CS 153:
INFRA @ SCALE

Stanford University | Jordan Hall 420-040

Wednesdays 12:30-2:20 PM | Jan 6 - Mar 14, 2025

How do you serve a billion users?

Course Materials And Updates:

Learn directly from the founders and engineers who've scaled and secured some of the world's largest computing systems, including guest lectures from Jensen Huang (NVIDIA), Matthew Prince (Cloudflare), Steve Huffman (Reddit), and Ben Mann (Cofounder, Anthropic), among others.

Course Instructors

Michael Abbott
General Motors, Apple, Twitter, Kleiner Perkins

Anjney Midha
a16z, Discord, Ubiquity6, Stanford

About

A deep dive into building, scaling and securing modern infrastructure. Learn how the world's most advanced engineering teams tackle the technical, operational, and human challenges behind computing systems serving billions of users.

Prerequisites: Required - CS110/CS111 (Systems), Recommended - CS155 (Security)

Enrollment is capped at room capacity (283), so enroll early.

Course Materials

Course Discord: Join Here - This is the main platform where all future course materials will be posted.

Week 1

Lectures 1 and 2 (PDF)

Links & Reading

Schedule

Duration: Jan 6 - Mar 14, 2025
Time: Wednesdays 12:30-2:20 PM
Location: Jordan Hall 420-040

For security reasons, speakers will only be revealed at the start of each lecture, making every week a surprise appearance.

Guest Speakers

Jensen Huang, CEO, NVIDIA
Matthew Prince, CEO, Cloudflare
Steve Huffman, CEO, Reddit
Raghu Raghuram, Ex-CEO, VMWare
Shyam Sankar, CTO, Palantir
Ben Mann, Cofounder, Anthropic
Clem Delangue, CEO, HuggingFace
Guillermo Rauch, CEO, Vercel
Guillaume Lample, Cofounder, Mistral AI
Robin Rombach, CEO, Black Forest Labs
Todd McKinnon, CEO, Okta
Sualeh Asif, CTO, Cursor AI
Joe Sullivan, Former CISO, Uber
Julie Cordua, CEO, Thorn
Igor Tsyganskiy, CISO, Microsoft
Bob Lord, Former CISO, CISA
HE Abdullah Alswaha, MCIT, KSA
Paul Vixie, Deputy CISO, AWS

Grading

Formula: 65% Attendance + 35% Final Project + Weekly Extra Credit

Final Project: Build and deploy an AI agent from scratch. Starter code and API credits provided. Top 5 projects will pitch to industry leaders.

Attendance Policy: One free absence permitted; additional absences need approval.

Upcoming Links

Course Staff

Course Assistant: Anthony David Mensah (admensah@stanford.edu)

CS 153:INFRA @ SCALE