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Introduction to Cloud Computing

This section contains important pre-reading if you are completely new to Cloud Computing. Understanding this information, it will make the instructions in Cloud Starter easier to follow.

What is the Midgard Cloud?

The Midgard Cloud is a way of accessing computing resources for training and development purpose, where you use your own computer as the controls & access point. You can request on-demand delivery of IT resources instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers.

This service from VAIT will allow to focus on delivering your learning projects at no cost.

Key Words

There are some key words you should know, which will help make your learning experience much easier.

  • Virtual Machine/Instance: a term used to describe your cloud computer.
  • Flavor: a flavor prescribes the size of a collection of virtual machine components, such as memory and CPU. You can’t select the size of these components individually, but select a flavour type (eg: small, medium, large) which predefines the size of each component appropriately.
  • Keypair: a keypair is a pair of files that contains a public and private key. The public key is added to your instance, and the private key is used to connect to your instance.
  • Port forwarding: a way to access a service running on your instance, from your local computer, through the Cloudflare network.
  • Image: a file that contains an operating system, which is added to a blank instance.
  • SSH: This is short for Secure Shell. It is a way to setup an encrypted (secure) connection between your computer and the cloud computer, usually via the command line.

Operation System

Just like your standard computer, your Cloud computer has an Operating System, this being Linux, with a number of distributions (a.k.a versions) available. At the moment, we support 2 main OS Distro: Ubuntu and CentOS.

This is important to understand, so you know how to find instructions and/or troubleshoot problems you have. For example, you may wish to install a particular package or software on your Cloud Computer. To do this you would search "How to install [insert package name] on Linux", which should (hopefully!) lead to the instructions you need.