This is one of the best courses to take at UCLA if you're interested in learning how real systems deployed in large companies work at scale. You learn quite a few concepts that have real-world applications, and might even give you a step up in cracking systems design interviews at tech companies.

Prof Netravali is extremely patient and has a knack for explaining hard concepts in an approachable manner. The assignments need to be taken seriously, and starting to work on them at the last minute is a bad idea. However, listening to the lectures is sufficient to get through the myriad challenges (there are quite a few) you'll encounter when solving the assignments.

Overall, this was a really fun course, and I would recommend this to anyone who wishes to learn valuable knowledge that'll stay with you for a long time.

He is very easy-going and very approachable, he is a really good communicator, he was very generous with our exam grades, and he gave us the majority test cases so we can be sure that we are doing the project correctly.

No it's not a free A.

In fact, it's not really GitHub-able.

I went through the class without cheating, together with my partner. Through discussing, learning and thinking as a pair. It's very reasonable.

We spent ungodly hours perfecting our projects, but we would have gotten an A with just 5 hours of work per week per person, if a simple A was our goal.

If you're not intelligent enough or a good fit academically for grad school, then maybe it's your fault. If you don't participate in class and ask questions and engage with the material, that's your fault. If maybe coding is just not your thing, that's your fault or the universe's fault. Maybe distributed systems is not a good fit with your brain wiring. Either way, don't blame the teacher for being fair and educative with his tests and assignments.

Ravi is one of the better teachers at UCLA. Yes, that's not saying a whole lot, but he's definitely at least good, if not great. Even compared to my mostly excellent highschool teachers.

I'm about to graduate. Distributed Systems has been my favorite class at UCLA.

The final project asks you to implement a fault-tolerant, highly available sharded key-value server in Golang. I felt an immense sense of accomplishment upon finishing it; I felt like I had really learned something valuable about the complexity of real-world systems and the tradeoffs made by distributed systems designers. Plus, I learned a new language.

The final project built off of an earlier one where you implement a fault-tolerant parliament of servers providing a distributed service on the Paxos protocol. This just added to the sense that the entire class has you work on and build up to the grand final project. I could see myself referring back to these projects (even the earlier ones) when I need a refresher on how these things work.

Being the first iteration of this class, I felt that it was reasonable that some of the slides did not present the material in the best way possible. There was at times some ambiguity with the concepts, and some of the examples could be better constructed. I believe that with some updates, Ravi's Distributed Systems class could be a solid mainstay in the UCLA CS curriculum.