Partly Cloudy – Getting Started With Cloud Computing
How Using the Cloud Can Make Your Day Sunnier

Tommy Jordan

Published by Tommy Jordan at Smashwords.

Copyright 2011 Tommy Jordan

Discover other titles by Tommy Jordan at Smashwords.com

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my friend, Bill Stovall. Throughout life Bill has at any one time been my employer, partner, mentor, trainer, and friend. His continuing prodding, poking, motivating, and limitless fountain of new ideas are what encouraged me to publish this first work and I’m quite certain he will be responsible for more of my writings in the near future.

Thanks, Bill, for all your motivation and friendship throughout the years, for providing me with motivation when I need it and confidence when I lack it. Our repartee over the years has been responsible for more than one great idea and I hope it will fuel more of them in the future.

Contents

Purpose of this Book

It is not the purpose of this book to make you a cloud computing expert overnight. It’s not going to teach you all the possible ways to leverage the technology of cloud computing, because they are in essence, limitless - bound only by your imagination.

What this book will do is teach you a few basic cloud concepts and tricks to get you started; to give you just enough to put your feet into the waters and see for yourself that it’s perfectly ok to come on in and explore some of the possibilities out there right now.

In addition to being the author of this short, but hopefully-knowledge-packed, book I am also the owner of an IT company that specializes in “Managed Services.” My company, Twisted Networx, serves small business and individual clients across the United States. You can find us online at http://twistednetworx.com.

I first got started with the idea of writing about seven years ago when it started becoming clear to me I was repeating the same tips and tricks to people over and over again. Being technically savvy, this led me to start blogging in earnest, writing about professional computer and internet how-to articles, in addition to my already-existing personal blogging I’d been doing for a few years.

Eventually a book became the next best idea. I am a person whose nature it is to seek efficiency in everything. It’s not because I’m lazy, but rather I prefer to have more free time learning new things instead of teaching the same old ones repeatedly. Why spend hours teaching the same idea to people hundreds of times when I could just spend hundreds of hours once and share the idea with an unlimited number of people?

It made financial sense from the end-user point of view as well. For you, the reader, not many of you want to spend $150.00 paying a consultant something you feel could be figured out on your own eventually. Instead I’d rather many people spend an insignificant amount of money to purchase something they can refer back to again and again and gain the same knowledge. Teach a man to fish and all that…

It is my sincerest desire for this book to be the beginning of a series of books surrounding the Cloud and social networking and how to leverage them as an individual to keep-up with technology as an end-user (read as Normal adult who didn’t grow up texting) and as a tool for businesses to expand their working knowledge of these concepts.

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http://tommyjordan.me

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What is the Cloud?

For the purpose of the lessons in this book, let’s keep the cloud computing concept very simple. Using the “cloud” means you access your documents, pictures, and other common computer files from any computer or device connected to the internet.

Rather than saving everything on your computer, I am going to teach you how to save files, photos, and other items to both your computer and the internet simultaneously using tools that are completely free and simple to use.

Once you have become comfortable saving your files on the internet we will discover how to share them with others and access them yourself from remote locations (such as your office, or a public hot-spot) even when you’re not on your own computer.

How Would I Find the Cloud Useful?

There are thousands of ways sharing files in the cloud could be useful, so I cannot possibly give you every possible method in this short e-book, but let’s consider a few uses common people have for this.

Personal Use

-Share your favorite list of ever-changing recipes with your culinary talented friend without having to resort to email.

-Keep documents for an event organized; plan parties, share to-do lists, etc.

-Share large amounts of photo collections with friends and allow them to download copies or make changes to them.

Teachers and Professors

-Keep a list of assignments updated with an unlimited amount of students, parents, or other faculty members. Imagine being able to distribute homework to parents with a single click!

-Update a document you’ve shared and have everyone notified immediately of the change!

Small Organizations, non-profits, churches, etc

-Keep important records centralized and distributed with ease in only seconds.

-Work on your QuickBooks accounting from any computer anytime and update all your other computers simultaneously when changes are made.

These are but a few possible uses for cloud-computing in daily life. If you would like to see some more in-depth discussion of these and other concepts, please refer to the chapter titled “Applying the Cloud to Your Life” later in this book

A Visual Example of Cloud Computing

Let’s start with simply comparing the way we traditionally share documents. For this example we are going to assume you want to share a document (recipe list, letter, or other document) with ten friends. The image below shows us the process you probably traditionally go through.

Everyone has been performing personal correspondence this way for years so we are all familiar with it. It’s easy, right? You just sent your file to ten people via email and now you need to make changes to it. What happens now? The image below shows the cycle your file would normally go through.

Do you see the circle we’ve created? Every time you have the need to edit a file, it has to be re-sent via email, re-received by the recipients, re-saved on their computers, and now they have two or more versions of the same file. This gets confusing for everyone and is the biggest reason people find it difficult to share files back and forth. Most people don’t bother trying to share data for common tasks because this method is just tiresome and prone to mistakes. Let us examine another way to do this using the cloud.

Now comes the really fun part! Let us assume for the sake of this example the file you sent was something simple, such as a list of your favorite recipes and the ten people you sent it to are avid recipe-hunters as well. Can you imagine trying to keep all those recipes straight? It would quickly get too time-consuming the old way. How about if we used the cloud instead? The picture below shows how easy it is to edit a file in the cloud and have it distributed to others.

Let’s take it to the next step and assume more than one of you wants to send files to your group. Look how easy that is, in the image below, using the cloud. Any member in your group can add a file to a folder on their own computer and instantly have it transmitted to everyone within seconds. All you have to do is: nothing. Yes, I said it. Nothing! It’s all automatic!

You have just seen the basic premise of cloud computing; using the internet to make files available to any select group of people, anywhere, within seconds.