Cloud computing is defined less by where servers sit and more by how resources are provided and consumed. The A+ exam lists a set of characteristics that distinguish cloud services from traditional IT, and questions often describe a behavior, such as automatically adding servers during a traffic spike or billing by the hour, and ask you to name the characteristic. Shared versus dedicated resources describes whether the hardware behind your service is used by other customers. With shared resources, the most common and cheapest arrangement, your virtual machines or services run on physical servers alongside other customers' workloads, isolated by the hypervisor and the provider's controls. With dedicated resources, sometimes offered as dedicated hosts or instances, the physical hardware is reserved for you alone. Dedicated resources cost more but can satisfy licensing rules that are tied to physical hardware, compliance requirements or a desire for extra isolation.
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