This analysis completely skips over the "elastic" aspect of cloud infrastructure, which was a key motivator for using these providers since the very beginning and is as relevant today regardless of company size.
My company (which is in fact part of the charts in the article) had every single metric across the board spike 15-20x basically overnight when the pandemic started last year in March. Our entire infrastructure burden was clicking a few buttons on the AWS console and making sure everything was provisioning and scaling as needed. If we had to send out people to buy hard drives and server racks at that time, there is no chance we would have been able to meet the extra demand.
Plus, if you give me a few dozen capable engineers today I'm not going to waste their efforts on rebuilding AWS to get a best-case few percentage point return on our cloud spend. I'll launch a new product for our customers instead.
That’s a valid point. I don’t want to argue pedantry but I’ll say I worked some media companies that experience 5x normal volumes a few times a year during events before returning to “normal”, making AWS an obvious choice.
I’ve also worked for a place so large in AWS we hit walls where we hit Amazon’s literal physical limit and had wait for them to go out and buy the hardware for us to provision.
For Dropbox specifically I don’t see them being any form of special case, if it saves money and they obviously had operational experience so it makes sense
My company (which is in fact part of the charts in the article) had every single metric across the board spike 15-20x basically overnight when the pandemic started last year in March. Our entire infrastructure burden was clicking a few buttons on the AWS console and making sure everything was provisioning and scaling as needed. If we had to send out people to buy hard drives and server racks at that time, there is no chance we would have been able to meet the extra demand.
Plus, if you give me a few dozen capable engineers today I'm not going to waste their efforts on rebuilding AWS to get a best-case few percentage point return on our cloud spend. I'll launch a new product for our customers instead.