Hello friends!
Welcome to this week’s Sloth bytes!
🦥 No selling out today
I am genuinely considering selling feet pics, so if you work at a company with a marketing budget please forward this to your boss immediately or the feet come out.
Sloths have very large stomachs
Sloth’s stomachs are very large. They have have four chambers which is similar a cow. When full, the animal's tummy makes up 20 to 30 percent of its body weight.
🦥An Introduction to Cloud Computing
Have you ever wondered what people mean when they talk about "the cloud" in technology?
Put it in the cloud. Store it in the cloud. Yap yap yap.
Is it just a fancy term for the internet, or is there more to it?
What Is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services. This includes servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the internet.
IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS
“Cloud” covers a few different levels of abstraction. The easiest way to understand them is by asking how much of the stack you want the provider to manage for you.
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): You rent infrastructure such as virtual machines, networks, and storage. The provider runs the physical hardware; you still manage much of the operating system and application stack. Think: renting the computers.
PaaS (Platform as a Service): You deploy your application onto a managed platform while the provider handles more of the runtime, operating system, scaling, and infrastructure details. Think: bring your code, let the platform deal with more of the plumbing.
SaaS (Software as a Service): You use a finished application delivered over the internet. The provider manages the application and underlying infrastructure; you mostly configure and use the product. Think: you’re the user, not the infrastructure engineer.
These categories blur in real life because cloud providers offer hundreds of services at different abstraction levels, but the basic tradeoff is the same: more control usually means more responsibility.
In smooth brain terms, it's like renting computing power and storage from someone else, so you don't have to own and maintain physical hardware yourself.
Why Should You Care About Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is important because it gives you access to strong tools and resources without needing to spend a lot of money on hardware and infrastructure at the start.
You don’t have to buy servers for your 0 user personal project, you can just rent them.
Cloud services can make it easier to scale resources up or down and shift spending from large upfront hardware purchases to usage-based or subscription pricing. That can save time and money, but cloud bills can also get very expensive if resources are overprovisioned, left running, or poorly designed.
Benefits of Cloud Computing
Lower Upfront Infrastructure Cost
You can start without buying and operating your own physical servers, although long-term cloud cost depends heavily on workload and architecture.
Elasticity
Many cloud services let you add or remove capacity as demand changes—sometimes automatically when you configure autoscaling.
Managed Services
Databases, queues, object storage, serverless platforms, and other managed products can reduce the infrastructure work your team handles directly.
Global Infrastructure
Major providers operate regions and availability zones around the world, making it easier to deploy services closer to users or design for geographic redundancy.
Reliability Building Blocks
Cloud providers offer replication, backups, load balancing, multiple zones, and disaster-recovery tools—but your application still has to be designed and configured to use them correctly.
How Does It Work?
Instead of owning your own data centers or servers, you can use cloud computing services to access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
The provider manages the physical infrastructure and, depending on the service you choose, may also manage operating systems, runtimes, databases, scaling, or application software. Your responsibility shrinks as you move from IaaS toward managed platforms and SaaS—but it never becomes literally zero.
Popular Cloud Providers
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Microsoft Azure
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Getting Started with Cloud Computing
Pick one small thing to deploy
Don’t start by memorizing 200 cloud products. Host a static site, deploy a tiny API, create an object-storage bucket, or launch a small database.
Choose a provider/platform
Pick whichever major provider or developer platform best matches the tutorial/project you’re following. The core concepts—compute, storage, networking, identity, observability, and cost—transfer between platforms.
Set a budget/usage alert before experimenting
Free tiers and credits can help, but they have limits and change over time. Configure spending alerts or quotas where available so your “hello world” does not become a “hello invoice.”
Deploy and observe
Once it runs, look at logs, metrics, permissions, networking, and billing. That operational layer is where “the cloud” stops feeling like magic.
What Can You Do in the Cloud?
Host Websites and Applications
Run static sites, APIs, containers, serverless functions, and full applications using different levels of managed infrastructure.
Store and Back Up Data
Use object storage, block/file storage, managed databases, snapshots, and backup services. Redundancy and backup behavior depend on the service and configuration—you still need a recovery plan.
Run Virtual Machines and Containers
Provision compute on demand when you need control over the runtime or operating environment.
Analyze Data and Run ML Workloads
Use managed warehouses, data-processing systems, GPUs, and machine-learning platforms without owning the physical hardware yourself.
Is Cloud Computing Secure?
Security is a top priority for cloud providers, who invest heavily in protecting their infrastructure.
However, it's a shared responsibility model: while the provider secures the cloud infrastructure, you are responsible for securing your data and applications.
This means implementing strong passwords, using encryption, and following best practices for access control.
Who Uses Cloud Computing?
Startups
Leverage the cloud to access enterprise-level resources without significant upfront costs.
Enterprises
Handle large-scale operations and data processing with the flexibility to scale resources as needed.
Individuals
Store personal files, photos, and documents securely and access them from any device.
Real-World Examples
Netflix
Uses AWS to deliver streaming services to millions of users worldwide, scaling resources up or down based on demand.
Airbnb
Relies on cloud services to handle bookings, data storage, and analytics, enabling a seamless experience for users.
Dropbox
Provides cloud storage solutions for individuals and businesses, allowing easy file sharing and collaboration.
Why Learn About Cloud Computing Now?
As technology continues to evolve, cloud computing skills are increasingly in demand across industries.
Whether you're a developer looking to deploy applications or someone interested in understanding modern IT infrastructure, learning about the cloud opens up new opportunities and keeps you ahead in the tech landscape.
If you want to keep learning
How cloud file storage works — see what actually happens when files are uploaded to services like S3.
The 3 types of caches — one of the easiest performance concepts to understand after learning cloud infrastructure.
5 system design resources — go deeper on scalability, distributed systems, databases, and architecture.
Thank you to everyone who submitted 😃
ravener, RelyingEarth87, Yoshlix, ddat828, taypham88, Classy-Cassy, and kwame-Owusu who also made a video:
Simon Says
Simon asks you to perform operations on a list of numbers that only he tells you.
You should ignore all other instructions given.
Create a function which evaluates a list of commands (written in plain English) if the command begins with Simon says. Return the result as an integer.
Examples
simon_says([
"Simon says add 4",
"Simon says add 6",
"Then add 5"
])
output = 10
simon_says([
"Susan says add 10",
"Simon says add 3",
"Simon says multiply by 8"
])
output = 24
simon_says([
"Firstly, add 4",
"Simeon says subtract 100" # Look at the name closely :)
])
output = 0Notes
If no instructions are given by Simon, return
0.For the sake of simplicity, there will be no command for dividing.
How To Submit Answers
Reply with
A link to your solution (github, twitter, personal blog, portfolio, replit, etc)
or if you’re on the web version leave a comment!
Editing + coding is not a good combo.
Yeah I don’t know why I thought it’d be a good idea to make videos about programming since editing takes forever and programming something also takes forever.
Anyways, I’m making good progress on this video.
The video is explaining how google/search engines work where I showcase how to create your own google search engine!
It uses the PageRank algorithm which is the original algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results.
Here’s a preview of some of the editing I’m doing for it 😁
That’s all from me!
Have a great week, be safe, make good choices, and have fun coding.
If I made a mistake or you have any questions, feel free to comment below or reply to the email!
See you all next week.
