Architecture of Large-Scale Information Systems

Course Description

This course deals with large-scale Internet-based information systems. It covers basic architecture and techniques for achieving scalability and high availability, with particular emphasis on Cloud Computing techniques.

Topics covered include three-tier architectures, Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), "conventional" Web Services (SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, ...) and RESTful designs. We discuss systems based on ACID transactions, SAGAs, and workflows.

Scalability and Availability topics include clusters and load balancing, session management, accelerators and caches, distributed transaction management, replication, failover and reliable message queues.

We discuss techniques to exploit the "elasticity" of Cloud Computing APIs to design systems that can reconfigure dynamically in response to failures or to changes in load.

The course includes significant programming assignments involving Web servers, application servers and database systems. These will involve using a commercial Cloud Computing service, the Amazon AWS system.

Note that this page, like most of the static content for the CS5300 website, is served directly from Amazon AWS.