At the high end AWS was a huge win for "traditional enterprises" because it broke them free from being held hostage by their own internal IT bureaucracies. Ent

At the high end AWS was a huge win for "traditional enterprises" because it broke them free from being held hostage by their own internal IT bureaucracies. Enterprises provided many of the things inside AWS but much, much worse. I actually think the political revolution it (cloud) triggered was a bigger thing than the technical and engineering changes. AWS is expensive compared to a machine under your desk but not so much compared to the fully loaded cost of (say) a VMware VM at a bank DC, which includes multi-year enterprise hardware & software commitments to make it go plus staff and admin costs. The DC model choked off innovation that was not approved "from the top" and severely damaged agility.