[addicted]

I agree. Maybe Amazon sold it really well, but as far as I can remember, the response almost universally (including in financial circles) was that this was a great idea since it allowed them to leverage idle resources they needed to build out to handle peak loads (such as during the holiday season).

[canes123456]

That never made sense. What happened during holiday season? Everyone on AWS was put on hold?

[gregmac]

Amazon.com, even at its peak computing needs, is now a drop in the bucket.

Three years ago, in 2014, AWS was adding the equivalent hardware every day of what ran Amazon.com in 2004, when it was only a $700-million company. [1]

[1] https://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/11/14/rare-peek-massive-...

[umanwizard]

I don't know for sure but I'm guessing spot pricing for instances went way up.