Initially I was skeptical as well. One server in a colocation will handle enough traffic until you can afford to hire all the people to make you web scale. But

Initially I was skeptical as well. One server in a colocation will handle enough traffic until you can afford to hire all the people to make you web scale. But then I started playing with the various tools and seeing how people used them, and it totally changed my view. The key point is that many of the new technologies in operations are about simplicity rather than speed. Standing up a stack in AWS can be flipped on and off like a light switch, and all the configuration steps can be much more easily automated/shared/updated/documented etc... It's not about any of these technologies being more efficient; it is about spending more in order to abstract away many of the headaches that slow down development. Certainly there are some people who are prematurely planning for a deluge of traffic and spending waayyy too many engineering resources on a 'web scale' stack, but that's not the majority.