I finished the specialization in 3 weeks and my movtivation was to understand the terms and conditions(T&C) when using cloud services, either it’s an App or it’s an application on AWS, GCP or Azure. I think the main audience of the specialization is for law background and I do have some interets in contract law and GDPR as I took some law courses and attended the court hearings myself without a lawyer (of course often consulted a lawyer before).
Those terms and conditions of cloud services are usually too long to read. When I used the app or cloud services, I often simply clicked “Accept”. I also know there are limitations in the software implementation before the user accepts T&C as a developer.
The specilazation covers the topic of what is cloud computing including SaaS, PaaS and IaaS and some characteristics about distributed storage and data center and thus how it affects regulation. I think this part consists of 10% of introduction to cloud computing. For a developer who uses AWS and GCP, it’s simple to read thoguh.
The rest of topics is about law and regulation. It covers GDPR and several Cloud services’ contracts in depth by providing example terms and conditions in terms of the most important paragraphs about AWS, GCP and Dropbox for example. It also teaches basic contract law and taxation briefly. The materials are very new as this course was published in 2022.
The case studies for the exercises are well-prepared. The exercise replaces the company name and it’s obvious the case transformed from the reality. One useful knowledge I learned is also how one party breaks T&C and GDPR can get punished and how will the legal process start, and how AWS and GCP will compensate when they are not able to meet the SLA if my app relies on these two services and why they choose such approach.
For the downside, one week’s topic on taxation was less interesting for me. I felt there was a knowledge gap, and the explanations for ‘why’ were a bit too few to me. It consists of 5%.
To summarize, the GDPR and the T&C are the two most useful things to me.
Here is the link to the specialzation.
https://www.coursera.org/specializations/cloud-computing-law
