For myself, I've been using a "personal" cloud at home (a couple Hyper-V Servers, load whatever OS and application I feel like playing with / learning) and find it to be perhaps one of the best ways to learn new tech.

SQL2012 Always On? Stand up a pair of Server2008s as VMs, follow the directions, and play with it. Log shipping? Ditto.

You don't *need* to use a "commercial" offering to use a "cloud" for development / testing / evaluation purposes. At my previous employer, we used VMs (all on-premise servers) for spinning up OSes to test our application on. Need to see how it works with WinXP? Load up a VM. Testing the application over a VPN? Spin up a pair of VMs on separate ISP lines (yes, they have / had multiple ISPs) plugged into the VPN routers we suggested and try it.

When people say "cloud" most automatically think of the big commercial offerings (Azure, Amazon, etc.) But it doesn't have to be. It can be a couple virtualization hosts living in your server room.