Cloud Computing Explained - To A 5 Year Old...Simples!

You don't like making your own cheeseburgers, so you hire a chef to make a cheeseburger for you. It's a tasty cheeseburger, so you invite all your friends round the next day for a cheeseburger party. But the chef can't make 100 cheeseburgers for your 100 friends, he's too busy! Lots of your friends go hungry! So, the next day you hire another 99 chefs, to make sure everyone can get a cheeseburger. However, that day, half your friends can't come round, so 50 of the chefs make 50 cheeseburgers for the friends who did come round, and the other 50 chefs stand around doing nothing. But, you still have to pay them! So you're wasting money. Now, imagine the four other people living on your street are also having cheeseburger parties, and they are all having the same problem. Sometimes they have more chefs than guests, wasting money, and sometimes they have more guests than chefs, so people are going hungry. Nobody can hire the exact number of chefs because nobody knows exactly how many friends they are going to have round that day. Also, everybody has to build huge cheeseburger kitchens, taking up room in their house they could use for other things. And to be honest, it's a hassle having all the chefs in your house. They're grumpy and annoying. You don't really care about keeping chefs happy, you just want to eat cheeseburgers. So, someone comes along and builds a massive kitchen with 200 chefs, and all the people on your street get rid of their own chefs and kitchen, and instead pay that person to do cheeseburger deliveries for them. Some days you have 100 guests, so you use 100 of these chefs, while other people have only 25 guests and chefs each. Another day you might have only 10 guests and chefs, and your next door neighbour has 150 guests and 150 chefs. You each only pay for the number of chefs you use each night, even though that changes unpredictably. And you don't have to use half your house for cheeseburger kitchens. You don't even need to know or care how many chefs are employed by the kitchen. Because the cheeseburger kitchen has lots of customers effectively pooling their money together, you can each be pretty confident there will be enough chefs to go around, plus, you have one totally amazing kitchen instead of five kinda ok kitchens.