Scalable Systems and Development Processes

A key engineering and entrepreneurial challenge is not only to quickly deploy the initial version of a great product but also, upon successful adaption by the market, to scale it up. A product  or product family can be scaled both "horizontally" by adding more feature sets to it and "vertically" attracting more users, on different platforms and in different markets, such as desktop  and mobile, stand-alone and cloud, enterprise and consumer, local and international. How and when to scale a product may be a business decision. The architecture of the code base and the engineering organization must be prepared for these requirements. This course teaches both the software architectural and engineering organizational aspects of building large scale products. It emphasizes the dynamic, evolutionary nature of this process. Continuous innovation, scaling and adaptability are essential for successful companies. They should be prepared to build upon their existing products and engineering processes and organization. The course teaches basic software architectural concepts, technologies and practices to architect products that can be quickly deployed but as the need arises can be smoothly, incrementally scaled. The aim of the course is to introduce to students best practices and technologies to build products that can evolve and scale over time. How to build products that grow from thousands of line of code to millions, developed and maintained from tens of software engineers to tens of thousands with a user base (supported load) from tens of thousands to tens of millions. The course touches upon both engineering processes, such as source control, testing, bug tracking, monitoring and applicable technologies such as networking, load balancing, parallel computing, large scale data repositories.

The course comprises a series of lectures, 2 homework assignments and readings from online resources. Duration: Weeks 1-7, 2x2 hours   

The course requires basic knowledge in object oriented programming. Familiarity with Java  and/or C++ is advantageous but not required.

Requirements: The final grade is based on the quality of home assignments (60%), on the solutions of smaller problems given at lectures (20%) and on the presentation about the topic of the assignments (20%).