About Me

Colin King

Student Facilitator

colink@umd.edu

What are STICs?

• "Student Initiated Courses"
• Inspired by DeCal at UC Berkeley
• http://sticsumd.com
• All brand-new classes, so feedback is appreciated!

Faculty Advisor

• Dr. Neil Spring
• nspring@cs.umd.edu
• http://www.cs.umd.edu/~nspring/
• Responsible for final grading decisions and resolving conflicts.

What is CMSC389L?

• Practical and programming-oriented introduction to cloud computing.

• There are two primary goals of this class:

  • For students to become comfortable using and interconnecting the many AWS primitives.
  • For students to build a project from scratch using the knowledge they've gained, which can be demoed to prospective employers.

Cloud Computing

• The old way was time and capital intense, knowledge-heavy, and hard to scale.
  • Need to predict number of users
  • What happens if you overestimate? Underestimate?
• Example: Niantic

Cloud Computing

• Cloud computing abstracts away many of these problems (not all, yet).
• IaaS: servers, storage, networking, power/cooling/maintenance/etc.
• PaaS: deployment tools that don't require infrastructure-level development
• SaaS: software available with little to no development required

Cloud Computing: Benefits

• Economies of Scale for providers, so cheaper overall
• Global deployment with direct networking lines
• Metered usage, sometimes down to the second
• Little initial capital investment
  • Enables experimentation + entrepreneurship
• No infrastructure maintenance

Cloud Computing: Providers

Cloud Computing: Drawbacks

• Vendor lock-in
• Proprietary source code
• Commodity hardware
  • "Everything fails all the time." -- Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon

Amazon Web Services

• Dominant public cloud computing provider
• 100 different products -- compute, developer tools, customer service, etc.
• Growing rapidly, 90% YOY
  • Started with SQS, now 1000+ announcements each year

Why learn it?

• Large majority of tech companies use it.
• Rare new-grad skillset
• Extremely useful knowledge when on small engineering teams