Amazon Web Services is providing new educative learning sessions for students and professors to collaborate with when developing new skills in cloud computing technology.

To break down how cloud computing works, I wanted to share the definition of the term:

the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.

I often hear someone speak of cloud computing as a far off and complex idea. But when one breaks down the process it makes clear sense.

Local servers can store data that is on the same machine as the server. An example, you download or upload a video to your desktop or laptop. You could host that image or video from your hard drive on the computer that you have it stored on, and have people view the content directly from your computer. It would stay on your hard drive, and be hosted from the same drive.

Remote servers store data on another device outside from the source that may have acquired it. An example, I make a video for a local business, and want potential customers to see the content. When I want to host the content on a remote server for other people to view on the Internet, I would have to store it on another computer/server, such as YouTube to have other people view it. So, cloud computing is really storing information on servers outside of your own hard drive.

“We built AWS Educate with a vision of helping to cultivate a cloud-enabled workforce. It’s been inspiring to see students from every corner of the globe – from Brooklyn to Bombay to Singapore to Seoul – embrace AWS Educate, eager to digest learnings from top computer science courses, and get their hands on their first Amazon S3 bucket,” said Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector, AWS.

Amazon also noted with Business Wire:

AWS Promotional Credits, online training, self-paced labs, a library of AWS resources, and educator-shared content – AWS Educate now features Cloud Career Pathways and the AWS Educate Job Board. The more than 25 Cloud Career Pathways are made up of content modules designed to teach the technical skills required in hundreds of cloud-related jobs.

Watch over videos below getting more in depth with cloud computing at Amazon.