Good Online Distributed Computing Course

Distributed computing is a field of computer science that deals with the distribution of tasks across multiple computers to achieve a common goal. With the increasing demand for efficient and scalable computing systems, there is a growing need for professionals who have expertise in distributed computing. Online courses are a popular platform for individuals looking to enhance their knowledge and skills in this field. In this article, we will explore some of the top online courses available for individuals seeking to expand their skill set in distributed computing.

Here’s a look at the Best Distributed Computing Courses and Certifications Online and what they have to offer for you!

Good Online Distributed Computing Course

1. Distributed Systems & Cloud Computing with Java by Michael Pogrebinsky | Java Expert & Software Architecture Specialist (Udemy) (Our Best Pick)

The course titled Distributed Systems & Cloud Computing with Java is taught by Michael Pogrebinsky, a Java Expert and Software Architecture Specialist. The course is designed to teach students the theory and practical skills necessary to build distributed Java applications at scale, parallel programming, distributed computing, and cloud software architecture. Students will learn to deploy groups of distributed Java applications on the cloud, build highly scalable and fault-tolerant distributed systems, and scale distributed databases to store petabytes of data. The course covers modern technologies like Apache Kafka, Apache Zookeeper, MongoDB, HAProxy, Google Cloud Platform, JSON, Java HTTP Server and Client, Protocol Buffers, and many others.The course is suitable for those who want to build software that reaches millions of users and impact people’s lives. Students will learn to handle massive amounts of internet traffic and transactions, securely store billions of photos, videos, and other data, and provide impeccable user experience and high performance 24/7 all around the globe. The course is designed to help students apply best practices for building and architecting real-life distributed systems, scale their distributed system to handle billions of transactions per day, deploy their distributed application on the cloud, and choose the right technologies for their use case and software architecture.The course requires basic knowledge of Java, and knowing the fundamentals of multithreading and concurrency may help but is not required. The skills learned in this course will help students in their career both while interviewing and working on real projects. All the technologies covered in the course are free and open-source. The lectures on the cloud don’t require students to pay for anything. If students want to follow along, all cloud vendors provide free-tier accounts to play around with and practice for free. Students can develop and run a distributed system on their computer without the need to buy any additional hardware, and most distributed computing development is done on a single computer before it goes to QA and production.

2. Akka Essentials with Scala | Rock the JVM by Daniel Ciocîrlan (Udemy)

The Akka Essentials with Scala course offered by Rock the JVM aims to teach the Akka actor model using Scala, with a focus on writing parallel, concurrent, and fault-tolerant systems. The course is designed for Scala programmers looking to design complex and scalable concurrent applications, and those who want to enhance their marketable skills. The course promises to deconstruct all concepts into critical pieces, select the most important ideas, and sequence them in a way that makes sense throughout the learning process. The course also offers a new mental model around parallel applications and helps in developing a significantly more marketable resume.

The course is not for beginners in Scala or those who have never worked with threads. To benefit from the course, students must have experience with functional programming at the level of the Rock the JVM Scala beginners course, and a solid understanding of general programming fundamentals. The lectures cover both theory and practice, with code examples, real-life code demos, assignments, resources, exercises, and solutions. The course aims to guide the students, but not tell them what to do, and allows freedom to experiment and improve upon their code.

The course consists of six sections, starting with a welcome section, followed by the Scala and Parallel Programming Recap, Akka Actors, Testing Akka Actors, Fault Tolerance, Akka Infrastructure, and Akka Patterns. Students are expected to write over 2000 lines of Akka code themselves, with guidance, and become a rockstar. The end result would be a fun and enjoyable learning experience, leading to more marketable skills, a new mental model, and thousands of lines of Akka code.

3. Jaeger – Distributed Tracing for Cloud Native Applications by MUTHUKUMAR Subramanian (Udemy)

The Jaeger – Distributed Tracing for Cloud Native Applications course covers the monitoring and troubleshooting of complex distributed transactions and context propagation, with an emphasis on performance and latency optimization. It focuses on solving major operation problems of distributed applications in networking and observability. Learners will acquire skills in distributed transaction monitoring, root cause analysis, service dependency analysis, and distributed context propagation.

The course covers various components in Jaeger, including the Jaeger UI, collector, query, agent, Jaeger-ingester, and in-memory storage. Participants will learn how to deploy and use an all-in-one open telemetry application for learning purposes, using Jaeger configuration along with OpenTelemetry configuration. The course also covers Jager API and its architecture, sampling and its importance, and different terminologies like span, trace, components, Jager client libraries, agent, collector, query, and ingester.

