This course offers a survey and training of cloud computing and big data technologies, which have become critical skills required in the software industry today. The course is very practical and technical, focusing on the most useful and popular cloud services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You will gain all the hands-on experiences of using cloud services and big data techniques to build real-world large-scale applications. Finishing the course can make yourself a more professional software engineer.

This course deals with very advanced topics in the field of Computer Science. We encourage you to read the following in order to better prepare yourself for the rest of the quarter.

Cloud Platforms are services built by large companies which allow you to build and host applications and websites in a scalable infrastructure.

Amazon offers a huge resource on cloud computing via their aws platform. You will require a credit card to sign up but there is a free tier available for new members. Be careful though, the free tier does not include everything and it is very easy to accrue expensive bills. So after you sign up please follow these instructions in order to avoid any unwanted charges.

For those who have used their free year, there are many educational platforms, including GitHub Education and AWS Educate, that will sponsor your aws account. But these applications can take sometime so be sure to setup a paid account in the meantime.

Google offers a very similar platform to AWS called Google Cloud Platform. Google offers a similar trial system to amazon's offering $300 over the course of a six month period. They also provide a budgeting feature for their platform.

NodeJS is a event-driven I/O server-side JavaScript environment commonly used in the development of web services. You will have to download their libraries inorder to use this environment.

Python is a fast paced lightweight scripting language with a wide array of support from various third party libraries. Please download version 3.5 from their website.

This course will handle a wide variety of projects with increasing levels of complexity. Due to the difficult nature of these projects we recommend using various IDEs to complete your homework assignments.

JetBrains offers a wide array of IDEs for various programming situations, if you have never used an IDE before this would be a great place to start. As a student you have access to JetBrains' Student Developer Pack, which includes all of their most popular products.

We recommend downloading IntelliJ IDEA, their Java/General Purpose IDE, and PyCharm, their Python IDE.