Cloud, virtualization and wine tasting

The other day a colleague asked me a question – “What is the difference between virtualization and cloud computing”. Though I almost started with ‘old wine...’, suddenly realized alcohol of any kind is prohibited in the office, changed it this way – “Virtualization is a about utilizing computing resources in the most optimized manner by employing techniques that can run multiple separate operating environments in the same hardware which helps in realizing cloud computing, a paradigm with a much larger scope of having computing functions provisioned from an externally hosted, on-demand environment that charges on a pay-as-you-go basis and helps business to leverage best of the breed software applications and tools at much lesser cost by not having to invest in purchasing, hosting and maintaining these software applications in-house” … and with that I fell flat. For those who wonder what the title means, that's a cheap technique bloggers employ to drive attention, nothing else.