intro_to_cloud.ipynb

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    "# Cloud Computing for Research\n",
    "\n",
    "Cloud computing is an on-demand computing resource that is scalable and follows a pay-as-you-go model. Instead of a singular data center or super-computing center, large cloud providers have  data centers spanning multiple locations. The largest cloud computing providers are [Microsoft (Azure)](https://azure.microsoft.com/), [Amazon (Amazon Web Services, AWS)](https://aws.amazon.com/) and [Google (Google Cloud Platform, GCP)](https://cloud.google.com/). Together, they are often referred to as **\"public\"** or **\"commercial\"** cloud providers. \n",
    "\n",
    "\n",
    "For researchers, it is often helpful to be aware of these five key components related to cloud computing infrastructure: \n",
    "\n",
    "<img src=\"./images/cloudcomponents.svg\" width=600 align=\"center\"><br/>   \n",
    "\n",
    "In contrast to buying your own desktop or laptop computer, a cluster of machines, or with buying external storage devices (such as a RAID, redundant array of independent disks), cloud computing allows you to provision computing and storage on machines that only available to you through an intermediated interface (such as a web-browser or through ssh). \n",
    "\n",
    "In some sense, cloud computing is akin to computing resources that would you obtain through institutional high-perfomance computing clusters or the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded platforms such as [XSEDE](https://www.xsede.org/). However, the fundamental difference is that the commercial cloud follows a pay-as-you-go model as opposed to a funding allocation model which you need to apply and be approved for. Commercial cloud providers are also frequently inventing, updating and improving their catalog of services; some researchers may find that the services offered on the commercial cloud can help accelerate their scientific workflows especially when dealing with big data. \n",
    "\n",
    "We will explore more about the services offered by the public cloud vendors in the next few chapters. "
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