In addition, the course covers performance tuning and troubleshooting, and monitoring Jaeger and its different components. The course content is divided into sections such as Introduction, Architecture and Installation, Play with Sample App Hot ROD, Tracker Instrumentation, Jaeger in Spring Boot, Tracing using Kubernetes and Istio, Kubernetes REVISION, Resources.

Overall, the course provides a comprehensive overview of Jaeger and its numerous components, offering learners practical skills and knowledge necessary for monitoring and troubleshooting distributed applications.

4. C# Remoting : Build Client / Server Database Applications by Husam Nujaim (Udemy)

The C# Remoting course is designed to teach students how to build client/server database applications. The course instructors are Husam Nujaim. The short description of the course is focused on building client applications that use objects on remote computers, such as using the database of the server remotely.

The course will cover .NET remoting, which enables client applications to use objects in other processes on the same computer or any other computer available on its network. Students will learn how to establish a connection between the server database and the client application.

Moreover, the course will cover creating SQL Server database, tables, and stored procedures. The students will also learn how to divide their application into layers to write elegant and easy-to-develop codes. Additionally, they will learn how to create a class library and import it to any application.

Throughout the course, students will make a complete client/server database application. The course is divided into seven sections: Introduction, SQL Server Database, Windows Form Application and APIs, Class Library, Client Application, Server Application, and Bonus Section.

5. Distributed Tasks Demystified with Celery, SQS & Python by Timothy Mugayi (Udemy)

This course, titled Distributed Tasks Demystified with Celery, SQS & Python, is led by instructor Timothy Mugayi. The course covers fundamental concepts of Distributed Programming in the context of python & Django, with a focus on building applications that increase throughput and reduce latency. The course begins with an exploration of asynchronous parallel tasks using python-celery, a distributed task queue framework, and then delves into using AWS SQS for scaling parallel tasks in the cloud. Upon completion, learners will have a strong foundation for building scalable Python solutions for any project.

This course is designed for both beginners and industry professionals who want to learn how to build applications that can process long-running jobs or tasks in a non-blocking way. Examples of such tasks include sending mass email, running high computational functions, and building chatting applications. The course provides learners with the necessary tools to scale their applications and enhances their skills in distributed programming.

The course includes projects that can be implemented in real-world projects with the focus of allowing applications to become distributed and have asynchronous components. Learners will have online access to the instructor and receive individualized answers to their questions posted on forums. Additionally, students will receive lifetime access to over 30 lectures and counting, including future series of lessons.

This course comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Students who are not satisfied in any way can receive a full refund, but may miss out on future existing lessons planned ahead and free source code for their own personal or business projects. The course content includes an introduction, getting started with multithreading in Python, core Celery distributed tasks, distributed tasks with AWS SQS, and two distributed project sections on email workers and data ingestor. Additionally, the course covers Python development tools.

6. Real World Vagrant For Distributed Computing by Toyin Akin (Udemy)

This course titled Real World Vagrant for Distributed Computing focuses on teaching individuals how to create a distributed environment to deploy technologies such as NoSQL, Big Data, DevOps and In Memory Database on. The course utilizes a combination of VirtualBox and Vagrant to transform desktop machines into virtual clusters. However, proper configuration is required to ensure optimal performance. The course teaches the same techniques used by enterprise developers and operators to simulate production environments.

Vagrant is an industry-standard technology that provides reproducible, configurable and portable work environments for individuals and teams. The course primarily uses VirtualBox to create virtual environments, but the same techniques can be used to provision virtual machines on other providers such as VMware and AWS.

The course is beneficial for developers as it helps isolate dependencies and configurations in a single environment, ensuring consistency and ease of use. It also allows for easy creation of development environments for other team members to prevent works on my machine bugs.

Operations engineers can benefit from the course by building disposable environments and workflows to test infrastructure management scripts. They can quickly test deployment scripts using VirtualBox, bringing sanity to their work lives.

Designers can use this course to install distributed software and focus on their design work. Once a developer configures Vagrant, designers do not need to worry about software installation and can start designing immediately.

The course is divided into the following sections: Introduction, Cluster Tools, Configure Virtual Machine – Part I and Part II, Multinode Cluster, and Distributed Software Deploy.

7. Introduction to Edge Computing by Saravanan (Saro) Velrajan (Udemy)

Introduction to Edge Computing is a course that aims to provide beginners with a quick understanding of the technology. The course covers various topics such as the evolution of the computing industry, cloud computing basics, and edge computing. It also provides information on different types of edge compute deployments, services, and educates students about vendor platforms, software services, standard bodies, and open source communities available for edge computing.

