> We moved the platform and every photo to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the industry leader in cloud computing, and modernized its technology along the way. As a result, pages are already 20% faster and photos load 30% more quickly. Platform outages, including Pandas, are way down. Flickr continues to get faster and more stable, and important new features are being built once again.
SmugMug did it primarily to improve stability and performance. They point out that Flickr hosts tens of billions of photos with 100M registered users and hundreds of thousands of paying customers across the globe. I see the need to use AWS (or any cloud provider for that matter) as a necessity to run a paid web service cost effectively at this scale.