Explaining Cloud Computing to your Grandmother

Cloud Computing has revolutionized every business over the past few years and has played an important role in the survival of several businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Needless to say that businesses that embraced Cloud a few years ago were able to minimize the impact on their operations by facilitating remote working and allowing their employees to access business-critical applications remotely.

How Cloud Computing has saved several businesses during the current pandemic is doing the rounds in the news. I was talking to my grandmother and she asked me what Cloud Computing is and with her non-technical background, it was difficult for her to wrap her mind around the basics of Cloud Computing when I explained them to her. So, I had to put it in a way that she could understand it with ease.

Here is how I explained it to her:

Imagine you want to bake a cake for your grandson and you know that you will be baking cakes for him fairly frequently. Now, you brought a bunch of ingredients like flour, yeast, icing, butter, sugar, milk, cocoa, toppings, eggs, etc. and will also need an oven to bake it, electricity, etc.

Now, because you want to make sure that your cake is the best ever (Well! because you love your grandkids so much), so you want to start baking it for whenever your grandson wants it and you want to use all the fresh ingredients. Some of these ingredients like the dairy ones may have a very short expiration date and it is sometimes possible for you to procure all the ingredients all the time as and when needed. Also, you know that he has a lot of friends and sometimes they may come home and you may want to bake a bigger cake and it would not possible to do it in the oven at your home.

Now, imagine a bakery that is open 24x7 and lets you use their ovens of all sizes as and when required and they also provide you with all the fresh ingredients you need to bake your special cake and any other ingredient in case you feel experimenting. And what is great is that these ingredients will cost you less than what it will cost you to buy from a shop as the shopkeeper buys them in bulk and passes on the savings due to the economies of scale to you. You only pay for the size of the oven used and for the time duration, you also pay for exactly the weight and number of ingredients used. So, baking a bigger cake will cost you slightly more than a smaller cake because of the additional ingredients and the oven time used to bake a bigger cake.

So, Cloud Computing is similar to this bakery where you can use resources like storage, network, etc. (ingredients) from the cloud provider (bakery) and you don’t have to worry about capital expenses like maintaining the oven, fresh ingredients, size of the cake, etc. similar to how companies using cloud services don’t have to worry about the physical security of the servers, scalability, etc.

IaaS is if you use their oven and bring your own ingredients.

PaaS is if you use their oven, their ingredients but bring your own toppings (OS in this case).

SaaS is when you buy the whole cake from the bakery directly.

Of course, Cloud Computing has so much more to it but explaining it to someone with little technical knowledge can be challenging. How would you explain Cloud Computing to your parents or grandparents?