevant experience and a mix of abilities.
The students will have substantial course-based experience; many of the students will have co-op or prior employment experience (but it may have been as part of a large organization where others specified architecture and design). As a mentor, your goal will be to help translate their academic knowledge and prior experience to help them elicit requirements and then design and build a real artifact to solve a real problem.
Role of Mentors
Mentors play a critical role in guiding students. You should have the technical expertise (if not the time) to complete the project and be available to answer questions—often by pointing students to the right resources. The typical time commitment is ~2 hours/week, and mentoring can be shared between technical and non-technical mentors. Meetings are scheduled outside class hours and conducted remotely (e.g., via Zoom).
Interested?
Please respond to ataturk@bu.edu using the attached template or the format below.
If you’re unsure about the exact project scope, feel free to submit a draft—we can refine it before the semester starts.
You can view last year’s projects here: https://ataturk.github.io/cc/proj2024fall.html
Final demo videos and GitHub links from Fall 2024 are also available for reference:
- Automation of Snowflake resource deployment using Harness: (project github)
- Async Batch Processing Solution for Cloud-LLMs: (project github), (final demo)
- Ansible Wrangler: (project github)
- Container Native File System Interposer: (project github)
- Orchestrating AI Applications deployments on Cloud: (project github), (final demo)
- Autopilot Dashboard: (project github), (final demo)
- Github Bot for Kata Containers CI: (project github), (final demo)
- Phone Pay Budget Tracker: (project github)
- Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing using Epoxy: (project github), (final demo)
If you’re not sure of the exact description or background needed, feel free to put in a placeholder, and we can fix it before classes start.
