The educational material do not meet the expected quality, as of many other courses. The instructor speaks too fast, with a lot of technical jargon in between each sentence, but does not interact with the user by annotating the slides. So, I had to keep moving my eyes around (reading compact text, or complex graphs) to try to make a connection between his words, and which part of slides he is speaking about.

Furthermore, I have excellent Python and Fortran and CUDA background, but not C++, so, I cannot do the final exam. I am gonna drop out of this course.

The programming assignment is very old style C code/C++ not using any of the updated/newer syntax. It required spending more time relearning old coding conventions than actually implementing the algorithms and such. Was very frustrating. The material and course overall is great, save that assignment, which is required to pass.

I found the concepts taught in this course interesting, but the lectures were far too fast paced (it takes twice the time to get through them if you actually want to get notes down as you will need to pause continuously). I also thought that the programming assignment was far, far too advanced seeing many people who take this course may not be familiar with C++ or programming in general. Even with my background being computer engineering, I found it challenging and spent much more time on it than the time suggested by the syllabus. Lastly, the homework was a major step up from lectures seeing there were minimal examples given in the lectures. Overall, the assessment was so ordinary that I would probably recommend not paying for this course. I kind of wish I could still get my money back.

If you want to do this course properly, double the time it tells you it will take for each part of it. You'll need to. If you're working full time and just looking for a hobby course, don't do this one. Or do it across two sessions, instead of trying to get it done in the 5 weeks. Don't do it if you want to learn how to use cloud computing - only if you want to research in cloud computing or need to know how it works under the hood.

This course would benefit from a slower pace and more detailed examples. I feel that everything was rushed and minimal guidance was given, which made the course not particularly enjoyable for me. Without some background in computer science, I think this would be a real struggle to get through at all.

Sorry for the lengthy review, I hope it helps someone decide whether this course is really for them.

Having to do the coding assignment in c++ is kind of bad :/

An acceptable course to those who want to have an insight to cloud computing.

The instructor seems to be in a hurry to get over the course and the course should rather be called a theoretical introduction to concepts in distributed computing. The slides are confusing with no animation. The programming assignment statement is just vague. Wouldn't recommend folks to pay and attend this. This may at best be for audit.

Felt like the assignments were too good for what was covered. We have to Google outside the course material to understand many concepts. But loved the fact that we got chance to try some hands on. That clarified a lot about Gossip style protocol. But the contents in the course about Chandy-Lamport algorithm needs SURE restructuring. It is NOT AT ALL adequate to answer the assignments. I request professor, Coursera to have a second look at these topics.

这人说话总是爱绕弯，也可能是我英语太差，听他这些停顿，无数多的从句感觉很头疼。

The lessons are a bit boring, an interactive blackboard or animated examples could help.

Not very engaging. Information overflow and poorly delivered lectures where the instructor is just reading from slides. I don't recommend paying for this, it is better to just check out the syllabus and read about this stuff online.

Note to instructor: Very simple concepts were explained using overly complicated language. Also, please refrain from over using the word 'essentially'.

The instructor's lecture sounded too robotic and I feel like he didn't make any effort to explain some of the principles or simplify the course to the audience. It feels like he just copied concepts and pasted them into the lecture and then read them quick.

My experience with this course was mostly positive. The lectures were helpful and fairly brief compared to a standard university class. The instructor provides good examples and the presentation slides are a good study guide. FWIW, the workload for this course is much less than a graduate level CS course (at least in my experience).

The negatives about this class: The homework/quiz assignments often asked you to solve a scenario more complicated than anything discussed in lecture, and there's no book to go read to get a better understanding. This made for an unnecessarily frustrating quiz process. Other reviewers have already criticized the programming assignment, and I concur with most of the complaints. You end up wasting too much time working on things other than learning content related to the course.

Good Course !

This course though looks quite simple but is very exhaustive and needs lot of dedicated effort to complete this course. Overall a very good learning experience related to cloud computing.

It really taught me a lot. Must take if you really want to know how big data technologies really work.

To the point videos and very good assignments.

good to understand deeper for cloud computing , it's good to practice my skill

Interesting and challenging programming assignment. I like to topics this course goes through: membership protocol, snapshot, CAP, and Paxos. I would highly recommend people who are interested in distributed system take this course.

Good details on concepts. Revised it multiple times. Crash course on distributed systems. Thank you for offering, Professor.

Amazing, very rich content, it allows you to go deep in understanding distributed systems. May be a hard course if you are just looking to understand cloud computing superficially, and much more if you don't know C++.

Seems a bit difficult in the beginning, especially if there is a long break from academics but a thorough and in depth course

Covered the basics of cloud computing very well.

This is one of the best internals courses I have taken. If you want to understand the cloud at the protocol level, take this course!

Comprehensive

It was a good course for the start. The concepts were taught with ease examples were there for more understanding. The programming assignment could be made more finesse, as there was a lot of issue like windows incompatibility, 64 bit incompatibility, memcpy passing vector in ENSend.