Why Cloud Computing is Critical for a Data Scientist
To understand the advantages cloud computing provides when it comes to data science, let’s imagine a world with as much data as we have today, but without servers. In such an unfortunate scenario, firms would need databases that run locally, right?
So, every time when you, as a data scientist, want to engage in new analyses or refresh an existing algorithm, you’d have to transfer information to your machine from the central database, and then proceed to operate locally. This unfortunate world would have several main drawbacks...
For example, manual intervention would be necessary to retrieve data... Your machine becomes a single point of failure for the analyses you have worked on locally... Processing speed would be equivalent to the computing power of your computer... Chances are you will be able to work with a limited amount of data due to the limited computing resources at your disposal... Moreover, under this setup, you wouldn’t be able to leverage real-time data to build recommender systems or any type of machine learning algorithms that require ‘live’ data.
