"The use of the cloud for server farms made of hundreds, thousands, and often more computers that are transparent to the user has achieved much the same goal, p

"The use of the cloud for server farms made of hundreds, thousands, and often more computers that are transparent to the user has achieved much the same goal, providing one’s connection to the cloud is also redundant. " This isn't true at all. The cloud offerings are more like traditional, high availability such as fail-over clusters. They might compete with VMS clusters by now with the right components. Maybe even exceed them except for longevity. Systems like NonStop and Stratus are fault-tolerant systems supposed to get five 9's availability with [hopefully] imperceptible moments of failure that [hopefully] recover immediately. I wouldn't trust a cloud platform for that. The latency alone would probably prevent the solution from matching a local, NonStop cluster.