Ask HN: How to introduce cloud computing to high schoolers?

Have been taking the analogy of Electricity. You do not produce electricity on your own but take service from the electricity provider(maybe government or private players).

I am totally bored myself o this analogy. As I have repeated this in many classes. I want to provide some other analogy. What could I provide?

3 points | by shivajikobardan 3 hours ago

5 comments

  • PaulHoule 3 hours ago
    In my mind it is about access to a high performance network inside the data center and to the rest of the world as much or more that I can rent a machine there.

    I'd also say there are a lot of cases where we only need intermittent service, like why pay for a whole server to sit there to serve 100 requests which could be handled by a simple Lambda function?

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    • __patchbit__ 1 hour ago
      Emphasis on waveform concepts that make sense in the context of cloud computing and quantum computing give students a fork in the road to specialization for them to decide on their distant future.
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      • PaulHoule 46 minutes ago
        Well I was involved with quantum computing back when you’d talk to the top people in the field and they would tell you they didn’t have any money for postdocs and I think the future for quantum computing is about as promising for a young person as it was then.
  • dj_studocai 1 hour ago
    You can check the Interest Lens feature on studocai.com , it will help you built different analogies on the basis of interest.
  • maryamshafaqat 2 hours ago
    A good one I have used is the roads and transport idea. You do not build roads to travel you just use shared infrastructure when you need it same way cloud works.
  • late_night_fix 1 hour ago
    A library analogy could work too,borrow resources when needed.
  • phendrenad2 2 hours ago
    Maybe they can handle a direct explanation. How many of you have a phone? How many of you use a laptop? The laptop overheats sometimes, huh? But it can do more? Well, server farms have air conditioning to let them heat up, but you can do even more. Like AI, ChatGPT Claude Gemini you know? Those fake videos you see all over tiktok?