Basically it's a huge farm of servers others can take advantage of to do stuff. In Titanfall's case, Microsoft's cloud platform Azure will be running their dedicated game servers.
In fact Respawn will be hosting all their platforms dedicated servers through Azure. The great thing about Microsoft's cloud service is that it scales up and down by requirement.
"Let me explain this simply: when companies talk about their cloud, all they are saying is that they have a huge amount of servers ready to run whatever you need them to run. That's all," blogged Jon Shiring.
"Microsoft has a cloud service called Azure (it's a real thing – you can go on their website right now and pay for servers and use them to run whatever you want). Microsoft realised that they could use that technology to solve our problem."
"So they built this powerful system to let us create all sorts of tasks that they will run for us, and it can scale up and down automatically as players come and go. We can upload new programs for them to run and they handle the deployment for us. And they'll host our game servers for other platforms, too!"
Xbox 360, Xbox One and PC dedicated servers for Titanfall will be hosted by Azure. This cloud of servers can do much more for developers than just host their multiplayer matches, continues Shiring.
"Developers aren't going to just want dedicated servers – they'll have all kinds of features that need a server to do some kind of work to make games better," he wrote. "Look at Forza 5, which studies your driving style in order to create custom AI that behaves like you do. That's totally different from what Titanfall uses it for, and it's really cool! So it's not accurate to say that the Xbox Live Cloud is simply a system for running dedicated servers – it can do a lot more than that."
The datacentre infrastructure that Microsoft has means a lot less hassle for game developers especially when it comes to upgrading their server-side code. Instead of dealing with multiple ISPs and different hosting companies it's all streamlined through one system.
"With the Xbox Live Cloud, we don't have to worry about estimating how many servers we'll need on launch day," said Shiring. "We don't have to find ISPs all over the globe and rent servers from each one. We don't have to maintain the servers or copy new builds to every server. That lets us focus on things that make our game more fun. And best yet, Microsoft has datacentres all over the world, so everyone playing our game should have a consistent, low latency connection to their local datacenter."
"Most importantly to us, Microsoft priced it so that it's far more affordable than other hosting options – their goal here is to get more awesome games, not to nickel-and-dime developers. So because of this, dedicated servers are much more of a realistic option for developers who don't want to make compromises on their player experience, and it opens up a lot more things that we can do in an online game."
"This is something that we are really excited about. The Xbox Live Cloud lets us to do things in Titanfall that no player-hosted multiplayer game can do. That has allowed us to push the boundaries in online multiplayer and that's awesome. We want to try new ideas and let the player do things they've never been able to do before!"
"Over time, I expect that we'll be using these servers to do a lot more than just dedicated servers. This is something that's going to let us drive all sorts of new ideas in online games for years to come."
If Microsoft's Azure Cloud service is as robust as Shiring believes it is then it'll certainly be a welcomed addition to the dedicated server scene. No more launch day meltdowns as everyone crams online? Yes please.
Titanfall releases on Xbox 360, Xbox One and PC in Q1 2014.
