New course "Design of high-loaded systems" in Technopolis

Technopolis is an educational project launched by Odnoklassniki (Mail.Ru) together with the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University of Peter the Great. Within the framework of the project, students of a polytechnic department study the design, development, implementation, and support of high-load Java applications. Project teachers are programmers, system administrators, data miners and other specialists from the Odnoklassniki team.

Philip Fedchin, head of Technopolis:

We started with an intensive Java course, where more than 100 people studied. Of these, more than 20 were among the 45 students enrolled last September for the two-year program: this was our first set. 23 people successfully overcame the first year of classes and continue their studies, and several of our children are already on probation at Odnoklassniki. Technopolis is an important experience for students.
We feel a high interest and support from the management and teachers of the polytechnic: students from different institutes come to us, and from this year we also begin cooperation with the university technopark (not to be confused with the Technopark of Bauman Moscow State Technical University). As in other educational projects of Mail.Ru, the Technopolis program ends with the development of graduation projects, and here we have a common interest with our colleagues. I hope after the public defense the most successful student projects will be supported in one form or another.

New Deal

This semester of Technopolis students will have four new subjects. Among them - the course "Designing high-loaded applications." It is designed for three months and includes the following sections:

• Scalability and resiliency.
• System operation.
• Network. HTTP (S), TLS and Web.
• Balancing and routing.
• Processors and memory. Permanent storage.
• OS, JVM, profiling and debugging tools.
• Monitoring
• Clouds
• Examples of systems.

The practical part of the course involves the creation of a fully-fledged distributed and fault-tolerant key-value storage. To learn more about the program please follow the link .

Current experience

Odnoklassniki is one of the most heavily loaded services in the world. By traffic, he is in the top 25 (in the top 5 among social networks). The best experts of the project are ready to teach in Technopolis and share combat experience with future specialists. A new course teacher, Odnoklassniki’s leading developer, Vadim Tsesko, explains what students will learn from a new subject and why high-load systems are not just design and coding.

We will not duplicate the main university course, but concentrate on the things that are really important in practice. Particular attention will be paid to issues of operation. Creating high-load applications is a set of aspects that accompany the system throughout the entire life cycle: from launching and reaching the peak of popularity to recycling the system.
In the first lectures, let's talk about scalability, high availability and fault tolerance. Then take a closer look at the technology stack. Special attention will be paid to networks and load balancing. Let's walk through the hierarchy of memory, consider modern processors, learn how the JVM works. With the help of certain tools we will learn how to diagnose problems, as well as find and eliminate bottlenecks. We will devote a separate lecture to system monitoring, data logging and auditing.

Why is it important for students?

As part of the course, students will receive the necessary knowledge and skills that will enable them to join any modern development team and effectively do what they love - the development of high-load services on the JVM.

In addition, after the course, the children will form a coherent picture of modern technologies, approaches, roles and processes in the field of creating highly loaded systems, which will allow them to choose their areas of interest for further development.

Real tasks

According to the leading developer of Odnoklassniki, the author and teacher of the course Vadim Tsesko, at the end of the course, students will be able to solve the following real tasks:

• design of high-load systems for future growth;
• Efficient implementation and optimization of distributed high-load Java applications;
• operation of high-load services.

The course “Designing High-Load Systems” starts for students of the third semester of Technopolis on September 19th. Video recording of lectures will be available on the Tehnostrim channel for everyone. The course teachers are specialists from the Odnoklassniki team: Vadim Tsesko, Oleg Anastasyev, Alexey Gorbov, Andrey Domas, Andrey Pan'gin, Dmitry Samsonov, Alexander Khristoforov, Sergey Sharapov and Ilya Shchanikov.