This document summarizes a talk about building scalable systems for the cloud using Erlang. The speaker discusses how Erlang processes with local state (gen_servers) can act as units of throughput that can be composed across cloud computing instances to scale applications. By treating each gen_server as an independent unit of throughput, systems can leverage the elastic computing resources of the cloud in a loosely coupled way to easily scale up as more instances are added. In contrast to traditional monolithic architectures, this approach allows for fractal-like scaling where the overall structure remains similar at different scales.