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Back to Cloud Computing Concepts, Part 1

Learner Reviews & Feedback for Cloud Computing Concepts, Part 1 by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

4.3
stars
1,049 ratings

About the Course

Cloud computing systems today, whether open-source or used inside companies, are built using a common set of core techniques, algorithms, and design philosophies – all centered around distributed systems. Learn about such fundamental distributed computing "concepts" for cloud computing. Some of these concepts include: clouds, MapReduce, key-value/NoSQL stores, classical distributed algorithms, widely-used distributed algorithms, scalability, trending areas, and much, much more! Know how these systems work from the inside out. Get your hands dirty using these concepts with provided homework exercises. In the programming assignments, implement some of these concepts in template code (programs) provided in the C++ programming language. Prior experience with C++ is required. The course also features interviews with leading researchers and managers, from both industry and academia....

Top reviews

MR

Jul 15, 2017

Great course, I would recommend to everyone who wants to understand the basics of cloud computing. The course material is excellent, the instructor Indy is phenomenal and the exams are marvelous.

DP

Oct 6, 2016

This instructor is fantastic. He is exceptionally thorough and his delivery is very good as well. This is a course definitely worth taking if you are interested in learning more about the cloud.

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151 - 175 of 259 Reviews for Cloud Computing Concepts, Part 1

By Shivam

Jul 29, 2023

Good

By Otkilbayev S

May 12, 2023

good

By Lakhan P S

Jul 3, 2022

good

By Vinit K

Jul 3, 2022

NICE

By aniketh .

Dec 22, 2019

Good

By Methaq S

Jun 17, 2018

good

By Manik P

Jul 24, 2022

k

By Felipe R

May 4, 2017

V

By David S

Mar 4, 2017

Overall I really enjoyed this course, and I think I learned a lot, so thank you!

However I think there were some things that could be improved.

Firstly the quality of the code provided for the programming assignment was very low. It contains a lot of things that are far from modern c++ best-practices (e.g. using raw arrays instead of std::vector, mixing malloc and new, using new where there is no reason to use it, using raw pointers when references would be fine, missing consts, macros, ...). There were also some relatively minor bugs: the first log message doesn't print with the correct prefix, and the grading script as provided doesn't run (IIRC it was because the #! isn't on the first line). Since this course could be some people's first introduction to C++ I feel that it's important to set a good example, and to keep the code simple and safe.

Secondly the symbols used for things were often inconsistent between slides, which was occasionally confusing but should be easy to fix.

Despite these issues I still think this is a great course, it just could be a little bit better.

By Lucas L C

Jul 21, 2020

While I understand that C++ had EmulNet, which must have been pretty handy when designing the assignment, it's really far from ideal to learn this sort of thing with such a low abstraction level language. I would have very much preferred to spend my time learning the algorithms more deeply, but I actually spent most of it remembering pointer arithmetic and memory management.

What I'm saying is C++ is fine, but it would have been better if we could use a language on which we can actually focus on the logic (which is not simple to start with), not data representation, memory management and what not.

Other than that, I loved the lectures. The examples are a bit outdated, but the concepts are solid, which is what really matters. Thank you very much!

By Austin Z

Dec 21, 2018

The content of this course is great and the video lectures are of good quality. If you are looking for a university quality distributed systems course this is the best course i've found. Where this course lacks is in the outdated and tedious programming project and some quiz's that have questions not covered in lecture. The programming project will have you using c-style c++ code so be prepared. It has inconsistent use of data structures and types in its template code that you cannot modify and you will spent a significant amount of time doing memcpy to encode and decode data for char buffers. The quiz's have questions not covered in lecture like Chandy-Lamport questions around process state recordings. BEWARE THIS IS NOT A COURSE FOR BEGINNERS

By Dheeraj R

Jul 23, 2018

The coverage is good and there is a clear linkage of the concepts included in the beginning with the rest of the contents as they flow in - not just throughout this course, but also for the entire specialization. It would really help if the instructor would speak a little slowly (a bunch of words get garbled) and if the slides have lesser content (have more slides and redesign). That way, the instructor might not feel forced to talk so much per slide and the listening might be a little easy on the ear.

