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Why not just take a few more specialized classes, such as distributed systems (and obviously a couple more)? What advantage would taking this class have over more traditional routes?

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Mostly time saving. With Majd Sakr teaching this, I expect fair amount of distributed systems content in here.

Although if a student at CMU does have time, a better roadmap is to take the new parallel programming course, along with distributed systems class. I did this and it served me well.

I don't know for sure since I didn't design the course, but I imagine this goes more in depth than your normal undergraduate distributed systems course. At the very least, I don't remember having to read any papers in my courses except for Cryptography, and even then we didn't come close to 30 of them. It sounds like this would actually tell you more about how the services are implemented, as opposed to how you would go about using them?

It actually does. The course is designed to get in details of challenges in cloud provisioning like designing Load Balancer.

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