The goal of this course is to provide students with a background in modern, cloud-based applications and the myriad of trade-offs in architecting such applications. Scalability is of primary concern, and we'll study the architecture and construction of scalable Internet services, using well-known case studies including Twitter, Netflix, and Uber. Systems at these scales have many custom-built components, but also rely upon common, reusable building blocks. Students will apply lessons learned from case studies to evaluate / design software systems in the cloud capable of safely scaling to large numbers of users.