To answer your question directly, AWS's poor spike handling has really made me distrustful of them. It's not that AWS's support staff is bad (actually, they're

To answer your question directly, AWS's poor spike handling has really made me distrustful of them. It's not that AWS's support staff is bad (actually, they're phenomenal given the difficulty of that job) but... the fact that I can be taken down by a big scale event because I can't pre-scale my ELBs without support help that takes hours is kinda annoying. Now, I've been TOLD by ___________________________________ this is actually because it's a pain in the butt and they're working to fix it, but AWS's budget seems to favor new shinies over iterating on the existing environment. Look how long it took us to get a new and less buggy AWS dashboard and that still hasn't propagated to all the internal services. I could go on. For example, my experience is that GCE's and even Azure's I/O and networking is way faster, more consistent and more reliable than AWSs. I host all my dev boxes on GCE because using an attached drive (so I can de/re-provision to save on costs) is much less agonizing. Also: google has some AMAZING database products that category kill whole infrastructure tasks. It's a very good kind of vendor lock-in when they can say, "You can't move away because no one else has found a way to provide our feature set."