More companies are moving to the cloud from managed colo than the inverse. For example, companies like Uber and Adobe has been moving from their own datacenters to AWS. Even dinosaurs like Disney have moved to the cloud.
Anyone who saves a significant amount of money running their own DCs vs uses the cloud either has significant security requirements or is the in the business of selling infrastructure (ex. Dropbox)
Everyone is waking up to the "total cost" of software development. Market forces are forcing people to realize that developer time is the most valuable commodity there is.
Companies don't go to the cloud because they have silicon valley money to burn. They go to the cloud because every minute of their developer time that is not spent on development operations and maintainance of code that a cloud provider offers instead, is a minute they can spend on the core UNIQUE business proposition of the company.
You can bemoan the skills lost in our industry, but that always happened at every layer of abstraction in every technical industry.
If you price right, then if you scale to the point you need it for ongoing costs, you'll have money to spend on the one-time cost of building an abstraction layer over any locked-in services and switching to that, enabling both a migration off and, potentially, its own resellable product.
Not every platform needs EC2 instances. Most can build on Lambdas, API Gateway, and S3.
Not sure what evidence supports this notion of billions and privilege. If anything, AWS has democratized entrepreneurial endeavors.
> If anything, AWS has democratized entrepreneurial endeavors.
More likely AWS simply made a lot of money on the race to the bottom (or top) with regards to an ever faster, fatter, fancier and shinier Web. (Now everyone needs a CDN, everyone needs many PoPs, because the market forces demand this. Of course the total costs are enormous, but due to the increased scale and decades of technological changes the unit costs have gone down.)
> Most can build on Lambdas, API Gateway, and S3.
Sure, and it's great if people are aware of what kind of workload to put where. And if they build in rate limits. Otherwise they will be surprised when they run into the classic gotchas of "how we burnt all of our seed money on AWS bills".
A simple colocated server nowadays can do almost a petabyte a month for less than $1000. Lookup how much that is on AWS.
Lambdas and s3 are cool until you get ddos'd and now owe way more money. Or, your software doesn't work with lambda, which is true of the overwhelming majority of services.
AWS is for privledged companies playing with silicon valley monopoly money based on made up "evaluations", most people don't have that benefit.