alt Hacker News> Cloud computing was an absolutely mind blowing revolution - suddenly your startup could run its own computer systems in minutes without need to install and run your own systems in a data center. This was an absolute game changer, and I really drank the AWS Kool Aid down to every last drop then I licked out the cup. I was all in on AWS in a big way.
Am I the only one who remembers that VPSes and dedicated hosting services were a thing before AWS came around? Yes you had to pay for a month at a time and scaling wasn’t as instant, but it wasn’t like the only option before cloud computing was having to drive to the datacentre and install your own server.
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If you recall AWS didn't scale instantly originally either.
We had super bursty traffic, and had to go with Google Cloud (very early days! [0]) because you'd need to communicate with AWS and pre-warm the ELB capacity of your expected bursts.
We did a dead launch to 60 million customers (0 to 60 million, no organic growth phase) this way. I wouldn't want to do that on a VPS.
Am I the only one who remembers how shady a lot of those VPS/hosting companies were? Seemed to be a race to the bottom, so a 'good' outfit might suck or completely disappear a couple years later. (Also, pricing was all over the map, I had a client who was paying $150/mo for a VPS.) Hetzner survived, but for a long time they had a reputation as spamfarm. So I get the initial appeal of AWS, used tactically. But for larger companies, its something like IBM or Oracle, if you are price-sensitive, it's not for you.
Not first, but it was the first with a planet-scale marketing budget.
I miss the Media Temple days.
> suddenly your startup could run its own computer systems in minutes without need to install and run your own systems in a data center.
The “in minutes” is doing a lot of the work in that sentence above.
I also used dedicated servers in the late ’90s (and they still offer great value today). But before AWS, provisioning new hardware typically took days, not minutes.
AWS changed that, and the rest of the industry eventually followed.