Cloud Computing: A base where your services can grow

Many people have tried to explain what cloud computing is but recently I've read something which I believe best describes cloud computing. The gist is that it enables an organisation to have a base where your services can grow.

To me this is really the true advantage of cloud computing. Just imagine that you have an application built on top of a cloud computing compliant platform. You deploy this application into the cloud. Whenever your application needs more juice, just increase the "servers" and that's it. The application will automatically find these new "servers" and scale accordingly, or the cloud can be configured in such a way that it automatically find these new servers and scale up accordingly when the demand goes up.

A dream? Not really. J2EE clustering architecture has been doing the manual variation of this for some time. Just deploy the J2EE application into the cluster and that's it. The new application instance will try to find the other instance and will start sharing the load. I'm not that familiar with the database architecture but I believe it should also be workable theoretically.

Anyway this new way of programming will take the worrying of the infrastructure portion away from the application developers. They can then further concentrate on developing the application. No more wondering about how many servers, clusters, load balancers and what have you. Application is slowing down under the load? The organisation can just active the extra servers and your application response problem is resolved, all without any intervention from your vendors.

I wonder if organisations can recognise this unique advantage which the cloud can offer. The only thing that you need to worry about is the services that the organisation provides. That's what matters most.