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

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Course Staff

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

General Information

The course meets Thu 3pm and Fri at 9am in H.208. See schedule for exact dates.

Announcements

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

Prerequisites

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:

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 Lecture notes, Hunt: ZooKeeper: Wait-free coordination for Internet-scale systems
Thu 9/10 Coordination services 3 -
Fri 10/10 Scalable load balancing 1 Lecture slides, Elson: Handling flash crowds from your garage
Thu 16/10 Serving the social graph 1 Lecture slides, Bronson: Facebook's distributed data store for the social graph
Fri 17/10 Topic TBA -
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 Scalable causal consistency 1 Lecture notes, Lloyd: Don't Settle for Eventual Consistency
Fri 31/10 (Note: UoC Career Fair) Scalable causal consistency 2 -
Thu 6/11 Presentations I
Fri 7/11 Presentations I
Thu 13/11 Presentations I -
Fri 14/11 Topic TBA -
Thu 20/11 Project proposals due -
Fri 21/11 Presentations I -
Thu 27/11 Tutorial on the use of AWS Academy (TA) -
Fri 28/11 Presentations II -
Thu 4/12 Presentations II -
Fri 5/12 Presentations II -
Thu 11/12 Presentations II -
Fri 12/12 Distributed transactions Lecture notes, Aguilera: Sinfonia: a new paradigm for buliding scalable distributed systems
Thu 18/12 Putting it all together -
Fri 19/12 Putting it all together -

Projects HOWTO

Please note the following project guidelines:

Other Resources