Why not just take a few more specialized classes, such as distributed systems (and obviously a couple more)? What advantage would taking this class have over more traditional routes?
Mostly time saving. With Majd Sakr teaching this, I expect fair amount of distributed systems content in here.
Although if a student at CMU does have time, a better roadmap is to take the new parallel programming course, along with distributed systems class. I did this and it served me well.
I don't know for sure since I didn't design the course, but I imagine this goes more in depth than your normal undergraduate distributed systems course. At the very least, I don't remember having to read any papers in my courses except for Cryptography, and even then we didn't come close to 30 of them. It sounds like this would actually tell you more about how the services are implemented, as opposed to how you would go about using them?
Currently taking this course. I don't know if I am allowed to share material online. Although all of these papers are well known papers in Cloud Computing. You can search for them online for open/free access.
EDIT: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15719/readinglist.html
During my time at CMU, my favorite thing was that professors would occasionally teach passion courses. Although when these types of courses would pop up you'd have to take them then and there otherwise miss the opportunity all together. Scanning the course list you'd see many classes that sounded interesting but after a year or two would realize that many might never be taught during your time there.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 33.5 ms ] threadAlthough if a student at CMU does have time, a better roadmap is to take the new parallel programming course, along with distributed systems class. I did this and it served me well.
This would (at least to me) be the next best thing as a non-CMU student ;)