"Fifteen young ladies in a school walk out three abreast for seven days in succession; it is required to arrange them daily, so that no two will walk twice abreast."  Thomas Kirkman posed this problem in 1850 in The Lady's and Gentleman's Diary and by doing so started the whole area of combinatorial design theory. In this talk, we show how solving Kirkman's schoolgirls problem, and other problems that are alike, is at the heart of constructing optimal low-latency and bandwdith-efficient codes for distributed cloud storage. We refer to these codes as Distributed REplication-based Simple Storage (DRESS) codes.