Scalable Internet Services Syllabus

Course Description

This course explores advanced topics in highly scalable Internet services and their underlying systems’ architecture. Software today is primarily delivered as a service: accessible globally via web browsers and mobile applications, and backed by millions of servers. Modern web frameworks (e.g., Ruby on Rails, Django, and Express), and continuous improvements to cloud providers (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure) make it increasingly easier to build and deploy these systems.

Despite these advances, building scalable Internet services today still requires an understanding of topics like caching, load balancing, security, and monitoring. In this course we will examine these topics and more: the state of the art in building scalable Internet services.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course students will be able to:

  • write and deploy highly scalable web functions using AWS Lambda

  • write a modern front end client application using React

  • create a Ruby on Rails web service and deploy it via AWS Elastic Beanstalk

  • measure the performance of various components of a web service

  • discover and resolve bottlenecks in a web service

Class Content and Interactions

Synchronous Classes

All core course topics, covering the essentials of building large scale Internet services, will be presented via in-person lectures.

Class will meet twice a week during the scheduled class time unless otherwise mentioned. Students are encouraged to attend in order to ask and answer questions, and explore the material in more depth.

Piazza

All students are expected to join the class on Piazza as class announcements will be made there. Additionally Piazza is used for offline questions about the class content and its projects. Students are able to submit anonymously, though anonymous content will not be counted toward participation. Students are strongly encouraged to answer each other’s questions by improving upon the “student answer”.

Please create a new post for each distinct question, rather than asking new questions as a follow up to an existing post. Follow-ups are useful to obtain more information necessary to answer a question, or to work through possible solutions to a question.

All one-on-one offline communication with the instructors for content pertaining to this class should be conducted via Piazza. Please do not reach out to the instructor via email for class related communications.

Team Check-ins

Once the primary project has started in week 5, teams will meet with instructors once each week, via Zoom. These meetings will be scheduled for approximately 15 minutes.

Projects

Initial Projects

There will be four projects in the first five weeks of the course, one per week with the fourth project spanning two weeks. These projects will ensure students have the basic knowledge to build and deploy modern, simple, and scalable web services without needing a deep understanding of how the underlying systems enable scalability. The first three projects are to be completed individually, and the fourth completed as a pair.

Primary Project

The goal of the course’s primary project is for students to experience and resolve pain points encountered when building and deploying a moderate-sized scalable web service. Students will do this using some of the latest web technologies in order to learn how to tackle scalability and fault-tolerance concerns. Projects will be conducted in agile teams of four to six students, and each team will build their own scalable web site using fundamental web technologies and the Ruby on Rails framework. A team may not be comprised of more than two undergraduate or BS/MS students.

Grading

Percent Item
3 Project 0 (Static Web Page)
6 Project 1 (RubyKoans)
9 Project 2 (AWS Lambda)
12 Project 3 (Rails demo app)
65 Primary Project Individual Score
5 Participation

Participation is an important part of keeping a class engaging. Participation can be earned by asking or answering questions during synchronous classes, and asking or answering public questions on Piazza. Note that neither private conversations with the instructor, nor participation during team check-ins count toward the participation score.

Projects 0 through 3 are scored as either complete (100%) or incomplete (0%); there is no fractional score other than as described below for late submissions.

Late submissions incur a 1% penalty for every five-minutes late rounded up. For example, if the deadline is before 2pm, an assignment submitted at 14:00:00 (5 minutes late) will receive 99% of its score, and an assignment submitted at 15:00:00 (65 minutes late) will receive only 87% of its score.

Primary Project Score

A project’s score is primarily based on the team’s description of their iterative approach to load testing and scaling their web service as described in their project report and highlighted in their project video. Objectively these components break down into:

Percent Item
50 iterative approach to load testing and scaling
20 web service complexity
15 quality of project report
15 quality of project video

Primary Project Individual Score

The individual score is computed by multiplying the project score by the student’s peer score. Peer scores are computed by summing the relative percent of work each individual’s teammates confidentially assigns them.

For example, a three person team may assign the following peer scores:

  Alice Bob Chuck
Alice - 55% 45%
Bob 60% - 40%
Chuck 52% 48% -
Total 112% 103% 85%

The observations from the data in the table above are:

  • Alice reported Bob (55%) as having contributed more work than Chuck (45%).
  • Similarly, Bob reported that Alice (60%) contributed more work than Chuck (40%).
  • Finally, Chuck reported that Alice (52%) contributed slightly more work than Bob (48%).

With these values, Alice’s peer score would be 112%, Bob’s 103%, and Chuck’s 85%. With a project score of 95%, Alice’s Primary Project Individual Score would be 106.4%, Bob’s 97.85%, and Chuck’s 80.75%.

We will confidentially conduct the peer score process once during the course:

  • Monday, November 18

The first peer score is intended to help students see if they need to make any adjustments to their team contributions. Only the outcome of the final peer score will be used to compute an individual’s score. Any moderate deviations of more than two points from equal contribution will require justification, and may be followed up on by the instructor.

Letter Grades

Letter grades will be assigned as follows:

Percent Grade
96 ⅔ A+
93 ⅓ A
90 A-
86 ⅔ B+
83 ⅓ B
80 B-
76 ⅔ C+
73 ⅓ C
0 F

The number listed is the lower bound of the percent grade for the given range. It is expected that each person is a relatively equal contributor on their team, with the exception that there may be significant positive outliers. Additionally, it is expected that each team does a solid job on their project. As a result, please note the drop to an F grade immediately following the C range.