General Information

• Venue : AC-04-LR-006

• Time :  6:20 pm - 7:50 pm

• Instructor : Manu Awasthi (manu.awasthi@ashoka.edu.in)

• Office Hours :  After lectures, or by appointment

Contacting Course staff 

The recommended method for contacting course staff is through the email alias cs4622-staff@googlegroups.com. We will be filtering emails regarding the course based on this email alias. Individual emails to course staff will not be answered.

Suggested Books and Readings

1. Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann

2. Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time by Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck & Hyrum Wright

3. The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines (Second Edition) by Luiz André Barroso, Jimmy Clidaras and Urs Hölzle

4. The Cloud Computing Book : The Future of Computing Explained by Douglas Comer

5. Understanding Distributed Systems: What Every Developer Should Know About Large Distributed Applications by Roberto Vitillo

Online Learning Management System

We will be using Google Classroom as the Learning Management System (LMS) for this course. You will automatically be added to the Google Classroom for this course via Ashoka AMS. All the course material will be made available through the either Google Classroom, or as links on this webpage. 

We will be accepting student submissions only through Google Classroom. No email submissions will be considered. 

Class Policies

The following is a tentative guideline for the grading policy and may undergo a change. 

1. Group Projects - 65% 

   • The bulk of the assessment for the course will be done through a group project which will require student groups (2 or 3 students per group) to design, implement and deploy an end to end SaaS application.  To earn credit,  major and minor milestones  for the project will be need to be met by project groups. These milestones will be made available at the start of the course

2. Project Presentation + Report: 15%

3. Code Reviews: 10%

4. Class participation : 10%

Project Deadlines (Tentative)

• Deadline 1 (End of class): Group formation. Groups size of 2 is preferred, 3 will be acceptable. Send your group to the teaching staff.

• Deadline 2: Project proposal due. Please discuss with the instructor before deciding on the projects.

• Deadline 3: First checkpoint report due.

• Deadline 4: Second checkpoint report and demo due.

• Deadline 5: Final everything due. This includes report , code, analysis.

• Reading Week: Final presentation and demos.

Cheating and Plagiarism

CS4622 has a zero tolerance for cheating, even for assignments. 

NOTE: Any evidence of academic integrity violation / plagiarism will result in an F grade for the entire course, no exceptions. In addition, you will be reported to the OAA for academic integrity violation.

Attendance

There is no mandatory attendance, but there is a class participation component to your eventual grade. However, you are expected to attend all the lectures. There will be material covered in class that is not present in textbooks.  In addition, some portion of the lectures will be used for discussions. It is in your best interests to attend the lectures as they happen, and get your questions answered during the discussions, rather than waiting till the end of the semester. 

The instructor reserves the right to cold call on any student who is attending the class to elicit student participation. You don't necessarily need to provide a correct answer to the question being posed, but it will be expected that everyone at least attempt to provide an answer. 

Schedule (Tentative)

Acknowledgements

The instructor gratefully acknowledges instruction material (slides, figures, animations etc.) that have been created by a number of instructors for similar courses around the world.