Cloud Computing

CS 443 treats the cloud as a distributed systems problem in disguise: once your application lives across data centers, you have to reason about virtualization layers, replication, consistency tradeoffs (CAP), and the networking glue that holds it all together. The work is mostly hands-on — five homeworks plus a term project where you build an actual application with a backend deployed on Google Cloud, alongside a written midterm and final. It's a natural follow-up to operating systems and networks courses, and it's where you stop thinking of "the server" as a single machine and start designing for the abstractions every modern backend job assumes you understand.