Wow....
The cloud is the internet... ummm, no.
Cloud computing is really a turn back to the way things used to be handled in a server/dummy terminal system- but not as simple.
Cloud computing is about maximizing shared resources. It's about dynamic allocation of resources to best service it's users (which, given how amazon's cloud has been acting, is highly amusing).
A small example would be if you could access all the same content from a computer at work, computer at home and laptop on the road.
Look at it this way... Say there used to be 3 servers per shard. As technology got better, it became one server per shard. And even better, run all the UO shards on 2 or 3 servers. (actually, it's probably just a small part of a server cluster).
What a company like Amazon does is come in and say. Hey for X amount of money, we can host all your computing needs, so you don't have to worry about hardware and some server software. You can spend more of that money elsewhere. We handle all the backups and we have teams of the best techs on duty around the clock to service your every need. Plus, you can have full control over part. And the best part is, since it is a dynamic system, you only pay for what you use. And you can set a cap, if you want, on the most you want to pay.
It's that last part that worries me most about it. In a dynamic system where you have high server loads at times, that everything allotted to UO is capped.
