[Cthulhu_]

I feel fine; one of the main selling points of cloud computing (as will be imprinted on you if you ever do an AWS course, sigh) is that before, if you wanted to launch a product, you had to invest in a huge amount of hardware first - just look at the first few years of Twitter where they were struggling to scale up. I mean yeah you could (and can) get managed hosting, rent some servers still at a lot of providers, often for cheaper than at Amazon, but scaling those out is not easy at all.

Nowadays? If Twitter launched today they would have had no trouble scaling up from one user to a hundred million within weeks. AWS is a major (MAJOR) factor in the startup boom, and allows for crazy levels of scaling for new startups that attract a lot of users. If you set up your stuff right before launch, getting slashdotted (or the HN variant) is a thing of the past. The only limit to scaling now is your credit limit.