Do you actually believe that the server racks are the only component of a cloud steaming service? Or even the most important part?
Its immaterial to the conversation, as that guy doesn't know and is clearly making stuff up. I would say this forum has gotten to the point of just spreading technology bs about 9o%+ of the time. They don't moderate it either. The term "cloud" is a made up marketing term, about 12 years ago or so Amazon started marketing it as part of AWS. One day we started hearing the term, and we were like wth is "cloud" and than the light bulb came on and we're like they are just talking about remote processing, which has existed for decades.
We have the Flat Earth Society of tech here, which is crazy since this is suppose to be a gaming site - no moderation at all on tech or more like the lack of tech. We might as well have people saying the internet is a "
series of tubes". The bad part about all this is.... it dumbs down other people that read it, so its a pet peeve of mine.
To answer your question, generally speaking... these processes have to run the same in their data center as they would at your house. There are things for internet traffic like load balancing, databases, etc. but to me those are things anyone can do - Microsoft nor anyone else has a strangle hold on these types of tech. At the end of the day, both Sony and Microsoft are stacking consoles in racks.... those consoles are generally going to work the same as in your house, although they'll have some type of additional software to control them, and to distribute the processing for them. But lets say one day they virtualize them (consoles), even the virtualized ones would have to run the same or very similar to the hardware you have in your house... that's the whole point... to copy an existing hardware/software that appears to be boxed in a virtualized environment i.e. virtual machine.
So... eventually one of these cats might VM them but to the end user there is no real difference in that instance.... it just adds efficiency, more or less. The end user should not really witness anything new, generally speaking as most of this tech is just mimicking existing tech in a different way.
That doesn't mean there isn't some cool tech that Microsoft has but at the end of the day, its more about efficiency than it is magic. There is no magic. Basically, these people on this forum oversell what Azure (and other cloud service provider have) and the crazy part is 99.999% that are talking about it, not only have never used the services as an administrator or developer.... they really have no idea what it is. Half of them think Sony is using Azure, why, because they don't know what it is.
But at the end of the day cloud streaming is more or less a loser business and generally a bad product compared to natively processing for gaming, so its like us arguing over who is uglier Trump or Hillary.