Development and Operation of Distributed Applications

The world of Software Engineering has been revolutionized in the last decade. Instead of releasing software updates yearly, companies can now release multiple times per week, sometimes even per day, to their customers. This allows quick reactions to market demands, software failures, and it is crucial for increasing the business value of software. These improvements come largely from new DevOps practices and from advances in release engineering. In this course, we will explore the underlying key techniques and technologies that build the foundation for the modern development and operation of distributed applications. 

The main target audience of this course are software engineers who want to learn how to systematically release reusable software and make their applications scalable in an orchestrated environment. Together, we will build a release pipeline for a small toy project and go on a journey that starts at continuous integration and then moves on to continuous delivery, continuous deployment, and continuous experimentation. We will discuss the theory and the current research on various related subjects like containerization, testing, or monitoring and will put the learned theory into practice. 

Important: Make sure to register for a group in Brightspace AT THE LATEST during the first lecture. 

Important: The course will introduce several state-of-the-art tools. While in theory all major operating systems should be supported, experience has shown that Windows users will face challenges. To reduce the friction points, we strongly recommend affected students to either dual-boot a Linux system or to boot a Linux live system via USB.