Introduction to Cloud Computing for Genomics; A lesson or additional reading resource?

[anwarMZ]

Hi Maintainers,

This is a "Discussion" issue in accordance to the discussion initiated at the Maintainer's meetings, August 19, 2020.
I am one of the new maintainers for cloud-genomics, I came to know that the lesson has been revised a few times since its origin and most of the content was moved to another lessons. In its current form, cloud-genomics lesson is only about an hour of teaching (primarily reading, with no code). I was of an opinion that maybe its time that we convert cloud-genomics lesson to an "Additional reading resource" rather than a separate lesson? There is also very limited activity on the lesson recently, maybe if we can discuss with instructors and check if the lesson is actively taught or not ?
It was also discussed that this decision will be finalized with Curriculum Advisory Committee but an issue will initiate a discussion.

Thanks,
Zohaib

[dstrib]

Providing my 2c, I feel like this might indeed be a good suggestion. When this was taught at my university the cloud-genomics portion was interesting but not particularly relevant to our user-base, all of whom used either local machines or our university high-performance system. As an alternative, perhaps different versions of the "cloud computing" lesson could be created which focus (in the general sense) on interacting with institutional systems via SSH rather than on AWS? While I don't have a significant familiarity with the breadth of how these systems might be implemented in the broad sense, if this is of interest I'd be happy to draft a version of this focusing on SSH -> Bash and resource loading using modules as is done at my institution.