Comment by fooker
11 hours ago
AWS was launched around 2006 (2002 internally at Amazon I think).
Where could you rent VMs in 2006?
IIRC there were two ways to run stuff, get your own server or get an account on a big shared computer.
11 hours ago
AWS was launched around 2006 (2002 internally at Amazon I think).
Where could you rent VMs in 2006?
IIRC there were two ways to run stuff, get your own server or get an account on a big shared computer.
Ehm. Shared hosting was a thing since forever. VPS also existed.
Linode definitely had something along those lines.
Amazon won on APIs and overall integration but VMs were around already.
I remember the story really well as this is when i joined the workforce as a young GNU/Linux fan.
It was pretty regional back then, when I got VMs for clients we used UK providers (ElasticHosts maybe?).
Also people are throwing AWS start date of 2006, but AWS only really started catching on around 2008/2009 if I remember correctly. EC2 came out of beta late 2008, and EBS was only launched around the same time.
I don't think it even officially launched S3 until 2008, which is what all people really used it for initially for cheap remote backups.
It definitely took a while to get good. There was also a period where having 'noisy neighbours' impact VM performance was often discussed here. You didn't tend to have that same problem on the other VM hosts as people were using the VMs for hosting with generally low CPU usage, not for compute.
> Where could you rent VMs in 2006?
I was renting a Debian VM from Bytemark in 2005 that I used to host a mail and web server. I think they were one of the first operators in the UK.
In 2008, Softlayer did monthly rental with provisioning of baremetal servers in hours. They quite likely did it earlier, but I used them in 2008.
Everywhere. You could rent VMs everywhere.
And they were cheaper than renting AWS. MUCH cheaper. They still are.
The original point of AWS is that could scale according to demand. Have 10 VMs running at lunchtime and 1 VM running at midnight.
But using a cloud VM also required less server admin experience. It was a bit easier and came.pre-configured with things like firewalls.
And THAT is what ended up being the USP of cloud hosting. Especially when they started rolling out all the SQL as a service, redis as a service, etc.
You didn't need to really understand servers to run a server, and it turned out almost all developers really didn't want to understand servers. TBH, I don't, server admin sucks. Right now I'm working somewhere where I have to think about SSL certs occasionally and I consider it a complete waste of my life.
Digital Ocean came out like 5 years after AWS, what was revolutionary about that wasn't that you could spin up VMs quickly, it was the price. VMs went from $20-30 p/m to $5.
For developers who weren't SV rich, that meant you could run a side project without it being a significant cost.