The course consists of seven sections which include Setting the Context, Evolution of Computing, Cloud Computing Basics, Edge Computing Overview, Edge Computing Deployment Locations, Edge Computing – Deployment Modes, and Edge Computing Marketplace. Each section provides in-depth information on the given topic to help students better understand the technology.

The first section, Setting the Context, aims to provide students with an introduction to edge computing and why it is important. The second section, Evolution of Computing, explains the evolution of computing over the years and how it has led to the emergence of edge computing. The third section, Cloud Computing Basics, provides students with an understanding of cloud computing and its relationship with edge computing.

The fourth section, Edge Computing Overview, is where students learn about the basics of edge computing, its architecture, and the various components that make up an edge computing system. The fifth section, Edge Computing Deployment Locations, provides information on different deployment locations of edge computing systems such as on-premises, cloud-based, and hybrid.

The sixth section, Edge Computing – Deployment Modes, covers different deployment modes of edge computing such as CDN Edge, IOT Edge, and Multi-access Edge (MEC). Lastly, the seventh section, Edge Computing Marketplace, educates students about the different vendor platforms, software services, standard bodies, and open source communities available for edge computing.

8. Building Modern Distributed Systems with Java by Lukasz Antoniak (Udemy)

The course titled Building Modern Distributed Systems with Java is aimed at teaching individuals how to design large-scale distributed systems using NoSQL databases, messaging queues, and cluster coordination. The course addresses the common challenges that arise while designing and implementing large-scale distributed systems and covers technologies, algorithms, and design patterns such as service registry and discovery, service mesh, Apache Cassandra, ETCD, Apache Kafka, idempotent service design, retry logic, sharding and consistent hashing, client-side load balancing, distributed tracing, canary deployment, sidecar pattern, and circuit breaker.

The course aims to teach the principles of various distributed systems design, including master-less vs. with leaders, poll-based vs. push-based, immediate vs. eventual consistency. After completing the course, learners will be able to learn new distributed database technology with ease, as they will have knowledge of the common re-used techniques and their pros and cons.

The course content is practical and includes lots of code examples and applied best practices. For instance, the course delves into the details of service registry and discovery, and learners will know how to implement their own framework on top of ETCD. Throughout the course, learners will build a distributed URL shorten service.

The course can also serve as a good recap for individuals preparing for systems design interview. The course content is divided into sections such as Concepts of Distributed Systems, Remote Procedure Call, Distributed Databases, Cluster Coordination, and Distributed Messaging Systems.

9. Edge Computing – A Complete Guide on Computing at the Edge by Wizdom Learning (Udemy)

The Edge Computing – A Complete Guide on Computing at the Edge course offered by Wizdom Learning aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of edge computing, a new way of processing and managing data from billions of devices worldwide. As the adoption of edge computing rapidly accelerates, it is making significant inroads into various industries, transforming daily lives and technology consumption. This course covers core fundamentals of edge computing, industry examples and its comparison with other methodologies such as cloud computing, and edge cloud and near/far edge components. It also explores key advantages, challenges, tenets of edge analytics, security and privacy, affiliated computing methodologies, systems and technology platforms available, architecture for edge computing, and use cases in various industries. The course content is curated by experts, making it the most comprehensive course on edge computing available.

10. Learn Edge Computing: Concepts explained from the Scratch by Rajeshwari Senthamil selvam, Kumar V (Udemy)

The Learn Edge Computing: Concepts explained from the Scratch course is designed for students who want to gain a comprehensive understanding of the Edge Computing concepts in a shorter span of time. The course is created by Rajeshwari Senthamil selvam and Kumar V and is suitable for beginners and experienced students alike. The lectures utilize animated presentations to help students quickly and easily understand complex concepts.

By investing in this course, learners will develop the following knowledge and skills:
1. Understanding of Edge Computing concepts from the ground up
2. Ability to identify use cases suitable for Edge Computing
3. Capability to adopt Edge Computing
4. Knowledge of technical terms related to Edge Computing
5. Monthly updates on Edge Computing

The course is structured into six sections:
1. Introduction to the course and Edge Computing
2. Understanding Edge Computing and its need
3. Edge Computing Architecture
4. Edge and Cloud Computing
5. Edge solutions in AWS & Azure
6. Edge Computing Use Cases in Health-Care and Defense

The content of the course includes an introduction to Edge Computing, an explanation of Edge Computing architecture, a comparison of Edge and Cloud Computing, an overview of Edge solutions in AWS & Azure, and a discussion of Edge Computing use cases in Health-Care and Defense.