Experiences Teaching Mapreduce In The Cloud

We describe our experiences teaching MapReduce in a large undergraduate lecture course using public cloud services. Using the cloud, every student could carry out scalability benchmarking assignments on realistic hardware, which would have been impossible otherwise. Over two semesters, over 500 students took our course. We believe this is the first large-scale demonstration that it is feasible to use pay-as-you-go billing in the Cloud for a large undergraduate course. Modest instructor effort was sufficient to prevent students from overspending. Average per-pupil expenses in the Cloud were under $45, less than half our available grant funding. Students were excited by the assignment: 90% said they thought it should be retained in future course offerings.