Exam 1 Review

Exam 1 will cover all material introduced so far in the class. This includes any readings or resources posted on the website (slides, notes, web links, code samples) as well as any topics we have covered in class.

The list of topics may include but is not limited to the following:

Overview

Why are distributed systems useful or necessary?
What are some of the challenges associated with building distributed systems?
Client/Server Architecture
Monolithic Architecture
Service Oriented Architecture
Web-based vs other systems

Networking

Layered model
HTTP
TCP functionality
TCP versus UDP
Socket programming - TCP and UDP
Reliable data transfer
Sliding window protocols
Go-Back-N Implementation

Software Development Review

Concurrency
Thread safety
wait and notify methods

System Implementation

Service discovery - general challenges and possible methods
ZooKeeper - what, why, how?
Data serialization - general challenges and possible methods
Protocol Buffers - what, why, how?

Web Services

Web service versus web site
RESTful model
API design

CAP Theorem

Consistency/Availability Tradeoff

Physical Time Synchronization

Cristian's algorithm
NTP