> 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.

VPSes and non-custom configs for dedicated servers were pretty instant as far as I know, I think the advantage of AWS was more that you could scale up and down much more easily since you weren’t locked down in a monthly contract, and that you could automate server provisioning through an API.