AWS Era

After decades of slow, manual, and hardware-bound deployment, the industry reached a breaking point. Companies needed to scale faster, deploy safer, and operate globally – without owning data centers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) emerged as a direct response to these pressures, fundamentally changing how systems are designed, deployed, and operated.

The World Before AWS

Before AWS, companies faced:

• Months-long hardware procurement
• Over-provisioning to handle peak load
• Manual server setup
• Expensive data centers

Scaling infrastructure required predicting the future, which most teams got wrong.

Amazon itself faced these problems internally while running its e-commerce platform.

AWS

Amazon made cloud infrastructure easily accessible. Anyone—whether a student, an entrepreneur, or a startup—could create an AWS account and have a virtual machine up and running within minutes.

As a result, a large number of teams began migrating their existing applications to AWS. Initially, this migration was mostly about moving servers rather than rethinking architecture—applications that once ran on on-premise machines were now running on EC2 instances.

Alongside this, Amazon strongly promoted the idea of cloud-native systems. AWS provided managed, production-ready implementations of core infrastructure components such as Redis, MySQL, Elastic Load Balancers, and CloudFront CDN. Instead of installing, configuring, and operating these systems manually, teams could consume them as services with a few API calls.

This availability of ready-to-use infrastructure significantly lowered the barrier to building and scaling systems, and many organizations began adapting their architectures to leverage cloud-managed services.

However, despite all these advancements, one major problem still remained unresolved: environment consistency. Application setup was still tightly coupled to the operating system, runtime versions, and system libraries. Development, staging, and production environments often differed in subtle ways.

As a result, the infamous phrase—

“It works on my machine”

– was still very much applicable, even in this cloud era.

The Persistent Environment Problem

Even in the cloud era, applications were still tightly coupled to:

• Operating systems versions
• Language runtime
• System libraries
• Manual configuration steps

Development environments differed from staging, and staging differed from production. Subtle mismatch cause failures that were hard to reproduce.

The cloud solved infrastructure availability, but it did not solve environment consistency.