Services Engineering Laboratory

Recommended Prerequisites

Base knowledge of Information Systems, Distributed Systems, and Databases.

Teaching Methods

Theoretical-practical classes: Detailed description of concepts, principles, methodologies and best practices used to engineer services in organizations. Presentation and discussion of case studies to illustrate the practical importance of methodologies. Lectures with invited experts.

Practical lab classes: Resolution of practical exercises and development end-to-end project that require the combination and association of concepts presented in theoretical classes. Fostering of critical thinking in the presence of more intricate problems. Project to create a digital service.

Learning Outcomes

The expansion of the service sector demands the use of scientific and systematic methods to create and manage them. Service engineering takes an important step to clarify the definition, design, modeling, execution, and analysis of services, thus exposing students to the entire process from conception to proof of concept development. The course presents methodologies, methods, techniques, tools, and technologies, illustrating their use in real or realistic cases. It provides a comprehensive reference suitable for students who aspire to learn about or to create a deeper scientific foundation for service design and engineering, service experience, and service management and innovation. During the course, students should acquire competencies on the design and implementation of services, namely online services or with a strong digital component.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

Part I - Service Design
- The service concept, relevance of services, considerations about service design
- Designing services: exploration
- Designing services: creation, reflection, implementation
- Open Service Innovation

Part II - Service Development
- Cloud computing.
- RESTFul services, OpenAPI/Swagger and GraphQL
- Introduction to front-end development
- Security in front-end development
- Data storage on the cloud
- CAP and PACELC theorems
- Serverless computing and Amazon AWS workflow services
- Amazon AWS Services: Simple Queue Service, Simple Notification Service, Simple Email Service, CloudFormation, CloudWatch, Identity and Access Management
- Cloud Architectures. Reliability, Availability, Scalability & Elasticity
- Load Balancing
- Containerization
- Machine Learning Services on the Cloud

Head Lecturer(s)

Jacinto Paulo Simões Estima

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Exam: 40.0%
Project: 60.0%

Bibliography

Stickdorn and Schneider (2021). This is Service Design Thinking. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers. ISBN: 978-90-6369-279-7

Downe (2022). Good Services: How to design services that work. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers. ISBN: 978-90-6369-543-9

Chandra Kopparapu (2002). Load Balancing Servers, Firewalls, and Caches. ISBN: 978-0-471-41550-3

James Cowling (2016). Inside the Magic Pocket. https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/inside-the-magic-pocket

Giuseppe DeCandia, Deniz Hastorun, Madan Jampani, Gunavardhan Kakulapati, Avinash Lakshman, Alex Pilchin, Swaminathan Sivasubramanian, Peter Vosshall, and Werner Vogels. 2007. Dynamo: amazon's highly available key-value store. SIGOPS Oper. Syst.
Rev. 41, 6 (December 2007), 205–220. https://doi.org/10.1145/1323293.1294281

Daniel Abadi. DBMS Musings (online blog). https://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/

Amazon Web Services, Inc. and/or its affiliates (2024). AWS Step Functions - Developer guide.