Honestly, I think Twitter is a counterpoint to your argument.
Twitter was founded in 2006, the same year AWS was launched, so in the early days Twitter didn't have a choice - the cloud wasn't yet a viable option to run a company.
And, if you remember in the early days, Twitter's scalability was absolutely atrocious - the "Fail Whale" was an emblem of Twitter's engineering headaches. Of course, through lots of blood, sweat and tears (and millions/billions of dollars) Twitter has been able to build a robust infrastructure, but I think a new company, or a company who wasn't absolutely expert-level when dealing with heavy load, would be crazy to try to roll their own at this point unless they wanted to be a cloud provider themselves.
> And, if you remember in the early days, Twitter's scalability was absolutely atrocious - the "Fail Whale" was an emblem of Twitter's engineering headaches.
That's because Twitter was:
1) A monolith
2) Written in Ruby
They started splitting components up in to specialised made-for-purpose components using Scala atop the JVM, and scaling ceased being a big issue. The problems they ran into couldn't be solved by horizontal scaling. There wasn't any service that AWS offers even today that would have helped with those engineering challenges.
Yes, based on their own detailed analysis and extensive technical blogs on the subject. Ruby was doing a lot of processing of the tweets contents etc. etc, and at the time Ruby was even worse for performance than it is today. (Ruby may be many things, but until the more recent JIT work, fast was not one of them).
Twitter was founded in 2006, the same year AWS was launched, so in the early days Twitter didn't have a choice - the cloud wasn't yet a viable option to run a company.
And, if you remember in the early days, Twitter's scalability was absolutely atrocious - the "Fail Whale" was an emblem of Twitter's engineering headaches. Of course, through lots of blood, sweat and tears (and millions/billions of dollars) Twitter has been able to build a robust infrastructure, but I think a new company, or a company who wasn't absolutely expert-level when dealing with heavy load, would be crazy to try to roll their own at this point unless they wanted to be a cloud provider themselves.