One of the easiest ways to define cloud is to compare it to pizza! No, seriously! You’ve probably already seen this but we’re surprised by how many people haven’t so we thought we’d share it again.
Pizza as a Service
There are at least four models for Pizza: Made at Home, Take & Bake, Delivery and Dine out. All the models have the same key elements for making an awesome pizza experience including the dough, sauce, cheese, toppings, fuel / electric, oven, pan, table and soda.
Obviously Made at Home makes you completely responsible for everything. Take & Bake allows you to pick up a pizza of your choice, throw it in the oven at home and enjoy. Delivery makes it so seriously easy, it just shows up and you enjoy. Dine Out means you don’t even have to throw the paper plates away. How often you eat pizza, the types of pizza, if you have a pizza oven, how lazy you are and many other factors go into picking the right model for you. Heck you might even use all the models for your pizza sourcing. We do!
Cloud Technology Stacks
Your cloud strategy is very similar to your pizza strategy. There are four models: On Premise – You Manage, Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Again there are key elements that need to be determined to meet your service needs. These elements include Networking, Storage, Servers, Virtualization, Operating System, Middleware, Runtime, Data and Applications. You also need to include Security, Automation / Orchestration, Service Assurance / Monitoring and Governance & Processes.
Maybe this comparison takes it too far for some, but for us it works to keep the conversation very simple (it also makes us very hungry). It’s amazing how often we come back to this conversation. We always encourage our customers and business partners to move their services as far up the stack as possible (where and when it makes business sense)! Enjoy your pizza and your cloud!
