Renting a kitchen instead of building one
Your restaurant needs a kitchen. Own one outright, rent space in a shared commercial kitchen, or lease a dedicated facility just for you — each choice is a different way computers get their computing done.
Pick Traditional, Public Cloud, or Private Cloud on the left to see how the restaurant gets its cooking done — and click on any box to learn what it represents.
Select a kitchen model to see the diagram.
| Feature | Traditional | Public Cloud | Private Cloud |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardware Ownership | Restaurant | Cloud Provider | Dedicated Cloud |
| Cost | High | Low | Medium–High |
| Maintenance | Restaurant | Provider | Organisation |
| Scalability | Limited | Excellent | Good |
| Security | Depends on owner | Shared | High |
| Control | Full | Limited | High |
Why the rented kitchen actually works as a model
Cloud computing means using computing resources — processing power, storage, software — that live on someone else's hardware, delivered to you over the internet, instead of buying and running that hardware yourself. You pay for what you use, the provider handles the physical machines, and you access it all remotely.
That's the exact decision this simulation asks the restaurant to make. Traditional Computing is the restaurant buying its own kitchen, pantry, and equipment outright — full control, full responsibility, full upfront cost, every appliance sitting idle whenever business is slow. Switching to a Cooking Company changes the deal entirely: the restaurant stops owning equipment and starts renting capacity, paying only for the cooking it actually needs.
The Public vs. Private split is really a question of who else is in the kitchen with you. A Public Cloud Kitchen is a shared commercial facility — many different restaurants send their ingredients to the same cooking company, and the equipment gets used efficiently around the clock because it's serving everyone at once. Your ingredients never mix with anyone else's, but you're sharing the underlying stoves, ovens, and staff — which is exactly how public cloud providers isolate each customer's data while running it all on the same shared hardware. A Private Cloud Kitchen removes the other tenants: one dedicated facility, reserved entirely for one restaurant, at a higher price for that exclusivity.
Notice that none of these change what the restaurant actually does — the ingredients, the recipes, the meals served to customers are identical in all three. What changes is who owns the kitchen, who maintains it, and how many other people are using it at the same time. That's the whole of cloud computing in one sentence.