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What’s updated in UIUC MCS-DS CS498 CCA in 2020 spring?
I’ve taken CS498 Cloud Computing Applications (CCA) in spring 2019 and team up with three other MCS-DS students for a team project.
CCA has been getting bad feedback and reputation from students since I joined this master’s degree program, while the other two, CS425 Distributed System and CS498 Cloud Networking, were recommended. (Although there were a few debates for the 2nd half of Cloud Networking)
In my opinion, CCA wasn’t that bad, especially for those four small coding assignments (MP, Machine Problem). Although some of the video and solutions covered “not-shiny-brand-new” cloud solutions, five MPs included essential functionalities in AWS, Hadoop, Hive, Apache Storm, and Apache Spark along with mllib. Also, depending on what students choose for their final, they could use other solutions like Docker, k8s, GCP, etc that’s covered in lectures.
A lot of complaining about the class came for the outdated video contents and one of the instructor’s long-lasting videos that makes students super distracted, even with 1.5x video speed, and not getting that much learning at the end. While I agree to 2nd point, it is arguable for the 1st claim as many students in MCS-DS are actively working on the industry, having a full-time job, and even someone like me is actually to use those solutions daily at work…
