Oh, for sure. A lot of startups don't need that ability. I work for a pretty infra heavy startup so AWS is simply required at this point. But we've hit AWS capacity limits during the worst times (one of our clusters processing 20k events/sec hit 100% utilization) and they literally had no capacity left for that instance type. It's not a perfect thing all the time.

But in the end, the pros significantly outweigh the cons. Our resource consumption is naturally extremely elastic. While we'll always need to slightly over-provision to maintain some headroom, adding/removing nodes throughout the variance saves quite a bit of $.

There are other benefits also:

1. You can get started for dirt-cheap or in some cases, free

2. There's a common API for requesting new instances and performing maintenance tasks

3. There are extra services available to help build your apps such as SES, S3, and RDS to name but a few I found very helpful.

I'm not saying anything in this thread is wrong. But in software engineering, we say "write the code that only you can write", which is a suggestion (but not a rule) to use pre-built libraries instead of trying to make your own. Perhaps we should also say, "run the instances that only you can run".

You can also rent VPS servers that are still cheaper than AWS temporarily and add them to the cluster whilst waiting for dedicated hardware.