It is true that there are two concepts conflated in "the cloud". The first, and by far the most important from a technology standpoint, is the ability to grow a

It is true that there are two concepts conflated in "the cloud". The first, and by far the most important from a technology standpoint, is the ability to grow and shrink pools of storage, servers, databases, etc. simply by plugging and unplugging hardware. Robust failover, dynamic data replication, all these things are necessary before you can begin having cloud services, and in fact, Google and others had this well before there was such a thing as a cloud. The second aspect is paying on an incremental basis for someone else to provide the pools developed in the first part. But that's more or less a trivial extension once you've got the first.