HY-559 Fall 2025-26

Computer Science Department, University of Crete
HY-559 Infrastructure Technologies for Large-Scale Service-Oriented Systems

info | readings | syllabus | other resources

Course Staff

Name	Email	Office Hours
Instructor: Kostas Magoutis	hy559@csd	By appt./E-306
Teaching Assistant: Stratos Ntallaris	hy559@csd	By appt.

General Information

The course meets Thu 3pm and Fri at 9am in E-313. See schedule for exact dates.

Announcements

19.09.2025 10:00: Note change in classroom: We are now meeting in E-313 (wing E, top floor of CSD building)

1.09.2025 10:00: You are welcome to get in touch with the instructor to discuss course-related issues.

1.08.2024 10:00: We will be using the AWS Academy cloud platform for course assignments, you may find our course page here.

Course Description

The explosive growth of e-services in recent years has created the need to design, implement, and manage infrastructures that support large-scale service-oriented systems. The course offers an introduction to the scalable infrastructure technologies designed to support large-scale e-services. In the course we will examine existing design techniques and research problems in the design and implementation of these systems as well as their possible solutions.

The course focuses on large-scale service-oriented systems and their architectures (Web services, service-oriented architectures, service mashups, etc.); design principles for scalable high performance; management of infrastructural service-level agreements (SLAs); information lifecycle management; configuration and change management databases and ITIL processes; design optimization to meet application requirements; the role of the human factor in service engagements; service delivery models; and several case studies (Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Facebook).

This course is targeted for graduate students and advanced undergraduates and requires the undertaking of a research project. The topics of the research projects will be chosen with the help and guidance of the course staff. Other requirements include review and presentation of two research papers.

Coursework

Reading and discussing classic and current papers
Review and presentation of two research papers
A research project of your choice

Prerequisites

Introductory operating systems, database, and service systems courses such as HY-345, HY-360, and (optionally) HY-452

Grading

The final grade depends on class participation, presentation of two research papers, and a research project.

Readings

There are a number of paper readings that are available online. You are expected to read the papers before the beginning of each class.

There is no required textbook for this class. The following textbooks, however, are recommended readings:

M. van Steen and A. S. Tanenbaum: Distributed Systems, 4th ed. (2025)
Alonso, Casati, Kuno, Machiraju: Web Services: Concepts, Architectures, and Applications, Springer Verlag.

Syllabus

Date	Notes	Readings
Thu 25/9	Course overview	Lecture notes
Fri 26/9	No class due to all-day CSD event	-
Thu 2/10	Coordination services 1	Lecture notes, Lamport: Paxos made simple
Fri 3/10	Coordination services 2	-
Thu 9/10	Coordination services 3	Lecture notes, Hunt: ZooKeeper: Wait-free coordination for Internet-scale systems
Fri 10/10	Coordination services 4	-
Thu 16/10	Scalable load balancing	Lecture slides, Eisenbud: Maglev: A Fast and Reliable Software Network Load Balancer, Google SRE Book chapters 11, 19 and 20
Fri 17/10	Serving the social graph 1	Lecture slides , Bronson: Facebook's distributed data store for the social graph
Thu 24/10	Serving the social graph 2	Lecture slides
Fri 25/10	Microservices platforms	Lecture slides, Kakivaya: Service Fabric: a distributed platform for building microservices in the cloud
Thu 30/10	Presentations I	1411, 1422, 1423, 4440
Fri 31/10	Presentations I	1430, 1441, 1471
Thu 6/11	Presentations I	1455, 1445, 1434, 1403
Fri 7/11	Presentations I	1446, 1447, 1448, 4763
Thu 13/11	Presentations I	1449, 1450, 1452, 5197
Fri 14/11	Presentations I	1458, 1459, 6079, 6101
Thu 20/11	Presentations I	1467, 1468, 1437
Thu 20/11	Project proposals due
Fri 21/11	Distributed transactions	1438, Lecture notes, Aguilera: Sinfonia: a new paradigm for buliding scalable distributed systems
Thu 27/11	Tutorial on the use of AWS Academy (TA)	-
Fri 28/11	Presentations II	1398, 1411, 1422, 4440
Thu 4/12	Presentations II	1423, 1430, 1434, 4763
Fri 5/12	Presentations II	1438, 1441, 1450, 1471
Thu 11/12	Presentations II	1446, 1447, 1448, 1403
Fri 12/12	Presentations II	1449, 1445, 1452, 5197
Thu 18/12	Presentations II	1455, 1458, 1459, 6079
Fri 19/12	Presentations II	1467, 1468, 1437, 6101

Projects HOWTO

Please note the following project guidelines:

Discuss project ideas with course staff
Prepare a short description (text or pdf) of your goals and deliverables by 22/11
In preparing your abstract, describe
- What you are trying to achieve
- Your plan to do so and expected deliverables (type of deployments in AWS Academy, evaluation, analysis, etc.)
Project reports (in the ACM paper formatting template) are due 31/1
Prepare a "rapid fire" (10min, up to 6 slides) presentation of your results; you will need to submit a video recording of it along with your report
You may use this presentation template.

Other Resources

Interesting readings
- Ken Birman's Like it or Not, Web Services are Distributed Objects!
- John Ousterhout's Always measure one level deeper
- Marvin Theimer's (Amazon) keynote speech at LADIS'09
- Jim Gray discusses lessons learned from the Amazon technology platform with Werner Vogels
- Jeff Dean's (Google) keynote speech at LADIS'09
- Kirk McKusick discusses the Google File System origins and evolution with Sean Quinlan (Google).
- A conversation with Werner Vogels on designing for evolution at scale
- ACM Queue magazine articles on Web services and Virtualization.
Open-source scalable infrastructure
- Hadoop, Zookeeper, Cassandra, Chord
Links
- LADIS workshops
- HY-559 fall 2024-25
- HY-559 fall 2023-24
- HY-559 fall 2022-23
- HY-559 fall 2021-22
- HY-559 fall 2020-21
- HY-559 fall 2019-20