"These are not nice people. There are not niceties like law and order - they break kneecaps." Ask a technical person what cloud computing is and you will most likely get a boilerplate answer that somewhere in it includes the terms "elastic", "agility", "broad network access", "dynamic", and "measurable". However, for most individuals seeking an understanding of the role cloud computing will play in their IT environment, these definitions really don't answer the mail. That is why I have developed an analogy based on US Thanksgiving dinner to help introduce the concepts of cloud computing. So far, this analogy has worked out pretty well in discussions with customers for creating a visualization of what we are attempting to achieve with cloud and why it's different than what IT is typically doing today. Let's start with the carving the turkey. Every year you invite ten people to Thanksgiving dinner. Since you invite the same people every year, you've learned after the first couple of years exactly how to carve up an eighteen pound turkey so that there are enough pieces to feed everyone. Moreover, you know exactly how much white meat there will be and how much dark meat. Additionally, since you invite the same ten people every year, you have an understanding of which pieces each of these individuals prefer. The result is that everyone is, mostly, happy and you have a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner. The reason I said "mostly happy" is because some people settle for less preferential pieces, but they don't complain and make due with what's available. This pretty much epitomizes today's Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings. There's a set of resources (the turkey) and it gets carved up into small, medium and large sized virtual machines. There's very little deviation from the template. You get a certain amount of memory, CPU and bandwidth associated with your selection. Carving up the resource pool in this manner means that operations can more easily manage the cloud environment, ensure that there's enough "turkey" for everyone and it satisfies a well-known audience. Based on this approach, it's easy to monitor capacity and define rules for expanding the resource pool. Additionally, the pool is expanded in fixed increments facilitating easier acquisition. The above offering describes a good first step on the road to delivering cloud computing, but it is not cloud computing; it's virtualization. Moreover, IT organizations applying this approach are typically modeling their physical data center as a virtual entity. So, let's explore what happens when we move from virtualization to cloud computing continuing our Thanksgiving dinner analogy. This year, Crazy Uncle Joe returns from abroad and would like to attend your Thanksgiving dinner. Introducing Uncle Joe changes a lot about your environment. For one, Joe always asks for his turkey in a way that totally undermines your method of carving. That is, Joe wants a piece of the bird that you typically carve into two separate pieces. Additionally, Joe can't get along with Aunt Mimi, which means that the seating for the table must also change. The issue before you is how can you accommodate Uncle Joe, while still being able to ensure there's enough turkey for all the other guests and ensuring there's not an all-out brawl in the middle of dinner? Now we're talking cloud computing!