Demystifying The (Departmental) Cloud

Cloud has become one of the most-popular buzzword of the recent years, yet most people still do not understand what the cloud is and how it can help them in their work. In this tutorial, I will try to uncover part of the mystery and show you what the cloud really is. Contrary to some of the popular beliefs, I will try to convince you that the cloud is not something you have to be afraid of; rather opposite, combined with the right tooling, it can really benefit your workflow. Furthermore, I will show you how to use tools such as Vagrant or Packer to make an order in your virtual machines and how to use them to harness the power of the departmental cloud, so the next time, when you need to run a massive computational job just a few days before your paper deadline, you will know what to do.