Right, but my argument is that most products--especially when the company is a startup--doesn't need that kind of scalability and won't for quite some time, if ever.
They all start out starry-eyed thinking they're the next unicorn and oh-my-gawd what if we start getting the kind of traffic Facebook gets tomorrow?! That's just not a reality. Facebook themselves didn't get that traffic for several years.
I think you're missing the benefits outside of scalability. There are a lot of native AWS services that help you to quickly prototype and build reliable solutions. A startup saves a lot of money (and time) by not needing to hire a whole devops team to manage various service clusters.
the biggest thing in the cloud is storage and managed databases. replacing a dead server with s3 is super easy. managing a database server can be challening aswell.
if you have one node you still need to do backups and s3 is just way easier. also when you abstract your storage your application has a way better structure. I already refactored tons of applications where System.IO or java.io were all over the place. with object storage from the start, you barely run into that problem.
