Give yourself plenty of time to complete the assignments, but if you are good at following instructions and utilizing external resources to research topics, it's an easy A.

Submitted Tue Jun 20 2023

Overall great class. Gives you exposure to APIs, GCP and writing tests in Postman. Definitely was more time-consuming than I thought it would be for an elective. You are given skeleton code and will be reusing your previous code for assignments so I never got "stuck" but it was tedious at times to meet all the requirements. As others have mentioned, the assignments are building blocks for the final project. The quarter I took it, we had 8 assignments that were 10 pts each (drop the lowest score) and then the final project was worth 90 pts.

Submitted Mon Jun 05 2023

This is an interesting class. The first thing to know is 85% of the class is backend web development for apis. Yes you do learn some things about using and interacting with a cloud service, a few small front end development points and a very quick intro to containerization. But the meat of the class is spinning up GCloud apps and programming routes and handlers. Save your project code from week to week and make it modular for reuse. There is a lot of tedious work to be done, because in addition to coding and creating a lot of tests in Postman, you also have to write lengthy documentation for what you make. It isn't the hardest programming, but there is a lot of tedious stuff to do. Go to office hours early and often as a lot of the class is more of a teach yourself unless you ask approach. Its weird that the class is taught using GCloud as AWS and Azure are much more sought after industry standards, but whatever I guess some skills can translate over. Basically though whatever service you work with you have to dig through documentation a lot to figure it out. The final project took hours and hours and days and days for me, partly because I was confused by the instructions several times and had to meet with teachers three times to get it clear in my head. I wrote like 1700 lines of code for it (some copying going on too) hopefully you will not have such a nightmare like I did. Anyway all things considered, its a modern and interesting topic, and better than the other two electives I took at OSU (why is intro to networking required for this? It has almost nothing to do with it.)

Submitted Sun Dec 11 2022

Excellent class! You will get a lot of hands on exposure to APIs and OAuth 2.0

Submitted Tue Dec 06 2022

Make reusable functions for your boats and loads. You'll be making variants of the same project all quarter.

Submitted Mon Dec 05 2022

You can frequently copy your work from the previous week and build on it for the current week's assignment. I would do this whenever you can since it allows you to focus on the new concepts instead of having to constantly rebuild things from scratch that you had already done in previous weeks.

Submitted Mon Dec 05 2022

This was a pretty good class overall. I found the material was pretty light and the assignments were quick to implement. All of the assignments more or less build up off of one another, so writing your code with maintainability/extendability in mind will save you time down the road. The class revolves around assignments and they make up 90% of your grade.

Submitted Sun Nov 27 2022

Start the project early. Watch all the videos provided on Canvas and carefully read the instructions on the Google Cloud website and Postman website. Then all you need is some time to do the coding and tests.

Submitted Fri Jun 24 2022

From a conceptual and technical standpoint, this class is not too difficult. While completing assignments, around 50% of your time will be spent creating/editing documentation which can seem extremely tedious at times. This course is definitely one of the more useful electives offered in this program. Companies continue to shift towards relying 3rd party cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, FaaS) for implementing and maintaining their back end, and most of the big tech companies now offer their own suites of cloud services (Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, etc). So it should go without saying that this is a very useful skillset to have. In the course, you will mainly working with the Google Cloud Platform. You will develop various APIs and deploy them to GCP, setup your own virtual machine via Google Compute Engine, store and retrieve data on Google Datastore. You will, also, gain some exposure to using Docker, and performing user authentication and authorization via Auth0 and Google OAuth 2.0.

Submitted Tue Jun 14 2022

This is a good class. Cloud technology is important today and very relevant. This class is dipping your toe in that water. The gist (no pun intended) of it is that you spend the term writing and using APIs. The class is reliant on Google Cloud, so you will be rapidly familiarized with Google Compute Engine, Google App Engine, Google Datastore, etc. (...it helps if you have an elementary understanding of their cloud services layout, how to navigate, but not required). All projects can be written in JavaScript (Node.js) or Python (Flask), others are authorized, but you must get instructor permission first. I took the Node path because the whole program deeply leans on Python, and my JS was getting rusty. Projects are all very doable, requirements are mostly clear, though there were a few issues where the requirements would seemingly defy a relevant RFC, like stipulating a Content-Type header had to be set to indicate what MIME type the client was requesting (hint: should be the Accept header, this was fixed). Largely, content is text only, with some video, I didn't really use or review any of it. I heard mixed feelings from classmates that did use it. Flask seems like an afterthought. The real time-sink in this class comes from writing API documentation, and my God, is there a ton. My final project was 66 pages long, not including code, tests, and double-checking everything. The smallest one was 31 pages long. Now a lot of it is repetitive copy and paste, just filling in the boxes of the template they give you. But its still tedious, demanding and looooong. It's not hard, its just a lot. There were 2 exams (basically 10 question quizzes) that felt like more of an afterthought, unproctored. TL;DR = Overall, good class though, I would recommend it, just get your typing fingers ready. Be skilled in either JavaScript or Python. If your fundamentals are weak, you will struggle, but probably get by.

Submitted Thu Jun 03 2021