cloud

Cloud 8: Automating publishing an Android App to Google Play with GitHub Actions

Here East, London, September 2025 Introduction This post looks at automating the deployment of an Android app to Google Play with GitHub Actions. The app itself is covered in this post here. An earlier post on GitHub Actions is here. The not$ 1. Building an Android App Bundle (An .aab file) from the app Kotlin scripts on GitHub 2. As the app is being built inject the API keys it uses rather than have them in the code on GitHub 3. Sign the app with my private key to authenticate it 4. Log into Google Play and upload the app ...

Cloud 6: Introduction to Infrastructure as Code using CloudFormation

Willis tower, Chicago, August 2023 Introduction to Infrastructure as Code - deploying a virtual machine In previous posts we spun up virtual machines from the consoles of cloud providers websites. However this has the disadvantage that it can be time consuming and the steps involved complicated and easy to forget. By contrast directly specifying the cloud computing that we want to access in code is more explicit and easier to reuse - it can also be version controlled....

Cloud 5: Introduction to deploying an app with simple CI/CD

Patrick Staff’s ‘On Venus’ at the Serpentine gallery Deploying a web app with Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) Introduction The last post used a Serverless approach to regularly search Twitter for particular words and then stored the corresponding Tweet data in a cloud database. Here we develop a simple Streamlit app that accesses the database and creates a page showing average daily sentiment on the topic. We then deploy the app in the cloud....

Cloud 4: Using Serverless

La Cabane Éclatée aux 4 Salles, Daniel Buren at the Gori collection What is Serverless? In previous posts we spun up virtual machines to work in the cloud, but the cloud can also perform specific functions for us without us having to run any servers, so called serverless computing. The servers providing the services still exist, but they are managed by the cloud provider while we deal with the services directly....

Cloud 3: Docker and Jupyter notebooks in the Cloud

Kings Cross underpass rotated, London In the last post we covered some basic operations with cloud machines, in this post we discuss using Docker containers to replicate environments in the cloud and how to containerise a Jupyter notebook. Docker has become a standard way to package applications enabling something that runs on one machine to run on another. It is a container which holds a virtualisation of an operating system within which applications can be packaged to allow them to move between machines....

Cloud 2: Getting started with using a Virtual Machine in the Cloud

Clouds over the Lea valley, London In the last post we covered setting up a virtual machine in the cloud, logging into it via ssh and securing it. However, this gets us a virtual machine running in the cloud costing us money, it isn’t doing anything useful. To work with the virtual machine there are some other basic things that it’s helpful to be able to do. 1. Getting things on and off the cloud machine...

Cloud 1: Introduction to launching a Virtual Machine in the Cloud

Es Devlin’s “BLUEWHITESKY” at the 2021 LUX exhibition More and more of the digital services we use involve the cloud, where the computing is not done on our laptop or mobile, but accessed over the internet. However, coming across its technical details for the first time, the cloud can be slightly opaque to someone whose background is not computing - I certainly found it that way. From a data science perspective working with it involves things that are not related to statistics, machine learning or even programming narrowly defined....