Cloud and Serverless Computing for Scientists: A Primer

This book offers an introduction to cloud computing and serverless computing for students, researchers and R&D organizations through several practical examples. Rather than focusing exclusively on the computational issues related to cloud computing, the authors focus on addressing the multidisciplinary applications of cloud computing for daily research work in public institutions and private companies in fields such as archaeology, geosciences, computer sciences, medicine and physics. The book also discusses the emergence of serverless computing over the last three years as a means to make computational infrastructures more apparent to users, avoiding the need to concern one's self with the type of server or computing machine needed to perform a computing task. These topics are presented from the perspective of users, researchers and decision-makers, and are approached based on the authors' collective experience on the use and adoption of cloud computing.

About the Authors

Dr Juan Antonio Añel is Associate Professor in the Environmental Physics Laboratory at the Universidade de Vigo, in Ourense. Affiliate in Economics and Energy, Secretary/Treasurer of the Atmosphere and Ocean Physics Group of the Spanish Royal Physics Society, Section Editor for PLoS ONE, and member of the editorial board of "Geoscientific Model Development". Also, he is a member of the GNU Project and former Scientific Coordinator of ClimatePrediciton.net at the University of Oxford.

Diego Perez Montes is a Doctoral Researcher in the Environmental Physics Laboratory at Universidade de Vigo in Ourense. His research topic is the development and combination of distributed and cloud computing for geoscientific modelling. Outside the academia, he is currently Principal Engineer at Nitro Software (previously, he was Staff Engineer at Etsy and Systems Developer at Amazon) where his expertise is in Computing and Large Scale Information Technology Infrastructures and Systems Architecting.

Dr Javier Rodeiro-Iglesias is Associate Professor in the School of Computer Sciences Engineering, as well as the Director of the Center of Research, Transfer and Innovation, and Director of Infrastructures at the Universidade de Vigo. His areas of expertise include user interface design, human-computer interaction, record linkage, environmental modelling and simulation, sensors and information security.