A Brief History of High Availability
Hmm, I think potted history is more correct...There is no mention hardware here. HP, Compaq, IBM and Sun all produced hardware with HA ability. Meaning that normal software could be run on two or more nodes, and should one break, it'd fall over with no loss of data, or outages. Here is a (contrived) video where they literally blow up a server stack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMCHpUtJnEIYou can do this with VMware, and if AWS could see a way to make money, they'd do it to. (For  a while AWS's platform was not capable, but that was 7+ years ago. its much more lucrative to make people build in HA and redundancy into software, as its requires more services to run)