Instructor: Prof. Rob Marano
Email: rob@cooper.edu & robmarano@gmail.com
Semester of the course: Fall 2020
Dates of the course: 21 January – 13 May 2021
You will dive deep, hands-on, to study critical, foundational technology components that enable
cloud computing, and the engineering advancements that have led to today’s thriving cloud
computing ecosystem. Students understand, design, build and test representational software units
that implement different distributed computing components, e.g., parallel logic, software-defined
networking, computers, storage, databases, and security. Topics include multi-threaded
programming; functional programming (map-reduce). Hadoop: a programmer’s perspective;
streams processing to collect data; AI/ML inference model training, validation, and execution; &
modern development and DevOps of serverless applications. This course prepares the student with
foundational knowledge and experience to prepare for a variety of cloud computing professional
certifications.
3 credits. 3 hours per week (45 total hours).
ECE 251 and ECE 264 serve as the minimum prerequisites.
Lecture/Lab. This class meets remotely via Microsoft Teams on 1/21; 1/28; 2/4; 2/11; 2/18; 2/25; 3/4; 3/11; 3/18; 3/25; 4/1; 4/15; 4/22; 4/29; 5/13, for a total of 15 sessions. Note that we do not meet on 4/8 nor on 5/6. The class meets from 6:00 to 9:00 pm on all days, and it starts 10 minutes after the hour, and ends 10 minutes before the hour. Before class, please get ready and prepare your thoughts and development environment.
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
The best way to contact me is via email then by Slack. I will do my best to respond within 24 hours. Communication and participation in class is not only encouraged, but required.
Each session will consist of two components: discussion and lab. Discussion consists of a mix of lectures, programming examples, and question-driven group analysis of one or more large programming problems. Lab will consist of either group or individual work on exercises or projects. Questions arising during lab may be used to fuel additional discussion as time permits.
Success as a student begins with attendance. Class time is not only for learning new skills, but also
for practicing what you have learned. Some assignments and demos may be completed in class, but
practice and study are required outside of class. Students are expected to attend classes regularly,
arrive on time, and participate.
I take attendance during every session, and it forms part of your grade. Students are encouraged to
e-mail me when they are absent. Students are responsible for all academic work missed as a result
of absences. It is at my discretion to work with students outside of class time in order to make-up
any missed work.
All software will be open source.
All assignments must be completed by the end of this course in order to receive a passing grade.
Your final project is approximately 60% and attendance is approximately 20% of your overall
grade.
| Title | Pts | Due Date |
| HW 1a - 1-node, threaded dist algo app | 4 | 1/29 11:59pm ET |
| HW 1b - Next rev 1-node, threaded dist algo app | 6 | 2/5 11:59pm ET |
| HW 2a - n-node, threaded dist algo app | 4 | 2/12 11:59pm ET |
| HW 2b - Next rev n-node, threaded dist algo app | 6 | 2/19 11:59pm ET |
| HW 3a - AWS setup & config/run n-node, threaded app | 4 | 2/26 11:59pm ET |
| HW 3b - Deploy n-node app onto Elastic Beanstalk | 4 | 3/5 11:59pm ET |
| HW 4 - Design/implement secure Wordpress site on EC2, Aurora | 10 | 3/25 11:59pm ET |
| Final project: design/implement secure serverless app & UI | 30 | 4/14 11:59pm ET |
| Class attendance | 30 | 2 pts/class |
Final Projects MVPs
The course assessment expects you to design, implement, and leverage DevOps in a single final
project. Get started early, but pass your ideas past the professor. The following constraints govern
the grading mechanics of your final project.
Session 1: 01/21/2021, 6pm-9pm
Description: Course Overview; History of IT computing & distributed computing along with
HPC; von Neumann architecture & his stored-program concept - recall computer architecture
basics; distributed computing architectures including serverless; Moore’s Law and now that free
lunch is over for software engineers; cloud computing models; cloud deployment models; ”sprechen
Sie Sprachen der Wolke” - do you speak languages of the cloud?; let’s dig into command-line Bash,
mapreduce, JSON on jq, and beyond; Java threading and distributed algorithms... Whoa!
Assignments: Choose one distributed algorithm and then implement MVP1 a Java single-node,
multi-threaded (not multi-process with IPC) program.
Check out https://github.com/robmarano/threadedJavaJourney for Java threading
program structure ideas; research producer-consumer programming models. Think Big, like
blockchain or distributed image processing or even your own network filesystem, or
as simple as the Dining Philosophers problem. Due on 1/29/2021 11:59pm ET
Session 2: 01/28/2021, 6pm-9pm
Description: Discuss other cloud-ready languages, other distributed algorithms and Big-O
notation; hack more threaded Java on your computer.
Assignments: Next revision of your single-node, multi-threaded program. Due on 2/5/2021
11:59pm ET
Session 3: 02/04/2021, 6pm-9pm
Description: Reviewing threading topics; introduction to AWS Console and your account; AWS
Identity and Access Management through the lens of the AWS Console and the AWS CLI.
Assignments: Re-design your single-node, multi-threaded Java to run on many networked nodes
in a either a primary-secondary mode or peer-to-peer mode. Your will design your own network
protocol for handling inter-process communication between the nodes. Due on 2/12/2021
11:59pm ET
Session 4: 02/11/2021, 6pm-9pm
Description: Software-defined networking; AWS VPC and CloudFormation, as well as CDK; EC2
- all through the AWS Console and with AWS CLI.
