[Supreme]

Fair enough, I stand corrected. The problem is in the culture surrounding cloud services, not with the providers themselves.

So it seems that the only real benefit to utilising cloud services is to make scaling up easier and save money.

[acdha]

I think the main problem is that "the cloud"'s primary audience are developers, not sysadmins. Many developers simply don't appreciate that what you're getting is a [much] easier path to automating your server provisioning and management but you're still in exactly the same position as before regarding any bit of infrastructure's ability to fail at the least convenient moment.