My point was that there was nothing stopping every other company from doing this. Not in 2006, certainly not in 2012. Some of those companies, then and now (??

My point was that there was nothing stopping every other company from doing this. Not in 2006, certainly not in 2012. Some of those companies, then and now (??), are better positioned to truly drive towards zero because of how awful the price/perf is of cloud hosting. Storage aside, it's DO/Linode/OVH/Hetzner, not Amazon, that's driving towards zero. On an aside: Route 53's innovation is that, in huge number of cases, it's dirt cheap. But there have been relatively good and affordable DNS solutions before and since. I am a Route53 fan though, in large part because it's decoupled from AWS. You can use it (and S3) while avoiding everything else from AWS. Auto-scaling is what a sales engineer tells a C[ITE]O in exchange for a signed contract. Scaling comes from design/"architecture"...you can't auto scale your way out of bad design: stateful services, SELECT N+1, n^2 algorithms, LIKE '%spice', poor/unknown cache hit ratios and so on.