The article provides a beginner-friendly guide to setting up a virtual machine on a laptop quickly, introducing concepts of Cloud Computing and containers.
Cloud computing has roots in mainframes from the 1950s, evolving through technologies like virtualization to become the foundation of modern IT services.
Virtualization abstracts physical hardware into multiple virtual instances, enabling efficient resource sharing and scalability.
Serverless computing, going beyond virtualization, automates infrastructure tasks for developers, ensuring cost-efficiency and scalability.
Containers and virtual machines both offer application isolation benefits, with VMs simulating entire computers and containers encapsulating applications.
Virtual machines are crucial in data science for specific environments and tasks like training deep learning models with GPUs, while containers are used for data pipelines and deploying applications.
The article guides through creating an Ubuntu VM using VirtualBox, detailing steps from downloading VirtualBox to setting up the virtual machine with resources.
It emphasizes the importance of understanding virtualization technologies for data scientists, discussing the practical applications and benefits of VMs and containers.
Using VMs allows for experimentation and development without impacting the host system, making it useful for trying out development environments, installing tools like Python, or using Docker for containerized applications.
In a world shifting towards microservices and containerization, knowledge of virtual machines remains relevant and valuable for understanding IT infrastructure.