CMSC389L

Week 1

Introduction + Cloud Computing 101

January 26, 2018

What are STICs?

STICs: Student Initiated Courses

Interested in teaching a STIC?

Come talk with me after class!

Submit a feedback survey every week

We read every submission.

It's anonymous

Colin King

colink@umd.edu

Andrej Rasevic

arasevic@umd.edu

Isaac Lockwood

ialock@umd.edu

Responsible for final grading decisions and resolving conflicts.

Dr. Neil Spring

nspring@cs.umd.edu

Google's first production server rack

Pioneered the idea of using cheap commodity hardware to maximize availability

Why this is hard to do:

1 Server = 20k Users

Can you accurately forecast how many servers to maintain?

Amazon faced this problem back in the early 2000s.

Their solution? Lease out extra compute capacity.

This reduces the scaling volatility for Amazon, and greatly simplifies the scaling process for other companies.

Cloud Computing: "is a ... paradigm that enables ubiquitous access to shared pools of configurable system resources and higher-level services that can be rapidly provisioned with minimal management effort, often over the Internet. " (Wikipedia)
- In other words, it abstracts away all of those previous problems.
- You work with higher-level primitives than servers/storage/power/etc.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service: servers, storage, networking, power/cooling/maintenance/etc.
Platform-as-a-Service: deployment tools that don't require infrastructure-level development
Software-as-a-Service: software available with little to no development required

Okay, I'm a business. What benefits does this provide me?

It's cheaper
- Providers have an economy-of-scale because they buy this hardware in bulk
It's globally available
- F.e., Amazon runs datacenters across the globe
Pay-for-what you use
- It's also metered to the minute/second
- Enables experimentation + entrepreneurship
No hardware failures/upgrades/maintenance