Sure, google and Microsoft and IBM joined the party, but AWS was first and remains the best holistically. This is their moment of domination, and eventually something will knock them down, but they have made so many companies so nimble and powerful in ways that were impossible before. Go Amazon.

WhatsApp Stats (2014):

- 450 million active users, and reached that number faster than any other company in history.

- 50 billion messages every day across seven platforms (inbound + outbound)

- 32 engineers, one developer supports 14 million active users

- $60 million investment from Sequoia Capital

Which they managed their own FreeBSD servers hosted on SoftLayer.

[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-archi...

YouTube (2008):

"YouTube grew incredibly fast, to over 100 million video views per day, with only a handful of people responsible for scaling the site"

- 2 sysadmins, 2 scalability software architects

- 2 feature developers, 2 network engineers, 1 DBA

"They went to a colocation arrangement. Now they can customize everything and negotiate their own contracts."

"Sequoia invested a total of $11.5 million in two separate rounds and was the only venture firm to invest in the company." [3]

[2] http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/business/09cnd-deal.html

There is a sweet spot where cloud is good and provides some benefit but, once you're serving hundreds of millions of people and have double-digit millions in investment, you can probably do significantly better cost-wise rolling your own servers. Worst case, you just throw your own hypervisor management system on them and have most of the same features you got from a cloud service. If you're smart, you can probably architect it so you have on-demand overflow capacity from a cloud provider in case there's a spike you can't account for, which is the best of both worlds.

and yeah, they were down all the time, but that didn't seem to matter to their growth.

The part of that solution which was related to making the system scalable was written by two of us, who also did other things (it involved a partionable backend storage service, and a user registration service, that combined to let us migrate users between servers to even out load and partition storage; everything else was stateless).

This idea that AWS is necessary to build to scale with small staff just does not match reality. My years of consulting also showed me that I'd earn more from clients who insisted on AWS - they typically spent far more time and resources on devops (and spent far more on hosting overall).

AWS is convenient, and it's great when you can afford it, but it's expensive and still requires substantial devops effort.

Indeed. Hopefully, soon they'll stop selling physical items in that online store they have and focus on their strengths, so that other companies, who might be able to do better at selling things that aren't so frequently counterfeit that I no longer buy anything from Amazon, can have a go.

Could you expand on this?

I can't tell if you mean to launch a service/company or if you're talking about some large scale.. thing.. I haven't heard of.

Hard to imagine that without AWS.

I'm being serious, how do you design an API and a set of distributed intercommunicating systems in a way that doesn't couple you with their specific APIs, communication channels and semantics?

I don't think it's possible.

I can see suggesting using open source solutions instead that you run on your own, but that still couples you to those specific solutions, except they're open source so in theory you could fork it and have more control over them. I get that. But this is a different argument I feel. Since the cost of maintaining these open source products on your own is high, and the cost of switching to a different open source solution is as much as moving to another cloud provider.

I think the only form of lock in right now that might seem designed by the business, and not an artifact of the tech itself, is the high price of exporting your data out.

I think AWS is basically a large SaaS that sells you solutions to problems you have at scale. I don't think the lock in is only in the effort to export data, the lock in is also that a company will use the same building blocks for every new project or new feature on existing projects because their current staff is already trained and new hires don't know how to do it without those services either.

So just like in the 90's nobody got fired for buying IBM, today nobody gets fired for using AWS, even though they don't have problems at the scale AWS is great at.

I believe this is what Rackspace was attempting a while ago -- leveraging OpenStack to provide cloud services, so you'd be free from lockin in the sense that you could move to some other OpenStack compatible provider.

Wow, this is a scary but very real thought.

Though, the "Certified Windows XP / 7" stickers on hardware and video games / other software was quite common back in the day and isn't too dissimilar.

I would argue that the level of vendor lock-in Amazon is going for is far greater than Microsoft's.

If there were an open standard for "way to upload and store and serve files on the web", and S3 happened to implement that standard, and other companies and open-source projects did as well, then it wouldn't matter to me if AWS was the bundling king or not.

There was nothing magical about the design of Unix, either. It's not the only way to make an operating system, or even the best way. It survived because we got many competing implementations which were basically source-compatible. It really took off when we got free clones that anyone could run on their PC.