Clarifying question

How much does my grandma know about computers?

Answer Before I begin, I just want to write down the three most important concepts I want my grandmother to learn about cloud computing.

• Don’t need to own any of our own infrastructure
• Scale as needed
• Turn on or turn off as needed
• It gives us the end product without having to deal with how it might be produced.
• No expertise on setting up or on maintenance needed

Explanation

So let’s say you run a business that designs and makes shoes in your garage grandma. You’ve hired a few people to make the shoes that you design. All of a sudden, George Clooney found out about your shoes and a lot of people are suddenly submitting more orders for your shoes. Because it’s so sudden, you don’t know how you’re going to hire more people quickly, or where to even put them even if you did because your garage is full at this point. Plus, you know that this demand will die down soon once all the hubbub is gone. But you also know that Christmas and the holidays are coming around and you might need more people again.

At this point you realize that you’re really good at designing the shoes but someone else, another company, can make the shoes. That way you don’t need to worry about hiring or firing your shoe makers, or having enough space for them in your garage, or know how to make shoes yourself so that you can train them. This company just make the shoes you design because they have hundreds of shoe makers and you can just ask them to make as many or as few of the shoes you want.

In the same way, the cloud is basically this shoemaker company and your computer is your designing business. When your computer needs to do really complicated stuff, we would need to buy more computers and do everything on our own – like hiring shoemakers in our example. But now, we don’t need to buy more computers, we can just send a command to another company (the shoemaker company) who has many computers (shoemakers) than we could ever have to work out that tough problem and just tell us what the answer is ( the shoes). This is great because we can focus on what we do best

Cloud computing is like going out to a restaurant instead of cooking dinner at home.

When you cook at home, you have to do everything yourself. You need to use your own plates, pots, and pans. You have to know how many people are coming over and buy the right amount of ingredients. If more people join for dinner than you expected, you’ll run out of food! But if fewer people show up, then you’ll have leftovers that go to waste. And on top of it all, you have to do all the cooking, set up, and clean up yourself.

Before cloud computing existed, running an Internet business was actually pretty similar: You had to buy your own computers or rent dedicated servers from someone else. You had to predict the number of visitors who would come to your website and make sure your servers could handle that traffic. And you had to do a lot of infrastructure and maintenance work yourself—the computer equivalent of washing the dishes.

With cloud computing, on the other hand, it’s more like going to a big restaurant or cafeteria. Restaurants can handle groups of all sizes because they (usually) have more than enough food and plates to go around. If more friends want to join, the restaurant can move some tables around and give you more room. You’re going to pay more on average than cooking yourself, but you only pay for what you eat.

Cloud computing providers like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure are similar. They have nearly unlimited computing power which allows you to worry about your business instead of buying and maintaining computers. As your business grows, you simply pay for what you need. Like fancy restaurants that offer exotic menu items, cloud platforms also offer new technologies that you can’t find at home, like machine learning and more. And best of all—no washing dishes!