However, that does not take anything away from how that content is organized - that is good and takes you the flow rather well.

By Svilen S

Aug 25, 2019

I generally like the course because it expanded my horizon and taught me new concepts which are important in my work. However I think the presentation can be improved. I also miss a more in-depth comparison between the various related concepts. The programming assignment is not designed in the most test-friendly way. It contains some snippets that are half-baked and unclear instructions to provide the missing code. It required some reverse engineering to understand the template code. This can be seen by some as a fair requirement but I expected a more structured and unambiguous approach.

By Quan Z

May 14, 2017

1. Need more tutors to answer the question

Some of the questions in the quiz are badly written and some of us did not understand and tried to ask. And almost no one responds the questions in the "discussion forum" when you reach the end of the course.

2. C++ project assignment

The project claims to use C++, but mixed the C and C++ and doesn't follow C++ best practices. It is very bad for people who have to learn C++ to finish this project since they will get confused by plenty of C code in C++.

By Chuxing C

Aug 25, 2016

I enjoyed the contents and homeworks. Overall the delivery was very good, and I have grasped a lot.

The main reason that I won't give 5 stars is the program assignment. I have spent and wasted 3 weeks to work on the tools, yes, tools, not the subject matter. Course should clearly indicate that the assignment only works in Linux/UNIX environment, and need to further test the scripts in most popular Linux OS platforms, different c++ versions, and different python versions.

By Rafael L F S

Jun 8, 2018

I think the course content is very rich and useful. The topics are well explained and have examples. I'm really happy with the course content. The only part of the course I think it needs to be improved is the programming assignment. I think there should be more options of languages, like Java, for example. And the C++ code should be reviewed because it's very confusing and those who don't have familiarity with C++ will certainly have difficulty.

By Michał M

Apr 2, 2017

Very interesting course if you want to learn about inner workings of distributed systems. Lecturer was very knowledgeable and provided good examples. Exams and quizes were pretty challenging and fun. I love that there was a practical programming assignment. I would only suggest to tweak the template for programming assignment as it was a little bit limiting. And maybe allowing for different programming languages other than C++.

By Josh S

Oct 15, 2017

A solid introduction into the field of distributed systems. I especially liked the material on distributed hashing. The Quiz questions, in particular section 5 could use a bit of clarification, as I sometimes found it difficult to understand exactly what was being asked. That said the lecture slides, and organization of the material was quite good, and I recommend the course.

By Alex S

Nov 1, 2020

The content of the course - quite good, well explained

The quizes - mostly ok, but some of the questions were repetitive

The programming assignment - the C++ skeleton is quite bad bad, uses ugly code andneeds to be rewritten; also the chcker has an unpreditable behavior; sometimes, grades you with 90, sometimes with 30.

By Гайдай А

Oct 19, 2020

The course is quite interesting and useful in terms of lectures and tests, especially tests with written answers. But it needs refinement in terms of the task (outdated and there are no options for java or other popular languages), and a little more information about multicast with examples of problem solving)

By Coherence

Aug 17, 2020

Actually I wanna give it 3.5 star. This course is released a few years ago so it might not be maintained very well. Also the assignments are a bit of uncovered by the slides. The code assignment is not well code styled. The c code are integreted with c++ which makes me feel not good.

By gaurav

Dec 27, 2018

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.

By Ehtisham R

Sep 11, 2016

Great course but the main problem is that very little help is available. Programming assignment is not able to understand meaning not able to find how to start (what should be the first step?)

pace is little fast. learned a lot about Cloud Computing. Homeworks are really challenging.

By Niels R

May 29, 2018

The lectures are clear and informative. The quizes pose the right amount of challenge. The template code provided for the programming assignment is terrible, but the assignment itself is not that complex and quite doable for most people with object oriented programming experience.

By Pavel Č

Oct 16, 2016

The course gave me an interesting overview of different problems from the cloud computing field. The course start looks little bit slow, but later it gets more interesting. However I was disappointed with code quality of the assignment framework.