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Back to Cloud Computing Applications, Part 2: Big Data and Applications in the Cloud

Learner Reviews & Feedback for Cloud Computing Applications, Part 2: Big Data and Applications in the Cloud by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

4.3
stars
326 ratings

About the Course

Welcome to the Cloud Computing Applications course, the second part of a two-course series designed to give you a comprehensive view on the world of Cloud Computing and Big Data! In this second course we continue Cloud Computing Applications by exploring how the Cloud opens up data analytics of huge volumes of data that are static or streamed at high velocity and represent an enormous variety of information. Cloud applications and data analytics represent a disruptive change in the ways that society is informed by, and uses information. We start the first week by introducing some major systems for data analysis including Spark and the major frameworks and distributions of analytics applications including Hortonworks, Cloudera, and MapR. By the middle of week one we introduce the HDFS distributed and robust file system that is used in many applications like Hadoop and finish week one by exploring the powerful MapReduce programming model and how distributed operating systems like YARN and Mesos support a flexible and scalable environment for Big Data analytics. In week two, our course introduces large scale data storage and the difficulties and problems of consensus in enormous stores that use quantities of processors, memories and disks. We discuss eventual consistency, ACID, and BASE and the consensus algorithms used in data centers including Paxos and Zookeeper. Our course presents Distributed Key-Value Stores and in memory databases like Redis used in data centers for performance. Next we present NOSQL Databases. We visit HBase, the scalable, low latency database that supports database operations in applications that use Hadoop. Then again we show how Spark SQL can program SQL queries on huge data. We finish up week two with a presentation on Distributed Publish/Subscribe systems using Kafka, a distributed log messaging system that is finding wide use in connecting Big Data and streaming applications together to form complex systems. Week three moves to fast data real-time streaming and introduces Storm technology that is used widely in industries such as Yahoo. We continue with Spark Streaming, Lambda and Kappa architectures, and a presentation of the Streaming Ecosystem. Week four focuses on Graph Processing, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning. We introduce the ideas of graph processing and present Pregel, Giraph, and Spark GraphX. Then we move to machine learning with examples from Mahout and Spark. Kmeans, Naive Bayes, and fpm are given as examples. Spark ML and Mllib continue the theme of programmability and application construction. The last topic we cover in week four introduces Deep Learning technologies including Theano, Tensor Flow, CNTK, MXnet, and Caffe on Spark....

Top reviews

UN

Apr 9, 2018

My understanding of Big Data technologies was really enhanced by this course. I have decided to pursue more of these underlying technologies after this course. Good job

JA

Sep 29, 2019

Very Useful Course. Course material is massive and well prepared for the modern industry demands.

Filter by:

26 - 50 of 51 Reviews for Cloud Computing Applications, Part 2: Big Data and Applications in the Cloud

By Jose L P A

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Jun 11, 2020

Good structure, well explained but some of the examples presented are starting to be outdated. Solid theoretical presentation.

By Vinh T

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Dec 4, 2016

good practical materials which help to better understand the theories from previous courses

By Daren T

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Oct 11, 2016

The course could use a programming assignment to go along with the lectures.

By Vara V

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May 21, 2020

I love this course. Open lots of perspectives in cloud applications.

By Ganesh S

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May 22, 2020

Good learning about big data and real life scenarios esp. Yahoo.

By Cong W

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Apr 15, 2017

good course. I hope it can contain more contents.

By Tony W

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Mar 7, 2020

needs to be updated

By Arsene R

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Jan 30, 2021

Awesome

By Austin Z

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Apr 26, 2019

Much better than Part 1. This course mostly shows the applications of the topics covered in the Cloud Computing Concepts course using the popular tools from when this course was recorded. There is a decent amount of redundant material from course overlap and this course could be made more concise, but there is still a decent amount of new material. You can probably pass most of the quizzes from knowledge gained in the other course though.

By Miklós A R

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Jul 16, 2017

The content is very good, the course gives a wide overview on the topics. On the other hand for me it was a bit slow and found many repetitions in the course videos, the exams could have been harder and could have helped to deepen understanding a bit more. I was lacking the programming assignments, as well.

By Nishant S

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Aug 9, 2017

The course was focused too much on theory. It didn't have any programming assignments, which made the course less interesting.

By Ricardo O P d T

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Apr 16, 2018

The course is good, gives you an overview of many important technologies, although the last module is too superficial.

By Michael M

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Jun 19, 2018

There are very small quizzes in this course. First two parts were much more better and more interesting

By Alex T

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Jan 22, 2017

Not enough depth. Put another way not a CS course.

By Aditya K

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Sep 5, 2018

Again, too much theory. More exercises needed.

By Ruowang Z

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Feb 28, 2020

a bit easy

By Manasvi N

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May 2, 2019

-

By Oleg

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Sep 28, 2019

It looks like the course was influenced by reviews from 'Cloud Computing Concepts, Part 1' course that contained complaints about the programming assignment, fast pace of the course and complex quizes. (I don't share these complaints, for me that course was incredible)

This course gives a too high-level overview of the topics presented. Also, like in the previous part of the course, Mr. Campbell's lectures are too long, boring and hard to understand. This is disappointing since the topics in his lectures are really imporant. The quizes are too easy, no programming assigment, there's just no chance to check if you understood the material deep enough.

Spark, CAP theorem, Storm and a lot of other stuff is covered by Cloud Computing Concepts in a more informative and compact way.

Almost no imformation about the TensorFlow. It deserves at least a lessson devoted to it.

By Jörg S

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Mar 15, 2017

Quizzes are trivial. Makes the certification worthless.

Prof. Campbell is not a good lecturer.

The topics are treated mostly superficially, then suddenly go into too much detail sometimes (how to use IntelliJ IDEA, machine learning).

Subtitles are very buggy.

I enjoyed Mr. Farivar's talks much more, it seems like he knows what he is talking about and his presentations are well structured.

By Julien L

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Apr 9, 2020

As for part1, I find the course is not well prepared and does not go deep into the topics. Overall disappointed. Cloud computing concepts courses are of much higher quality.

By Gil S

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Jun 21, 2017

course content is good, but the lectures are monotonous and put you to sleep.

By valle

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Nov 18, 2021

SLow videos for just the overview of concepts

By Weidong X

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Oct 6, 2019

I learned a little about a lot of things.

By Sushil S

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Dec 27, 2019

This was an exasperating course - it is at times incoherent, at times just plain reading out of a teleprompter, and at times referring to assignments or slides which do not exist.

The quizzes can be safely tackled by going through 5% of the coursework and that is being generous. A deficit that a programming section could easily overcome.

I do feel bad for the instructors, i am sure it is not what they had in mind when they set out to design the course. Unfortunately it is hardly what one expects from a course part of a paid specialisation.

By David M

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Dec 2, 2021

I've never had an instructor that was so clearly phoning it in. What's more, lots of the information presented about how the Cloud works is factually inaccurate, and no one has bothered to correct it. I strongly suggest that working professionals with even a basic level of experience with the Cloud (read: clearly more than the instructor) simply save themselves the aggravation.