Overview

Teaching: 15 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• Who are we?

• Who are you?

• What will we do in this course?

Objectives

• Introduce the instructors.

• Get to know the students and how they want to use the cloud.

• Provide an overview of the course.

• Ensure everyone has their environments setup.

Introductions

Lets get to know each other starting with introductions and a brief background about your self. Tell us why you are interested in this course and what you hope to get out of it.

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 twitter/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

Humanities and social sciences often make use of computers in varied and diverse ways typically not needed by the more traditional high performance computing tasks. 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

This course will start by introducing some basic concepts about the Internet and cloud in general to lay the foundation for the episodes to come. By the end of the first day you should have the basic tools and knowledge in hand to start working with the cloud, having created a web-server and your first website hosted on your own cloud server.

In day two we will use WordPress as an example of how to setup and configure more complex website software. WordPress is a content management systems (CMS). There are many different CMSs available which have many components in common. We will start with manually walking through the steps to create a WordPress site in the cloud. Understanding the manual steps of installing and configuring a CMS will allow you to generalize to other CMS systems for example wikimedia, omeka, and drupal. Day two will also cover some more advanced ways to interact with the cloud using your terminal.

In day 3, with the knowledge of how a manual installation and setup works we will look at ways to automate this task. In the morning we will learn how to automate installation and setup of software and in the afternoon how to automate the creation of cloud resources.

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 Compute Canada cloud environments is left to its users.

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

• We will see methods to easy setup of cloud environments.