Your computer as a kitchen

Let's say your computer is a kitchen. Your hard drive
is the cabinets, and your RAM is the countertop. If you have lots of
cabinets and a small countertop, you can still cook whatever you want,
you'll just be cleaning up and putting pots and pans away a lot more
often. If you have a large counter, you can cook and cook until you're
done, and clean it all up at once.

Each CPU core is an oven.

We used have just one oven in
our stove, but now we have multi-oven stoves. This doesn't help us
roast a turkey faster (unless we find a way to cut the turkey in half),
but it helps us when we have to cook the pumpkin pie at the same time.

Servers
are like pantries; these days we each have our own kitchen in a
workgroup, which shares a single pantry. Over the whole organization,
we end up with a lot of pantries, and unfortunately a lot of times what
you need is in a pantry that is on the other side of the building. It
gets complicated.

Now Service Oriented Architectures are like if
the company decided to set up a little food court with a butcher, baker
and saucier chef. Instead of dressing and trussing the turkey you'd
have the butcher do it for you. You can get dough, pie crusts or
finished pies from the baker, and the saucier will supply things like
hollandaise sauce. One you're set up to cook that way, you can use
outside suppliers, like if you want pate a choux instead of the
simple pate brisee your in-house baker provides.

Oh, man I'm going to town with this one.

Indeed.
(Original Sources)