Instructional Sequence
Placeholder index for instructional modules, exams, project checkpoints, guest lectures, holidays, and other course sessions.
Course modules organize instructional sessions, exams, project checkpoints, guest lectures, and holidays without forcing every item into a one-week pattern.
Module 1
Define distributed systems, contrast them with parallel systems, and examine why enterprise systems become difficult once communication crosses network boundaries.
Module 2
Examine what makes services independently deployable, how containers create repeatable runtime boundaries, and how partial failure appears when services run separately.
Module 3
Design explicit API contracts, distinguish service location from identity, budget network latency, and observe how REST and gRPC calls behave under failure.
Module 4
Compare layered systems, microservices, and event-driven systems through a campus marketplace. Design integration boundaries, contain failures, and develop a team project proposal.
Module 5
Trace message-oriented middleware and event-driven architecture from enterprise queues to Kafka at LinkedIn and Apache Iggy, with real-world cases and small RabbitMQ/Kafka demos.
Module 6
Trace a request through service discovery, balancing, health checks, and orchestration. Explore Gateway API, modern data planes, and a recoverable agent runtime.
Module 7
Follow an order through skewed clocks, delayed messages, logical timestamps, and competing workers. Learn when ordering is enough and when shared decisions need coordination.
Module 8
Use PostgreSQL, etcd, and CouchDB to observe stale reads, quorum behavior, and write conflicts, then choose explicit consistency and availability guarantees.
Module 9
Learn Logs, Traces, and Metrics first, then analyze time series, use built-in metrics, trace multilingual services, and design bounded recovery with Instana exercises.