I had the honor of presenting the Developers at the Portland PASS chapter, and decided to go a different way than just using PowerPoint Slides…. (click on any picture to enlarge)

The point is that when you need to get a point across, it’s OK to change tactics to make sure the information sticks. In this case, I decided to make the audience the PowerPoint. I used a few props to show the various paradigms we use to describe what the industry uses for the word “cloud”

First, we talked about Infrastructure as a Service. I picked a gentleman who didn’t quite fit the hard hat and safety vest I picked out for him. Notice our “user” as she accesses our “Server” (complete with tray and glass) which has been virtualized.

Software as a service comes next. In this case, the user and potentially even customers just access software (represented here as a Windows ME box…) remotely – everything is virtualized.

Finally, Platform as a Service – Yup, Platform shoes as a necklace, and a tie-dye shirt to represent the 70’s – a decade when mainframes used stateless programming as well. Notice also the components of Windows Azure – Compute (Keyboard) Application Fabric (Toy Bus) and Storage (Bucket).

And at the end of the day, it’s all about serving those customers…