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Distributed Systems Academy (DSA) teaches both theoretical and practical aspects of implementing distributed systems. Students are introduced to important concepts about distributed system design and use those concepts to implement distributed systems.

Students who successfully complete DSA will understand the following concepts:

• Principles and concepts of designing and building distributed systems.
• Introduction to architectures for distributed computation including map-reduce, client-server, peer-to-peer, and event-driven.
• Cloud computing and APIs.
• Failure modes for distributed systems and how to mitigate them
• Reliability, availability, and scalability of large applications.
• Peer-to-peer distributed system architecture and principles including concepts such as 
  • Asynchronous interaction patterns (event and message-based interaction)
  • Distributed consensus and eventual consistency
  • P2P algorithms including Gossip protocols, Paxos, and byzantine generals problem.
  • Blockchains
  • Conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs)

Course Information

• Course Summary
• Prerequisites
• Syllabus
• Labs for Learning Reactive Programming
• Textbook Information
• Course Policies
• DSA FAQ
• Instructor Links to an external site.
• Teaching Assistants 

Course Modules

• Why Distributed Systems?
• Distributed System Patterns
• Integrity, Non-Repudiation, and Confidentiality
• Names and Directories
• APIs
• Parallel Architectures
• Failure and Consensus
• Peer-to-Peer Architectures
• Reactive Systems and the Actor Model
• Microservices

Photo Credit: Bees in a bee hive Links to an external site. from USDA (CC BY 2.0)