An Introduction To Cloud Services For Data Scientists

What is the cloud?

The cloud sounds like a magical place, where data lives entangled in the fabric of reality. It’s beautiful branding because the reality is a lot less exciting. Most people have heard of Data Centers, the warehouses filled with computers (fancily called servers) that big tech companies use. What many miss, is that the cloud and data centers are one in the same. When you save your photos to the cloud, you are sending them to a data center to be stored on one of the servers there. When you want to look at your photo, your phone sends a request to the data center to get that image sent back to it. Similarly, if you want to calculate the fastest route home from work, you send the request to do this calculation from your phone to a data center. The data center has all the map data stored and a lot more processing power than your phone, so it can quickly perform this calculation and send the results back to your phone. This is why your maps applications can’t calculate new routes when you lose cell signal.

#cloud-services #data-science #cloud-computing #cloud