HY-559 Fall 2026-27

Computer Science Department, University of Crete
HY-559 Infrastructure Technologies for Large-Scale Service-Oriented Systems

info | readings | syllabus | other resources

Course Staff

Name	Email	Office Hours
Instructor: Kostas Magoutis	hy559@csd	By appt./E-306
Teaching Assistant: Stratos Ntallaris	hy559@csd	By appt.

General Information

The course meets Thu 3pm and Fri at 9am in E-313. See schedule for exact dates.

Announcements

8.10.2026 10:00: There will be no class on Friday 9/10.

1.09.2026 10:00: You are welcome to get in touch with the instructor to discuss course-related issues.

1.08.2026 10:00: We will be using the AWS Academy cloud platform for course assignments, you may find our course page here.

Course Description

The explosive growth of e-services in recent years has created the need to design, implement, and manage infrastructures that support large-scale service-oriented systems. The course offers an introduction to the scalable infrastructure technologies designed to support large-scale e-services. In the course we will examine existing design techniques and research problems in the design and implementation of these systems as well as their possible solutions.

The course focuses on large-scale service-oriented systems and their architectures (Web services, service-oriented architectures, service mashups, etc.); design principles for scalable high performance; management of infrastructural service-level agreements (SLAs); information lifecycle management; configuration and change management databases and ITIL processes; design optimization to meet application requirements; the role of the human factor in service engagements; service delivery models; and several case studies (Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Facebook).

This course is targeted for graduate students and advanced undergraduates and requires the undertaking of a research project. The topics of the research projects will be chosen with the help and guidance of the course staff. Other requirements include review and presentation of two research papers.

Coursework

Reading and discussing classic and current papers
Review and presentation of two research papers
A research project of your choice

Prerequisites

Introductory operating systems, database, and service systems courses such as HY-345, HY-360, and (optionally) HY-452

Grading

The final grade depends on class participation, presentation of two research papers, and a research project.

Readings

There are a number of paper readings that are available online. You are expected to read the papers before the beginning of each class.

There is no required textbook for this class. The following textbooks, however, are recommended readings:

M. van Steen and A. S. Tanenbaum: Distributed Systems, 4th ed. (2025)
Alonso, Casati, Kuno, Machiraju: Web Services: Concepts, Architectures, and Applications, Springer Verlag.

Syllabus

Date	Notes	Readings
Thu 24/9	Course overview	Lecture notes
Fri 25/9	No class due to all-day CSD event	-
Thu 1/10	Coordination services 1	Lecture notes, Lamport: Paxos made simple
Fri 2/10	Coordination services 2	-
Thu 8/10	Coordination services 3	Lecture notes, Hunt: ZooKeeper: Wait-free coordination for Internet-scale systems
Fri 9/10	No class today	-
Thu 15/10	Scalable load balancing	Lecture slides, Eisenbud: Maglev: A Fast and Reliable Software Network Load Balancer
Fri 16/10	Serving the social graph 1	Lecture slides, Bronson: Facebook's distributed data store for the social graph
Thu 22/10	Serving the social graph 2	Lecture slides
Fri 23/10	Microservices platforms	Lecture slides, Kakivaya: Service Fabric: a distributed platform for building microservices in the cloud
Thu 29/10	Presentations I	1415, 1453, 1478
Fri 30/10	Presentations I	1482, 1490, 1491, 1492
Thu 5/11	Tutorial on the use of AWS Academy	-
Fri 6/11	Presentations I	1495, 1497, 1505, 1511
Thu 12/11	Presentations I	1514, 1524, 1527, 1529
Fri 13/11	Presentations I	1530, 1540, 1545, 5443
Thu 19/11	Presentations I	5420, 5178, 5309, 1476
Fri 20/11	Presentations I, Project proposals due	1539, 1541, 1488, 1499
Thu 26/11	Presentations I	1520, 1521, 1469, 5309
Fri 27/11	Presentations II	1415, 1453, 1478
Thu 3/12	Presentations II	1490, 1491, 1492, 1495
Fri 4/12	Presentations II	1497, 1505, 1511, 1514
Thu 10/12	Presentations II	1524, 1527, 1529, 1530
Fri 11/12	Presentations II	1540, 1545, 5443, 5420, 1482
Thu 17/12	Presentations II	5178, 1476, 1539, 1469
Fri 18/12	Presentations II	1541, 1488, 1499, 1520, 1521

Projects HOWTO

Please note the following project guidelines:

Discuss project ideas with course staff
Prepare a short description (text or pdf) of your goals and deliverables by 20/11
In preparing your abstract, describe
- What you are trying to achieve
- Your plan to do so and expected deliverables (type of deployments in AWS Academy, evaluation, analysis, etc.)
Project reports (in the ACM paper formatting template) are due 31/1
Prepare a "rapid fire" (10min, up to 6 slides) presentation of your results; you will need to submit a video recording of it along with your report
You may use this presentation template.

Other Resources

Interesting readings
- Ken Birman's Like it or Not, Web Services are Distributed Objects!
- John Ousterhout's Always measure one level deeper
- Marvin Theimer's (Amazon) keynote speech at LADIS'09
- Jim Gray discusses lessons learned from the Amazon technology platform with Werner Vogels
- Jeff Dean's (Google) keynote speech at LADIS'09
- Kirk McKusick discusses the Google File System origins and evolution with Sean Quinlan (Google).
- A conversation with Werner Vogels on designing for evolution at scale
- ACM Queue magazine articles on Web services and Virtualization.
- ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award papers
Open-source scalable infrastructure
- Hadoop, Zookeeper, Cassandra, Chord
Links
- LADIS workshops
- HY-559 fall 2025-26
- HY-559 fall 2024-25
- HY-559 fall 2023-24
- HY-559 fall 2022-23
- HY-559 fall 2021-22
- HY-559 fall 2020-21
- HY-559 fall 2019-20