yes, but I am glad about how many job titles are obsoleted for many businesses due to how compute instances are managed.
much smaller organizations used to need a full blown database administrator or two, and other personnel dedicated to keeping the server up. or you were doing it all yourself and spending your time on that.
much higher barrier of entry than today where you have an untold number of computers spun up for you in an instant and a bunch of cached versions on yet more computers in the CDN and another process keeping those caches updated, with you just thinking its one single instance used because you're on the hobby plan.
When I worked at smaller places, developers handled infrastructure and development. As the company grew, dedicated specialists came onboard to help.
Today, at smaller places, developers handle the cloud infrastructure, and as the company grows, they bring on dedicated specialists to help.
The biggest difference, I think, is that we have so many specialized products. We are no longer trying to figure out how to make a shoehorned relational DB scale, instead we start with a database designed for specific workloads.
I disagree with this statement. Yes, you could rent, but not by the hour and based on compute power, and couldn't rent extra storage again by the hour and by the GB. Plus, you couldn't interact with these "virtual servers" through APIs.
I was at AWS 2008-2014 (early days!), and I think you should consider the impact of the "on-demand", API-by-default, nature of the AWS offering. Oh, and don't forget that with a valid credit card you could be up and running in literally minutes, not weeks.
Back then AWS had decent performance, but it was pretty bad when compared to more traditional Colo offerings; but in regards to the above aspects it dominated the scene, undisputed. IMHO, that's what gave AWS most of the initial traction.
Right - because it's so cheap you don't need to rent by the hour.
Your disagreement here is without merit. You are talking about facets that were never even mentioned by the GP. If you wanted to list those things off as why the previous situation was suboptimal, fine, do that. But how can you disagree with a (presumably) completely factual statement?
Getting hard assets is a core part of business in basically every industry, so I found it strange to claim that it was some major obstacle just because it happened to be servers instead of trucks or factory equipment.
Of course since then things have improved and you can now expect your sever to be provisioned within minutes, along with a nice dashboard to manage it. It's a bit more involved if you want to build your own server and put it in colocation somewhere, mostly because that involves being physically present.
Edit: Actually I remember using actual cloud provider back in 2008 - it was called Virtualmaster, one of the first cloud providers in central EU. They offered a free (!) VPS with 256 MB RAM and 1/4 CPU - I had a minimalist Debian image that allowed me to run full LAMP stack on it and an IRC client in tmux session.
Another cool central EU provider was 4smart. Their offering used to be that you only paid for resources you actually used - but for VMs. If you consumed only 10MB RAM, you only paid for that. I had servers cheaper than 1 EUR/month running continuosly with their own IPv4 there. They changed the pricing structure after few years.
Emphasis on backup.
It took longer to provision than EC2 and all you had for storage is a fixed amount of disk, but that was absolutely sufficient for many businesses.