I don't really buy the idea that companies can't afford to run their own computers due to hardware and infrastructure costs, and that clouds don't require hiring or specialised technical experts.
Pay per second Linux boxes with public IPs. A lot of the VPS/server hosts I used in the past took minutes to boot an instance and billed you by the hour (or maybe by the month, although that was uncommon), not so with EC2.
There’s much less value if you never need to scale of course, which is true of 90% of businesses. But doing a dumb experiment on a 10 cent spot instance for an hour where it would’ve taken a week to arrange space on the company VMWare box? That is awesome.
EC2 was billed by the hour initially. Minimum one hour charge as soon as you started an instance. It was still better than the alternatives; nobody else had per-hour billing with no commitments in 2006. Moving to per-second billing was a much later change (in 2017).
> Pay per second Linux boxes with public IPs. A lot of the VPS/server hosts I used in the past took minutes to boot an instance and billed you by the hour (or maybe by the month, although that was uncommon), not so with EC2.
It's only worth it if the pay-per-second box has an equivalent or better cost-performance ratio than the "legacy" alternative, otherwise it's still cheaper to get one "legacy" VPS/dedicated server, use it for 10 seconds and let the rest go to "waste".
Which is?
I don't really buy the idea that companies can't afford to run their own computers due to hardware and infrastructure costs, and that clouds don't require hiring or specialised technical experts.