Yep, that is why I specifically noted in the article, that given enough resources, it is possible to survive and even thrive in the cloud (Netflix being one of the best examples of that), but in case of a startup it is not aways the best idea to keep burning money and engineering resources when your primary job is to keep building a business.

And no, I don't think they're getting any real special treatment from Amazon since every single talk from a Netflix engineer points out the the cloud-specific issues they're solving in their infrastructure software.

Netflix uses thousands of instances, they don't share servers.

Using thousands of servers doesn't mean that you don't share physical servers.

Even if you own all the VMs on a physical server it's hard to avoid the noisy neighbour problem. Netflix has its own instance monitoring tool - Vector - to handle these issues: http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/02/a-microscope-on-microser...