Do you happen to have some examples? Very curious to hear about this.
Other companies had similar problems to solve, and they also had to build it themselves for the most part.
Kubernetes was launched in 2014, and similarly, was mostly a curiosity for a few years. Twitter at that time made an (probably?) unlucky bet on Mesos, a competing but not that similar technology, that is now pretty much dead.
Google Cloud launched it's VM service in beta in 2012. A lot of base AWS services did exist, but was similarly a curiosity: AWS 2012 revenue was 2 billion. This year they are on track to 80 billion.