All assignments should be completed individually. You can use Piazza to consult your peers for assistance with technical issues. Clarifications to assignments will be posted on Piazza and noted at the bottom of assignment pages.

Assignment 1 (No Due Date)
This assignment will verify you can access Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure and introduce you to their management interfaces. You will provision the smallest VM in both providers, perform some basic connectivity tests, and verify the charges incurred.

Assignment 2 (Due Monday, September 24 at 11:59pm)
Grading Rubric
This assignment will introduce you to the services offered by major Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers and allow you to gain experience using these services. You will provision compute, storage, and networking resources in Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure and evaluate the performance of a subset of these services. You will produce a short report detailing your experimental methodology, performance observations, and takeaways.

Assignment 3 (Due Thursday, October 11 at 11:59pm)
Grading Rubric
This assignment will increase your understanding of data analytics frameworks and the factors influencing their performance. You will create a small MapReduce-style deployment using Hadoop in Amazon EC2 and analyze its performance under different operating scenarios. You will produce a short report detailing your performance observations and takeaways.

Assignment 4 (Due Thursday, November 1 at 11:59pm)
Grading Commands
This assignment will introduce you to important software defined networking (SDN) concepts and practices through the development of your own controller application. You will use Mininet to emulate a small data center network consisting of OpenFlow switches and end-hosts. You will write an SDN application that routes end-host traffic along the shortest path through the data center by installing the appropriate forwarding rules in the emulated OpenFlow switches.