San José State University · Fall 2026
CMPE 273 Overview
Enterprise Distributed Systems meets Mondays from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM during Fall 2026.
Course Information
Overview
CMPE 273 explores the principles, architectures, and engineering practices behind modern enterprise distributed systems. Students learn how services communicate, coordinate, maintain consistency, tolerate failures, and operate reliably at scale.
The course connects foundational distributed-systems concepts with cloud-native and agentic AI architectures. Topics include logical clocks, replication, consensus, distributed transactions, event-driven systems, Kubernetes, observability, security, and multi-agent systems.
Through weekly hands-on assignments and a semester-long team project, students will design, build, deploy, observe, and evaluate a production-oriented distributed system. The emphasis is on understanding engineering tradeoffs, testing failure scenarios, and using AI responsibly as part of the software-development process.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
- Explain the fundamental challenges and tradeoffs of distributed systems
- Design service communication and coordination mechanisms
- Evaluate replication, consistency, consensus, and transaction strategies
- Build fault-tolerant, event-driven, cloud-native applications
- Deploy and operate distributed services using containers and Kubernetes
- Instrument applications with metrics, logs, traces, and service-level objectives
- Secure distributed services and agentic AI workflows
- Design and evaluate distributed agentic systems with appropriate human oversight
- Test scalability, resilience, security, and failure behavior
- Communicate and defend distributed-system architecture decisions
Fall 2026
Schedule
| Date | Topic | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 24 | Module 1: Introduction to Enterprise Distributed Systems | Course introduction; distributed-system goals, architectures, tradeoffs, failure models, and team formation |
| Aug 31 | Module 2: Service Boundaries, Runtime Isolation, and Containers | Processes, ports, deployment units, containers, and independently running services |
| Sep 7 | No Class | Labor Day; campus closed |
| Sep 14 | Module 3: Network Communication with REST and gRPC | REST APIs, contracts, service identity, latency, timeouts, and gRPC comparison |
| Sep 21 | Module 4: Architecture Styles for Enterprise Distributed Systems | Layered systems, microservices, event-driven systems, integration boundaries, and failure domains |
| Sep 28 | Module 5: Asynchronous Messaging and Event-Driven Architecture | Queues, topics, pub/sub, delivery semantics, Kafka or RabbitMQ, and domain events |
| Oct 5 | Module 6: Discovery, Load Balancing, and Cloud-Native Runtime Patterns | Naming, discovery, load balancing, container orchestration concepts, and traffic routing |
| Oct 12 | Module 7: Time, Ordering, and Coordination | Clocks, logical clocks, ordering, coordination, leases, and ordering assumptions |
| Oct 19 | Midterm and Project Triage | Foundations through coordination; short project triage after the exam if time permits |
| Oct 26 | Module 8: Replication, Consistency, CAP, and PACELC | Replication, consistency models, availability tradeoffs, stale reads, and write conflicts |
| Nov 2 | Module 9: Distributed Transactions, Sagas, and Idempotency | Transactions, sagas, compensating actions, idempotency keys, and end-to-end workflows |
| Nov 9 | Module 10: Fault Tolerance and Resilience Patterns | Retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, backpressure, bulkheads, and failure-mode testing |
| Nov 16 | Module 11: Observability and Operational Diagnosis | Logs, metrics, traces, correlation IDs, telemetry access, and sensitive-data handling |
| Nov 23 | Integration, Review, and Project Coaching | Cross-module integration, project debugging, review patterns, and project stabilization |
| Nov 30 | Module 12: Agentic Orchestration, MCP, and Failure Containment | MCP, tool authorization, guardrails, evaluation, human approval, and failure containment |
| Dec 7 | Final Project Demonstrations | Live demonstration, distributed architecture review, resilience results, individual contributions, and peer evaluation |
| Dec 14 | Final Exam or Culminating Activity | Integrative reasoning across the semester, pending the official SJSU final exam schedule |
Canvas Boundary
Canvas remains the official system of record for grades, submissions, quizzes, exams, announcements, and student-specific information.