> Can you specifically give me examples of why using a cloud provider is better for a startup than, for example, using a couple desktops in your garage? For us

> Can you specifically give me examples of why using a cloud provider is better for a startup than, for example, using a couple desktops in your garage? For us (a small three-man team), the full portfolio of AWS services lets us shove responsibility for some of our infrastructure off to Amazon, which saves us loads of time (EC2, ELB, S3, CloudFront, SQS, Route53, SES, and some light DynamoDB in our case). Even with their repeat EBS issues, we've engineered around the common failure points, and do so with a tiny number of self-managed VMs relative to our traffic. Even if we were to go down every few months, our hosted services do better than a one-man devops team could ever do on his own in his garage, or even in a co-lo. Though AWS is not expensive, we gladly pay up in order to focus on our own software. Sure beats hiring another person, in our case. The common counter-argument is that if we managed it ourselves, that we'd have the ability to resolve outages on our own, because it'd be our responsibility. That is just the thing, we don't want it to be our responsibility, we've got one ops guy (me), and we need to be iterating on our product fast at this point. We'll instead plan for failure, design our architecture to continue operating under some degree of failure, and keep shipping. Not to say that the "cloud" is a silver bullet. It's not. However, especially from the developer point of view, it lets our entire (tiny) team stay more focused on product development. Addendum: I've managed servers in my basement, in co-lo, and in the "cloud". Each of these routes is more (or less) appropriate in various cases, but AWS has been a boon to our particular usage case.