EC2 was released in 2006. Digital Ocean was founded in 2011.
back
1 comments
Okay thanks. I will remove digital ocean, my mistake. Linode and Slicehost I have used for many many years though so I'm sure those are correct.
I wasn't really in the cloud world in 2006, but AFAIK EC2 was pretty inventive/original/game changing in that it allowed anyone to immediately fire up and use VPS. Although there were (small) exiting services, these had enterprise entry level requirements, where you had to be approved as a customer before hand, provide all code that you wanted to run on their machines, and contact humans on the provider's end in order to up/down scale. Open to correction.
No, AWS was not unique. It became well-known because a) Amazon had the money to pump into marketing it, and Amazon was already a strong brand and b) aggressive integration of additional non-hosting services like S3 and Route53 made it a simple one-stop shop. They had the brand credit to get enterprise clients on the hook. As the rest of this thread is stating wrt DSC, the success is really only slightly related to the technology.
Linode and other hosts have had online billing since their inception. You could always launch a VPS on linode in seconds. Even shittier hosts like HostGator or Dreamhost never required human contact to launch new servers.
EC2 was game changing for certain reasons but what you mention sbout 'enterprise' was never an issue.
I remember having VPS-like setup over 10 years ago for cheap, on FreeBSD using jails.