Learning Scalable Internet Services

Via Planet Trapexit, and this interesting post from RightScale on the network performance of Amazon EC2 and S3, there is this fascinating page from a UC Santa Barbara course...

"CS290F - Scalable Internet Services"

The project consisted of building a transactional dynamic web site in Ruby on Rails and running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Each site had to hold >100'000 database records that could be searched and explored, have user accounts, and include some form of transaction, such as a shopping cart check-out.

Each project then had to be deployed on multiple servers on EC2 and the groups had to use httperf to demonstrate that they could scale the performance of their site by running a front-end load balancer server, a database server, a memcached server, and up to 10 application servers. All this had to fit into a 10-week quarter, with none of the students knowing either Ruby or Rails at the outset!

More information from the instructor's RightScale blog. The wiki link there is broken, but at least pieces are still around, including the course material.