I think this years exam was a bit harder than before. 2 different professors. 4 hours per week for lectures, a lot of content. But it is doable. I don't think the content is hard, just a lot. You usually read papers from Google, Amazon etc ... so it is perhaps specific to only a few companies who really scale this big. However many other interesting things as well, like DNA storage, cold storage etc ... I liked this course.

The module was not particularly engaging content-wise. The lectures can feel monotonous at times. While the slides are somewhat lengthy, they are not very useful on their own, as they contain limited explanatory material. Overall, I think the module is straightforward, with both the courseworks and final exam being direct. Both courseworks were less challenging than those of other modules.

A weird module, it felt like you had to study everything by yourself and do your own research into the actual topics as the slides were quite useless. However, the topics were pretty good and in combination with the research papers you could learn a bunch of useful information on distributed large scale systems.

Very easy courseworks. Teaching is very hit or miss. Felt effectively like an advanced/modernised databases module. You study various research papers which are interesting but you go through like 5 or 6 of them in the module but end up only being examined on 1 which can be rough if you simply focused on that one less personally.

This module had probably the most interesting content out of all my modules: Storing data in DNA, Google’s and Amazon’s commercial distributed systems, load balancing, storage, caching, etc. We even had a guest lecture from Google Search creators. The module is taught in two separate halves, one focusing on papers and real case studies and another on storage technology mostly and traditional lecture style teaching. These parts were fairly disconnected and sometimes repeated each other (were taught concurrently). Additionally, the second half (traditional lectures) was super disorganised and poorly taught. The teaching style was boring and the prof. often sent his postdocs to teach. The other half was great though. Courseworks were super easy (1 A4 worksheet each) and the exam was pretty easy too.