This course guides learners through the full VM lifecycle, from platform basics and secure access to launching, connecting, storing, protecting, hardening, scaling and decommissioning. Infographics and live command demos support all learners.

Course description

Virtual machines are the building blocks of almost everything that runs in the cloud, every web service, database, processing pipeline and satellite-data workflow starts with a VM that someone had to size, launch, secure and pay for. This course gives you a structured, provider-neutral guide to the complete lifecycle of a VM on an OpenStack-based cloud, the platform family behind many European and Earth-observation clouds.

Every concept is drawn out as an animated infographic and every command is shown being typed and answered, in the Horizon dashboard and on the command line, so you can follow along whether you prefer clicking or scripting. You will understand what a project, a quota, a flavour, a Floating IP and a security group really are; launch and reach your own VM; attach and grow storage; protect your data with snapshots and backups; harden the machine and hide a fleet behind a bastion; and finally resize, monitor and decommission it cleanly.

The course is built for people who need to be productive on a cloud quickly, without a background in infrastructure: the eight lessons are short, the quizzes check the facts that matter, and the exercises take one VM from its first launch to a tidy decommission on a free-tier sandbox project.

What you will learn

  • Platform, access & launch

    Read a project's quotas and roles, know which VM states keep billing, generate and protect SSH keys, write tight security-group rules, and launch a right-sized VM from an image and a flavour, in Horizon and with one openstack CLI command, automated with cloud-init.

  • Networking, storage & protection

    Understand private networks, routers and Floating IPs, troubleshoot a failed ssh connection layer by layer, attach, format, mount and grow block volumes, and protect data with snapshots, backups, the 3-2-1 rule and recovery objectives you can actually test.

  • Security, scale & cost

    Harden SSH, add UFW and fail2ban, apply defence in depth, build the bastion pattern with ProxyJump, resize or scale out, automate with infrastructure-as-code, monitor with Prometheus and Grafana, and follow the stop / shelve / delete playbook so nothing keeps costing money.

Course curriculum

  1. 01

    • Introduction to the lesson

    • Quiz 1
  2. 02

    • SSH Keys and Security Groups

    • Quiz 2
  3. 03

    • Launching_Your_First_VM

    • Quiz 3
  4. 04

    • Connecting to your VM and getting it ready

    • Quiz 4
  5. 05

    • Storage volumes

    • Quiz 5
  6. 06

    • Snapshots Backups and Object Storage

    • Quiz 6
  7. 07

    • Security Hardening and MultiVM Architectures

    • Quiz 7
  8. 08

    • VM lifecycle scaling monitoring and cost management

    • Quiz 8

Who is it for

  • Cloud engineers and system administrators, who are new to OpenStack-based clouds and want a fast, complete orientation before running real workloads.

  • Developers, researchers and data scientists, who need a VM for a service, a model or a processing job and want to run it safely without waiting for someone else.

  • Project managers and team leads, who oversee cloud infrastructure or budgets and want to understand what their teams launch, what it costs, and how it is protected.

Instructor

Dr. Maria Makaronidou is a Forest Engineer and Environmental Scientist who earned her PhD in Environmental Science from Lancaster University (2020), focusing on the local climate effects of solar parks. She also holds an Integrated Master in Forestry and Natural Environment from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), specialising in forest infrastructure and ArcGIS. Currently, she serves as an AI-Learning Design and Strategy Consultant at GOVADI, developing geospatial courses for the geo.university platform. Her extensive academic career includes serving as an Associate Lecturer and Tutor at Lancaster University (2015–2019), where she led along with class lectures, field research in Mediterranean ecosystems and workshops on energy metrics. From 2025 to the present, she continues her teaching as an Adjunct Lecturer at AUTh, instructing courses on Snow Science, Hydraulics, and Environmental Geotechnical works. Simultaneously, she is a Scientific Associate at the Athena Research Center, managing European projects like SciLake and EOSC-EVERSE. Her expertise spans Agrivoltaics, Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA), and the application of AI and Big Data in environmental configurations. Further, Maria is a member of the EOSC expert group and the Geotechnical Chamber of Greece. Her research is widely published, covering microclimatic variability and the ecological footprint of infrastructure.

Maria Makaronidou

Senior Instructor

Use of AI tools

Transparency notice regarding the course content creation

The academic concepts and slides for this course were developed by our lecturer. The narration was co-authored using AI tools and subsequently edited. The narration is provided by a synthetic AI voice.