Summary and Setup

The cloud is a fancy name for the huge network of computers that host your favorite websites, stream movies, and shop online, but you can also harness all of that computing power for running analyses that would take days, weeks or even years on your local computer.

In this lesson, you’ll learn about renting cloud services that fit your analytic needs, and how to interact with one of those services (AWS) via the command line.

Prerequisites

This lesson assumes a working understanding of the bash shell. If you haven’t already completed the Shell Genomics lesson, and aren’t familiar with the bash shell, please review those materials before starting this lesson.

Windows users will need to install PuTTY. See the installation instructions in Setup.

This workshop is designed to be run on pre-imaged Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances. For information about how to use the workshop materials, see the setup instructions on the main workshop page. The Cloud Genomics lesson requires no additional setup.