One difference is that Heroku and similar are fairly young companies, whose infrastructure was largely built in "the cloud" and for "the cloud." Whatever precon

One difference is that Heroku and similar are fairly young companies, whose infrastructure was largely built in "the cloud" and for "the cloud." Whatever preconceptions the builders had about the charactaristics of the underlying environment, they started learning the reality and adapting to it relatively early in the project. Netflix is a sizable and successful business. It's more than a decade old. Their streaming business launched only 4 years ago, more than 6 months before EC2's general availability, and almost 2 years before EBS, and it would be even longer before any of it was a reasonable choice for a company of their size, launching a new service building off their existing customer base, that had to succeed to allow the company to navigate a major transition that the company had been planning for for years. The similarities and differences in their experiences would be interesting and probably informative, particularly if considered against the vastly different starting points.