[randomdata]

I always understood the cloud to mean a black box of sorts that automatically handles failover, among other things. The cloud being just a fuzzy representation of the infrastructure.

S3 probably fits the description of a cloud service. You send your data, and the service worries about making it redundant without your intervention. If data in NE USA is unavailable, the service will automatically serve you the data from somewhere else. You don't need to know how it works.

EC2 and some of these other building blocks, however, I would not consider to be cloud services. Merely tools for building out your own cloud services to other customers who then shouldn't have to think about failover and other such concerns.

If you know you are using a server that is physically located in a certain geographic location, it need not be represented by a cloud. It is a distinct point on the network.