Tell me and I forget. Teach me, and I remember. Involve me, and I learn.
Benjamin Franklin
In Cloud Computing for Big Data Analytics, there will be two sorts of student jobs: lab assignments and one project. Some lab sessions include pre-session homework.
Students are expected to complete and submit the assigned pre-lab homework before each lab session.
Students will begin by creating an essential toolbox to get them started in the Cloud. It will prepare them to be able to practice with APIs, the doors in the Cloud. That will also allow students to be able to mine the deluge of data coming from the Cloud or using new advanced analytics services available nowadays in the Cloud. Finally, we will look under the hood of these high-level analytics services in the Cloud, either regarding software or hardware, to understand how to meet high-performance requirements. The final goal is to provide code examples that smoothly can get the student started.
- Lab 1: Basic "Knowledge Toolbox" to get started in the Cloud
- Lab 2: Doors in the Cloud
- Lab 3: Extracting and Analyzing data from the Cloud
- Lab 4: Creating a web application using cloud PaaS
- Lab 5: Enhancing your web app using additional cloud services
- Lab 6: Interacting with users and services in the Cloud
- Lab 7: Using the Elastic Stack to study scraped data from a web page
- Lab 8: Advanced Analytics as a Service in the Cloud
- Lab 9: Programming your cloud infrastructure
The deadlines for each assignment will be published at the "FIB Racó".
I would like to thank Prof. Jordi Torres for developing the initial version of these lab sessions and thanks also due to some of his former students for their help proofreading and improving the documentation: Eloy Gil, Dani Cea, Xisco Sastre, Maurici Yagüez and Mauro Gómez.
The course project will be completed in teams of five students enrolled in the same sub-group. Before starting the development, students require the teacher's approval of their course project proposal.
The student project is meant to allow students to put into practice many concepts that they learn in this subject. It is an exercise to help students to consolidate their learning, not a way to obtain a flawlessly working prototype.
Students are supposed to invest forty hours of their time (two hundred hours the five members). If the group is too ambitious in the scope of the project, there is a high chance of running out of time.
A good approach is to work on a simple idea that makes sense by itself. Once it is working, make it grow larger by adding new features. Students may end up having all the initially planned tasks or not.
It is much better to present a well defined, correctly executed but partially working idea than a very sophisticated working program that nobody will dare to touch a line of code after three weeks because of the high probability of making a huge mess.
For the project, students need to create a web app, web service or set of microservices that will be available on the AWS cloud. They need to decide and explain the final objective, resources, and services that the project will be using.
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The code of the project will be written in Python 3. Additional programming languages for small parts of the project can also be used (i.e., JavaScript, ...)
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Students can use as many packages or open source code as they need, They need to explain the reasons for using these resources.
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Create a private GitHub repository to manage the code versioning. All team members and angeltoribio-UPC-BCN need to have access to it.
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Follow the twelve-factor methodology as much as possible. A clear and concise explanation on how the project benefits from each of the factors used. Justification for not using any of the factors (time constraints or project scope are examples of valid reasons) and how having used them could have affected the project.
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Students team need to have an always working demo showing the advances that they have achieved up to the moment. Obviously, some functionality will be partially working or not working at all that will not be available at the exposed demo.
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The demo does not need to be up 24/7, but students need to be able to have a running demo in less than five minutes. For that purpose, students are ecouraged to automate their deployments as much as possible.
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Use log files/streams extensively to provide a trace of the programs, good or bad, functioning.
On a normal project, one would have a series of draft documents before delivering the final report. In this case, students will only to have to produce two documents: what the team plans on doing (first draft) and what they finally did (final report).
Student teams need to provide:
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a description of the functionality and scope of their project;
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a listing of the resources and services required to build their solution;
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a listing the intended use of the 160 hours for all the main tasks of the project (i.e., architectural design, research and documentation on services and resources, coding, meetings, written documentation, etc).
Students can create some proof of concept while developing the initial idea. However, it is required to have it validated by your teacher before they begin to build the project.
One of the goals of the practical assignments is to cooperate and share the knowledge with student peers, helping each other to be able to have a broader understanding of Cloud Computing and Big Data Analytics.
By the end of the project, students are encouraged to select and present the best from their work to help other class peers to take advantage of what the team has learned by doing the project.
Each team will have ten minutes for the public delivery of the project presentation.
The final report needs to contain a clear and concise explanation of the following points:
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What does the project finally do?
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What are the differences in scope from the project first draft?: added and unimplemented features.
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How does the code do the above? Description and architectural diagram of the different parts.
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Discussion on the use of the twelve-factor methodology as stated in the requirements.
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Description of the methodology used to create the project: division of responsibilities, meetings organization, exchange of ideas and documentation, created working environments (development, production, staging), tools used, etc.
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Description of the main problems encountered and the solutions implemented regarding coding, team organization, services, and resources used.
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For each of the services and resources used, explanation on how project benefits from them. Giving some alternatives to obtain similar results and briefly explaining why have been discarded.
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Listing the hours invested, by each member, for all the main tasks of the project (i.e., architectural design, research and documentation on services and resources, coding, meetings, written documentation, etc). What is the project deviation in hours. How could the team have deviated less from the initial hour count breakdown?
Students need to submit to "FIB Raco":
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for the project first draft: A PDF file containing an extended description of the scope of the project and a detailed tentative content index of the final report. Between 1000 and 2000 English words, adding any images considered necessary.
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for the final report and presentation:
- a PDF file with the slides for in-class presentation;
- a PDF file with the final report. Between 6000 and 10000 English words, adding any images considered necessary;
- the GitHub URL containing the code repository.
The deadlines for each deliverable will be published at the "FIB Racó".
Delivered documents need to follow the specified restrictions in order to be graded. Do not provide deliverables after the deadline, longer/shorter documentation or different file formats.
The project will be evaluated based on the quality of the materials delivered and the compliance with the requirements. The evaluation will pay specific attention to:
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the architectural design (modularity, reusability, portability, clarity in the definition of interfaces);
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the code (modular, adequately grouped in files, clear to understand);
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the methodology used to develop the project (briefly explained in the final report);
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clear and concise documentation covering all the required topics;
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an effective in-class presentation that will allow student peers to enrich from the lessons learned by the team while doing the project.
Once the laboratory laboratory assignments have finished, students are required to continue attending to class. They will then have the opportunity to ask the teacher any doubts, have him to help solving problems, agree on changes in the scope of the project. The teacher will also be able to supervise that everyone is participating adequately and encourage students to improve any aspect of the project development (work methodology, details definition, etc.).
All team members need to demonstrate that they have equally contributed to the success of the project, therefore they need to communicate their efforts and difficulties to the teacher (during the in-class meetings and the technical interviews).
Based on the quality of the in-class presentation and the answers given during the in-class meetings and technical interview, all team members may not end up having the same final grade on the project.