"At the end of the day, developers, whether you're in a startup or working in a big enterprise, you want to deliver stuff," Vosshall said.

By resorting to supplying their own infrastructure, developers either can overestimate what they need or, even worse, underestimate, he said.

An official with AWS user SmugMug, an online video and photo-sharing site, cited successes with Amazon services. SmugMug processes more than 40 terapixels a day and has peaks at times, such as Christmas, which must be accommodated, said Don MacAskill, CEO at SmugMug.

"We need to scale up and down a lot," MacAskill said. SmugMug even enjoys such benefits as not having to depreciate and amortize hardware purchases, he said. Updating software is easy, he added. The only issue MacAskill raised pertaining to AWS was it takes a minute or two to add instances.

"We're huge fans of Amazon Web Services and wouldn't be able to build our business the way we have without it," MacAskill said.