> First, if you don't notice some random/unexpected EC2 instance failures, you don't have a big EC2 deployment. ...Not seeing any unique value proposition here for "the cloud".

Because when something fails, you don't have to care about the "why" as long as you can replace it. I see about 4 instances needing a maintenance per month per 1000. That's reasonable enough to not demand someone be full-time focused on making sure that only the good lights blink on the hardware.

> The point is that even when you're using EC2, you still have to set all of that up. Contrary to popular belief, EC2 is not a panacea that can magically make your software reliable and redundant.

You're making a strawman by suggesting people think it's a panacea. The advantage is that a lot of the work, maintenance, and feature improvements for 'infrastructure as code' is handled for you. Cloud hosting means writing the software layer and being done, no managing the infrastructure services, facilities, hardware, business relationships involved with rack/stack.

> It's just a nice interface that makes it easy to rent servers from Amazon.

To be fair, it's a _very_ nice interface.

> I know EC2 et al are popular because people like buzzwords, but that doesn't make it good business (or does it? Investors love cloud because it keep capex low, and because investors are buzzword-driven like everyone else; saying "cloud" will make them like you more and want to give you more money).

If you think cloud hosting is popular because of op-ex or buzzwords, I think you're out of touch. EC2 and Google Cloud are popular because they let you focus on getting shit done, even when you have variadic workloads that are uptime dependent.

> For companies that are still in the garage (literally in the garage), shelling out $20/mo for a couple of cheap VPSes from something like DigitalOcean is going to be just fine. But once you get bigger than that, there's no way to avoid paying attention to this stuff, even if paying Amazon tons of money creates a false psychological connection that makes you think they're doing the work for you.

They _are_ doing a lot of work for you. You say $20 is the point that it makes more sense to self-host. I'll be charitable and round that up to $100, but even at that price, there is _no way_ you'll be able to get something as fault tolerant or low-cost as a cloud hosted solution. Do you really think that for $100 a month you can self-host geo-close servers with redundancy to the point that you don't have to think about it? Keep in mind that "two is one and one is none" when planning your hardware purchase.

> Vastly overallocating here.

No, that's conservative for a major US city (e.g. where Snap would be doing the hiring). Have you tried to pull a handful of really good system hackers out of thin air recently? Even if you can get them, they're not cheap, and you'd need a sizable team to pull off the highly-redundant world-wide install that Snap needs for its growth projections. It starts off expensive to hire good tech and gets more spendy the longer you're fishing.

And that's even ignoring the costs on productivity (for that and other employees) when an employee isn't happy or decides it's time to leave -- staffing also takes money and attention to maintain.

> And the added benefit of being a trendy tech company is that after your company creates some extremely specialized solution, you can open-source it and watch with an uncomfortable mix of amusement and horror as 90%+ of other companies's tech departments contort themselves into pathetic, desperate architecture pretzels so that they can become cool by abandoning a stable, proven, mature stack for your company's experimental, sputtering, duct-taped abomination that requires a PhD to even get to compile.

You seem like you're speaking from personal experience. Having a working infrastructure that isn't a barrier to growth isn't trendy or sexy, it's a base competency for any internet-reliant business model.

> Sure, but they don't have to set massive gobs of money on fire for no reason along the way. But then, I guess they wouldn't be part of the Silicon Valley family if they didn't.

This isn't setting "massive gobs of money on fire for no reason", this is going with a high-performance datacenter that someone else maintains. They clearly have something very big in mind and I doubt they made a multi-$bb commitment without asking themselves "are we lighting this money on fire?"