FREE HISTORY OF COMPUTING COMPANIES LESSON
2006 — Rent the machine by the request
AWS and infrastructure as a metered API
Rent the machine by the request
S3 and EC2 exposed storage and compute through programmable, pay-as-you-go interfaces. Startups could trade capital expenditure and provisioning delay for variable cost and dependence on a provider. The provider turned operational expertise and economies of scale into reusable primitives; the customer gained speed but inherited pricing, egress, regional, identity, and control-plane boundaries.
Cloud converts infrastructure from owned capital into a metered service by hiding operations behind APIs, moving both toil and strategic dependency to the provider boundary.
Institutional reconstruction
Compare owned infrastructure and cloud for a bursty workload using utilization, lead time, staffing, failure ownership, unit cost, and exit cost. Specify the observation that would reverse your decision.
Trace the scarce resource, coordination mechanism, power boundary, and newly possible failure.