Assignments: Next revision of your multi-node, multi-threaded program. Due on 2/19/2021
11:59pm ET. Brainstorm ideas for your complex, multi-stage final project with your teammate.
Session 5: 02/18/2021, 6pm-9pm
Description: More exercises and live coding on AWS VPC, EC2, CDK; ephemeral EC2 storage;
EBS storage
Assignments: Migrate your multi-node, multi-threaded program to AWS EC2 on its own secure
VPC. Due on 2/26/2021 11:59pm ET.
Session 6: 02/25/2021, 6pm-9pm
Description: Abstracting EC2 away and introducing a managed code deployment and execution
service called Elastic Beanstalk; Simple Storage Service (S3).
Assignments: Re-design and deploy your multi-node, multi-threaded Java app on to Elastic
Beanstalk. Due on 3/5/2021 11:59pm ET.
Session 7: 03/04/2021, 6pm-9pm
Description: Abstracting our compute and storage, what are the various, purpose-built
cloud-based databases? Do you have ”maintain” them? Abstracting out support and
maintenance... Covering relational, NoSQL, graph, and time-series databases.
Assignments: Research the most common application today - informational websites built with
content management systems (CMS). Focus on WordPress with a relational database backend.
Migrate a typical WordPress site to AWS so that it is secure with minimal support and
maintenance. Due on 3/26/2021 11:59pm ET.
Session 8: 03/11/2021, 6pm-9pm
Description: Wait, let’s abstract compute from a virtual machine to a function! How do you
manage code, new and updated, in an automated fashion. Wait is that DevOps too? How about
centralizing my distribtued application logs and analyze the continuous reams of logs to find
problems? Abstracting further from traditional IT systems and processes to streamlined,
everything-is-software-defined, so that you can focus just on the problem to be solved with logic -
your differentiation in the marketplace or thesis uniqueness! ;-) Oh, more on cloud storage.
Assignments: Work on your Wordpress migration to serverless and your final project.
Session 9: 03/18/2021, 6pm-9pm
Description: More on Lambda, but now with all that work on containerized software developed
on Docker, well reall from Unix first, how do they move to the cloud?
Assignments: Work on your Wordpress migration to serverless and your final project.
Session 10: 03/25/2021, 6pm-9pm
Description: Continuing with software containers; AWS ECS, EKS.
Assignments: Work on your Wordpress migration to serverless and your final project.
Session 11: 04/01/2021, 6pm-9pm
Description: Putting it all together to create cloud applications that scale to millions and
millions of users and only pay for what you use. Mind blown! In years past, companies paid
UP-FRONT for equipment that would stand idle but needed for surge and growth capacities. That
equipment was already old in functionality 18-24 months after purchase, but they would amortize
it over 5 to 10 years. Not good for continual, rapid innovation... Let’s see what we need to build
serverless applications and client-side MVC systems, exploiting the advantages of the internet and
cheaper, more powerful edge devices.
Assignments: Work on your final project incorporating these serverless appdev components into
your final project designs.
Session 12: 04/15/2021, 6pm-9pm
Description: What about handling Twitter, Facebook, TikTok-scale or even bigger like IoT
devices and thei feeds of new data arriving constantly? Text, images, videos? You’ll need a highly
scaleable streaming system. So what about cloud messaging and ingestion. Do I ever throw data
out? Hmmm.... How big is your cloud?
Assignments: Work on your final project incorporating these serverless streaming components
into your final project designs.
Session 13: 04/22/2021, 6pm-9pm
Description: So how do all those streaming IoT devices ensure their telemetry data to the cloud?
How is it processed? It has to be fast and scalable. Let’s dig into using cloud computing to enable
such processing systems. Sometimes decisions needs to be made as close to the IoT device at the
edge of the network due to latency. Btw, these systems don’t only have to limited to IoT
telemetry, like temperature readings. Why not audio over the wire? Video? Let’s go!
Assignments: Work on your final project incorporating these serverless streaming components
into your final project designs.
Session 14: 04/29/2021, 6pm-9pm
Description: One of the best examples of using distributed computing (in the cloud) includes
machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), that is, teaching a computing system to
think similar to a human to make decisions to take actions based on problems that don’t
necessarily have a closed form solution and may have increasing numbers of inputs to consider.
We’ll cover Amazon’s Jupyter notebook service, i.e., SageMaker, to learn how to build and execute
models in the cloud and at the (IoT) edge.
Assignments: One more week: Work on your final project incorporating these serverless
streaming components into your final project designs.
Session 15a: 05/13/2021, 6pm-9pm
Description: Final project presentations from each team of two. All materials including code are
to be stored on your git repository.
Assignments: Final repo for source code and presentations due 5/14/2021 at 11:59:59pm.
Feel free to record your video presentation again if you want me to renew your grade
from class presentation. Make video available on YouTube. I encourage this highly!
Session 15b: 05/14/2021, 11:59:59pm
Description: Final, working source code due on your team’s main branch.
See https://github.com/github/renaming.
Assignments: Officially hand-in your two-person team project.