You need to also look into why DevOps became a thing. Because devs were sick of the BS dealing with Ops teams (want a server, that will take 6 months to provision). So devs decided they could do it themselves (with better tools).
Now you pay AWS anywhere from 5-11x more for an instance, but you still have an ops team managing it (by some name).
If you had given even 20% of that investment to the sysadmins you would have had an equivalent system.
AWS just weaponised this short-sighted thinking that was killing ops teams.
From what I recall it was AWS developers trying to solve object storage, and EC2 came later. Not about ops.
And failed. Other people’s jobs always look easy from the outside
What do we think we were using Perl for?
Job Security (joking)
The difference with those tools is that they were off the rack and not bespoke. There were plenty of bespoke systems before, used in fewer places because bespoke systems are expensive.