Overview

Teaching: 15 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• What are some ways cloud is used?

• What is gained by using cloud?

• What is lost by using cloud?

Objectives

• Provide an overview of the course.

• Ensure everyone has their environments setup.

Use cases

Cloud computing offers a wide range of usage possibilities. From running basic HTML sites for publishing works, to collaborative wikis, to running persistent social media/web scrapers automating data collection and processing, to providing platforms to help support whole research communities. Possible use cases are varied and wide ranging. One particular example using the Compute Canada cloud is Voyant Tools, a web-based text reading and analysis environment. It is a scholarly project that is designed to facilitate reading and interpretive practises for digital humanities students and scholars as well as for the general public.

Motivation

A wide range of diverse research disciplines often make use of computers in varied and diverse ways that are not suitable to the more traditional high performance computing (HPC) environment. Cloud computing provides the required flexibility for these varied and diverse usage cases. However, this flexibility comes at a cost. To facilitate a wide array possible use cases, much of the configuration and setup must be undertaken by individual researchers and not by the central bodies which manage the cloud infrastructure. With each cloud setup being customized and unique it becomes difficult to manage centrally in a consistent manner and much of the management and customization is left to the end cloud user.

Overview

In this workshop:

• Introduce fundamental concepts involved in a network.
• Introduce the concepts of cloud computing
• Walk through the steps required to create your first virtual machine
  • Create a key pair
  • Create a virtual machine
  • Connect to your virtual machine
  • Apply software updates

Before we begin make sure you have completed the steps in the setup page. If you have had difficulty with any part of them, now is the time to let us know and we will help you solve them.

Key Points

• Cloud computing is very flexible and has many diverse uses.

• Setup of Alliance cloud environments is left to its users, enabling great flexibility but requiring more knowledge.

• In this course we will setup a cloud environment to run a Jekyll site.