Cloud Powering DH Research

Cloud computing has become very popular recently. Part of the reason for this popularity is that it provides great flexibility allowing complete control of the computing environment. In addition the environment can be copied, backed up, created and recreated in an automated way. In these lessons we will start you on the path towards making use of the great flexibility and power of cloud computing.

One of the more interesting use cases for the cloud is its ability to provide web services. To explore the flexibility and power of cloud computing we will use the popular WordPress software as an example. WordPress is free as in ‘free beer’ and also as in ‘free speech’ since it is OpenSource software. WordPress allows you you build great looking websites without the need to write all the code your self. It what is referred to as a Content Management System CMS. There are other CMS out there (e.g. Mediawiki, Drupal, Omeka) but WordPress is among one of the most popular and the methods learnt for setting up WordPress will also be applicable to other CMS software.

Prerequisites

• Very strongly encouraged to have a Compute Canada Cloud account well before the course. It can take several business days to obtain an account (see the setup for more details) and having an account means you can continue to use what you have learnt after the course concludes.
• Bring your own laptop to work on. Working on your own laptop makes it that much easier to continue using what you learnt in the course after the course has concluded.
• Students should be comfortable working with computer file systems. They should know how to create and delete directories and files on their own personal computer.
• Familiarity with a Unix style command line environment is strongly encouraged but not required.
• Programming experience is an asset but also not required.