Instructor: Prof. Rob Marano
Email: rob@cooper.edu
Semester of the indepedent study: Spring 2025
Dates: 21 Jan 2025 – 16 May 2025
“Cloud computing — the phenomenon by which services are provided by huge collections of remote servers.”
— Andrew Tanenbaum & Maarten van Steen
From the catalog:
“Critical, foundational technology components that enable cloud computing, and the engineering advancements that have led to today’s ecosystem. Students design, build and test representational software units that implement different distributed computing components. Multi-threaded programming in Java. Functional programming (MapReduce). Hadoop: a programmer’s perspective; building and configuring clusters; Flume as an input engine to collect data; Mahout as a machine learning system to perform categorization, classification and recommendation; Zookeeper for systems coordination.”
Note: We will update course catalog description to focus on topic vs software implementation. We may or may not use MapReduce, Hadoop, Zookeeper, and ML.
From the instructor:
You will dive deep, with hands-on approach, to study and implement critical, foundational technology components that enable distributed (cloud) computing, and the engineering advancements that have led to today’s thriving cloud computing ecosystem. Students will understand, design, build and test representational software units that implement different distributed components, e.g., concurrent logic execution that uses software-defined communications, compute, storage, and security. Distributed computing topics include multi-threaded programming; architecture designs; communication designs; coordination; naming; consistency & replication; fault tolerance; and security.
You will be introduced to many of the system design tenets used in the operation of large-scale distributed systems operated by modern commercial cloud computing providers (hyperscalers), e.g., Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure. These tenets include reliability; scalability; availability; fault tolerance; data replication; caching; consistency; partition tolerance; load balancing; asynchronous communications; instrumentation; and monitoring.
This course prepares the student with foundational knowledge and experience to prepare for modern cloud computing software design and development professions and academic research.
3 credits. 3 hours per week (45 total hours).
Minimum ECE 251 and ECE 264, or approval of EE Department Chair.
Lectures and Live Coding Labs: This class meets TBD ET on the following days: TBD, for a total of 15 sessions. I encourage each of you to schedule office hours with me. Once appointment is confirmed, we will meet either in person in the Engineering Adjunct’s Office on the 2nd floor of the NAB at 41 Cooper Square or remotely using Microsoft Teams video call.
Anticipated Schedule
| Dates | Topic |
|---|---|
| Class 1 | Introduction & development environment setup |
| Class 2, 3, 4 | Multi-processing & network programming |
| Class 5 | Containerization: Docker and Kubernetes |
| Class 6 | Distributed Architectures |
| Class 7 | Communication and Coordination |
| Class 8 | Consistency & Replication |
| Class 9 | Fault Tolerance |
| Class 10 | Security |
| Class 11 | DevOps and CI/CD |
| Class 12 | Integrate application to infrastructure - Part 1 |
| Class 13 | Deploying on a hyperscaler; Integrate designs - (Virtual Bare Metal) |
| Class 14 | Deploying on a hyperscaler; Integrate designs - GCP, AWS, Azure |
| Class 15 | Last tidbits and guidance; Integrate designs |
| Class 15 | Final individual projects due |
Given that it’s possible to build distributed systems, it does not always mean that it’s a good idea.
A distributed system’s design goals; it should
Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to understand the design goals that make building a distributed (cloud) system worth all the effort:
The best way to contact me is first by a short summary via chat on Microsoft Teams followed immediately by a detailed email to rob.marano@cooper.edu. I will do my best to respond within 24 hours. Communication and participation in class is not only encouraged, but required. I seek to understand your individual understanding of the material each class. Advocate for yourself, early and often.
Each session will consist of two components: discussion and in-class lab work on your computers. Come prepared with your laptop and the Linux environment. See the “Software” section below.
Each class 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 serves not only for learning new concepts and skills but also for practicing what you have learned with active feedback. 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.
To understand the journey of distributed systems (that lead to today’s current implementation called “The Cloud” - hence “cloud computing”):
We will be using other resources available on the Internet for our course. These will be shared throughout the semester based upon covered topics and assignments.
With that said, the following books provide helpful and historical background for our course and may help with programming. None are required.
Stevens, W. Richard, Bill Fenner, and Andrew M. Rudoff. UNIX Network Programming, Vol. 1: The Sockets Networking API. 3rd ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Professional, 2003. ISBN: 9780131411555.
Tanenbaum, Andrew. Modern Operating Systems. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001. ISBN: 9780130313584.
McKusick, Marshall Kirk, Keith Bostic, Michael J. Karels, and John S. Quarterman. The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Professional, 1996. ISBN: 9780201549799.
Stevens, W. Richard, and Stephen Rago. Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment. 2nd ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Professional, 2005. ISBN: 9780201433074.
You run your distributed systems development environment in Linux, which can be operated natively or within a virtual machine using VirtualBox, Vagrant, or Docker, for example. At a minimum, you’ll need a terminal emulator running the Bash shell, Java 18 or higher with Maven, and git installed.
All software used during this course will be open source-based. We will also be using Amazon Web Services through the AWS Academy site of which Cooper Union has been given access. For many of our programming assignments, the Java programming language will be used, especially since this language is one of the most used ones for implementing modern cloud services given its portability across CPU instruction set architectures.
All assignments and the individual final project per student must be completed by the end of this course. Programming assignments and the projects will be handed-in individually via GitHub.
| Assignment | Title | Points | Given On | Due Date | Link to Solution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Program 1 | 10 | Class 1 | Class 2 | TBD |
| 2 | Program 2 | 10 | Class 2 | Class 3 | TBD |
| 3 | Program 3 | 10 | Class 3 | Class 4 | TBD |
| 4 | Program 4 | 10 | Class 4 | Class 5 | TBD |
| 5 | Program 5 | 10 | Class 5 | Class 6 | TBD |
| 6 | Program 6 | 10 | Class 6 | Class 7 | TBD |
| 7 | Program 7 | 10 | Class 7 | Class 8 | TBD |
| 8 | Program 8 | 10 | Class 8 | Class 9 | TBD |
| 9 | Program 9 | 10 | Class 9 | Class 10 | TBD |
| 10 | Program 10 | 10 | Class 10 | Class 11 | TBD |
| 11 | Program 11 | 10 | Class 11 | Class 12 | TBD |
| 12 | Program 12 | 10 | Class 12 | Class 13 | TBD |
| 13 | Final Project | 180 | Class 6 | Last Class | TBD |
One final project:
robmarano@gmail.com.Before you leave for break, ensure that you clean up your personal GitHub respository so that you can showcase the work you have developed. This will be helpful in any employment interviews you may have in the future. Like an artist, you know have a portfolio of software you have designed and implemented. No matter what you decide in your career, work and life is better through coding!
Enjoy the course! /prof.marano