[Andys]

The AWS business model is to sell shared hosting on commodity hardware. Cloud is a cool buzzword but it is still sharing hardware. Cheap, commodity hardware is the magic that lets you scale up so big and so fast for a highly accessible price.

But you're still sharing the same hardware as everyone else and its still just commodity hardware.

[smhinsey]

For what it's worth, it's not entirely accurate to say that you are always using shared hardware on AWS, at least for your servers. It depends on how you set up your environment.

[weavejester]

Sharing hardware is an implementation detail. You could potentially build a cloud infrastructure where everyone has dedicated hardware. The whole point of cloud computing is that the implementation shouldn't matter to end uses.