Cloud: Hiding the Sausage Factory

The infamous sausage factory analogy describes an unpleasant process, which is hidden from the public's view, that yields a widely consumable product, such as a hamburger. The cloud enables consumers to buy what they want without forcing them to build their own sausage factory, per say. However, the depth of the cloud extends much further past this superficial metaphor. 

The divisions that compose the cloud can be classified as infrastructure, platform, software, or business processes as a service. This concept is powerful because it empowers the consumer to pick and choose which aspects of an IT system that they want control over and which processes they would rather outsource. Just as consumers do not wish to know the details of how a sausage factory operates and only want the final product, cloud consumes may not wish to know how network and storage hardware function, they just want to choose which operating system to use on top of that hardware. In another case, a consumer might not care which hardware or OS is used, they just want a to build a software application with readily available resources that are offered through the cloud. A third consumer may not care which hardware, OS, or software is used, they just want to leverage a business process, such as SmarterCities, to accomplish a business initiative. The possibilities are endless. 

Source: http://kunalashar.com/blog/the-next-generation-enterprise-business-as-a-service-in-the-cloud/

The chart above (Copyrights go to Kunal Ashar) depicts this cloud idea extremely succinctly. On the left, we see that business process lives on software, which lives on a platform, which lives on infrastructure. However, the real value comes almost exclusively from business processes. This is critical for understanding why cloud can help business ignore traditional IT and jump straight to the top of the pyramid for their business processes.

In conclusion, the end consumer of cloud technology is the ultimate decider of choosing what they want to manage and what they want that "simply works". Consumers do not care to know the elaborate details of the internal operations of a sausage factory. The main dilemma is deciding which component of an IT system (infrastructure, platform, software, business processes) is the sausage factory to the client's business.