>>5I blame piracy (or at least the paranoia about piracy) for the "
as a Service" meme.
You no longer own software like you used to. You used to pay and get a copy. You could use that copy offline. You could use it for as long as you want. But if you pirated it, you'd never need to pay the creators.
Now, you don't own any of your accounts or subscriptions. You merely pay to use them, and they mostly require internet connections to work properly. They can only connect to the company's servers, so you can't host your own version. So basically it defeats piracy to make every a monthly subscription or "as a Service" model.
>>6AWS is cool for the ability to scale out when you need it, and then scale back when you don't. With a traditional data center, you'd need to overprovision -- buying dedicated resources to meet your maximum capacity that you almost never reach.
Let's say you have a website that sells goods related to a certain holiday. You get next to no users most of the time, but you get a million users during the week surrounding the holiday. Should you build on-prem infrastructure to host a million users -- being capable of doing that every single day of the year? Or does it make more sense to have scalable resources in AWS or some other cloud platform like Azure or lolGoogleCompute?
Elasticity of cloud services is super cool. Microservices architecture, Docker, Kubernetes, etc. But it also doesn't make sense to go all in with cloud if you're a huge company, because it's just way more expensive. But when you're a startup, or you know you have a lot of high-traffic moments that don't last 24/7, it can be good to go with cloud stuff.
AWS has a billion APIs and I can't keep up with all of their offerings, but they have a lot of neat stuff.
It's all too easy to be a curmudgeon who dismisses all new things because it "ain't like the good old days." But don't be that guy who paints himself into a corner and ends up being the dinosaur who only maintains legacy COBOL and Fortran because he said new languages and ideas were bad.
Cloud is here to stay whether you like it or not.