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 |