Cloud Computing

CS 683 treats the cloud as a distributed systems problem with a credit card attached: you learn why virtualization, replication, and consistency tradeoffs (CAP, SQL vs NoSQL, datacenter networking) shape what you can actually build on top of someone else's machines. Expect to spend most of your time hands-on in Google Cloud — containers, Kubernetes, managed storage, pub/sub — across regular homeworks and a term project where you ship an application with a real cloud backend. It's a graduate elective that assumes you're already comfortable with OS and networking fundamentals, and it's the natural prerequisite-by-experience for anything you'll later do in big-data or ML systems work.