Comment by throwup238 12 hours ago
AWS also made huge inroads in big companies because engineering teams could run their own account off of their budget and didn’t have to go through to IT to requisition servers, which was often red tape hell. In my experience it was just as much about internal politics as the technical benefits.
Absolutely. At several startups, getting a simple €20–50/month Hetzner server meant rounds with leadership and a little dance with another department to hand over a credit card. With AWS, leadership suddenly accepted that Ops/Dev could provision what we thought was right. It isn’t logically compelling, but that’s why the cloud gained traction so quickly: it removed friction.
> At several startups, getting a simple €20–50/month Hetzner server meant rounds with leadership and a little dance with another department to hand over a credit card.
That's not a startup if you can't go straight to the founder and get a definite yes/no answer in a few minutes.
> which was often red tape hell
Seconded. I was working for a storage vendor when AWS was first ascendant. After we delivered hardware, it was typically 6-12 weeks to even get it powered up, and often a few weeks longer to complete deployment. This is with professional services, e.g. us handling the setup once we had wires to plug in. Similar lead time for ordering, racking, and provisioning standard servers.
The paperwork was massive, too. Order forms, expense justifications, conversations with Legal, invoices, etc. etc.
And when I say 6-12 weeks, I mean that was a standard time - there were outliers measured in months.