A Sneak Peak of the Cloud: the 2 Minute Intro for Beginners

Everyone I know has been talking about the cloud. The cloud will change the way we work! The cloud will solve all of our problems! People who worked in the cloud have an air of mystery about them. Outside of the engineering community, there’s not a lot of clarity about what the cloud offers. I’m going to try to give a 2 minute intro to help clear some things up.

The cloud has a lot of cool features, but it’s basically built for 2 things: storage and computing. You might be familiar with dropbox, box and the like as a place for cloud storage. The AWS equivalent is an S3 bucket. Machines and programmers can store data in S3 buckets. Its basically unlimited storage for a a fraction of a penny. A bucket is the special name for the folder to simplify the difference between the main folders where data is stored and folders inside a bucket. An engineer can say access bucket “example-andy,” and that is a lot clearer than folder “example-andy” when there are multiple buckets that could have folders with that name.

The second big piece of the cloud is computing. The workhorses of the data world, Elastic Computing 2 servers are basically machines like your mac or pc. They can host websites, run programs in a variety of languages (even word/excel/powerpoint) and hold data (docs or programs). The most common way of accessing them is through SSH, which we can talk about in a later note.

There you have it, the cloud is just 2 pieces that we’re already familiar with, with a few nuances.