The Cloud

Learning objectives

  • Recognize why you might (and might not) want to host services in the cloud.
  • Differentiate between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.
  • List some common cloud services.
  • Start and stop an EC2 instance on AWS.

Quick Section Overview

So this section is really targeting the student who wants to host a project for portfolio purposes, the hobbyist who’s hosting a toy project, or the data science leader who has no choice but to host things for themselves because they just can’t get IT/Admin support.

Why cloud?

  • Flexibility: easy to re-scale.
  • No need to manage hardware.
  • Cheaper?
    • Not so much

Things as a Service

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS, “eye-az”)

  • Rent a server
  • It is actually a VM: a virtualized server on a virtual machine, called an instance.
  • Spot instances: for stateless, fault-tolerant applications.
    • Cheaper, they lend you space no one is using.
    • Preemptible, they can be claimed back.

Things as a Service

Platform as a Service (PaaS, “pass”)

  • They manage the servers AND your applications.
  • You get a ready to use environment for your applications.
  • Examples:
    • Blob storage
    • Lambdas, serverless functions
    • Container orchestration, Kubernetes
  • Posit Connect Cloud

Things as a Service

Software as a Service (SaaS, “sass”)

  • You rent the end-user software.
  • Data as a service?

Types of Saas. From What Is Software as a Service (SaaS)?

Common Cloud Services

Service AWS Azure GCP
Kubernetes cluster EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine)
Run a function as an API Lambda Azure Functions Google Cloud Functions
Database RDS/Redshift Azure Database Google Cloud SQL
ML Platform SageMaker Azure ML Vertex AI
Access control IAM Microsoft Entra ID Identity Access Management

Discuss the Lab

https://aws.amazon.com