Serverless Distributed Architecture by Incremental Examples

Cloud computing has the potential to be a great equalizer, providing powerful and sophisticated computing tools to anyone with an internet connection and even a minimal budget. In fact, educational institutions can often get cloud grants providing access at no cost. Although any traditional computing paradigm can be implemented with cloud computing, there are now new and potentially more useful options available. This workshop is a hands-on exploration of several of those new paradigms in a single gamifiable system. Participants will explore cloud computing through a game-playing case study. Concepts covered include serverless computing, distributed systems, event-driven software, message passing, asynchronous communication, and non-relational databases. Each new idea will be used to advance the example system a step at a time. The workshop will emphasize ways to incorporate the case study in class and possibilities for extending it. All code for the system is available on GitHub for participants to work with to implement their own games or extend the concepts in other ways, such as a programming assignment submission and scoring system.