people extol the benefits of cloud for fast scaling, powerful managed services etc and those things are absolutely true. But in my mind, the real "value add" in many industries was not the services. It was the API...
I just remember being in a meeting about colo and on prom where people argued about why the colo was better... I provisioned a working instance of our web site (a big job board) with load balancer and fresh databases via the API... and the arguments stopped when I showed the team. "While you were arguing, I deployed our entire infrastructure into AWS. Try it out at http://somewierdawsurl.something"
