A pedagogy to support modern concepts in distributed systems courses

Recently, there have been many advances in technology and infrastructure to meet the changing needs of the application domains. These changes have resulted in the development and adoption of a rich set of novel concepts in distributed systems. For example, lookup, discovery, custom event and event handling, runtime reflection, callback and service leasing are just a few of these new ideas. Traditional approaches to teaching Distributed Systems courses do not cover these newer concepts for reasons ranging from lack of support from the existing framework to the fear sacrificing coverage of some fundamental concepts. Moreover, many of the textbooks used do not cover these concepts. In this paper, we present a pedagogy that seamlessly integrates the modern concepts to the existing conventional methods for teaching distributed systems. We propose a set of laboratory experiments that will not only illustrate how to integrate the newer concepts into existing framework but will also provide the students with hands-on experience in the application of these concepts. The design and description of three laboratory projects that cover newer topics in Distributed Systems, namely, (i) location-independence, (ii) active discovery and (iii) interoperability and persistence are shown. These projects will serve as models for development of similar projects illustrating other concepts of interest. A major contribution of this paper will be the pedagogy that will build bridges between the rapidly advancing modern technologies and the traditionally rigid curricula.