CS 291A: Scalable Internet Services

This course explores advanced topics in highly scalable Internet services and their underlying systems architecture. Software today is increasingly being delivered as a service: accessible globally via web browsers and mobile applications and backed by millions of servers. Modern frameworks and platforms are making it easier to build and deploy these systems, such as Ruby on Rails and Amazon’s EC2.

Yet despite these advances, some concerns just don’t go away. Building scalable Internet services today still requires an understanding of topics like caching, load balancing, security, and monitoring. In this course we will examine these topics and more: the state of the art in building scalable Internet services.