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Learning how to learn about cloud

Guidelines for Researchers

You may have looked at the various websites and poked around the web, and found it's just not clear at all how cloud computing may be helpful to you, even though it all sounds great. The challenge for researchers learning about cloud is that most cloud documentation for isn't written for you.

Challenges for researchers learning:

  • Cloud training and documentation are mostly written for IT professionals like system admins and architects, software developers, business people, and agency managers. Researchers tend to be a little of all of those things.

  • Requires an understanding the concepts, glossary of IT Infrastructure as cloud services are based on a model of IT so traning materials often have an embedded conceptual models of computing.

  • Goals of researchers are often different from IT Professionals responsible for buildomg systems used by hundreds of people or for business purposes. That can make it difficult to decipher which kind of cloud service will work best for your use case.
  • As Dr. Parvizi writes (link to pdf), cloud is very different from using traditional research-oriented technology like workstations or HPC. There are hundreds of services to choose from but we find many researchers will reach for the conceptually straightfoward path of creating cloud computers and install what they need.
  • Our goal for this fellowship is to provide context and background, and help you explore some of the so-called "cloud native" technologies like "serverless" systems that let you run your scripts without dealing with operating system installs.

What documentation is available for researchers?

There are general, conceptual introductions and dicussions for academics.

Learning how to learn about cloud: Caveats and help

As part of this fellowship, our goal is to help you translate documentation written for the systems and developer perspectives into a research perspective.

  • The cloud services themselves are always changing

  • There are new services and bundles created all the time that may be competing or superior choices for doing research

  • If you are unsure, ask us. See the contact page or use our Teams channel.
  • Cloud companies have help desks and many resources for anyone using their services or potential customers and we may be able to connect you with those.