I'm always surprised that comparisons like this with AWS miss the fundamental philosophical approach of the cloud offerings. AWS is "infrastructure as a servic

I'm always surprised that comparisons like this with AWS miss the fundamental philosophical approach of the cloud offerings. AWS is "infrastructure as a service". Hosts, network switches, load balancers - things that historically cost an arm and a leg, but they could virtualize. Add some elasticity and auto scaling, and you've got the foundation to build anything else on top. The hyper-specificity of SQS vs Kinesis, for example, comes out of the same philosophy: Provide the infrastructure, and let customers figure out what to build on top of it. Google, meanwhile, started with AppEngine - run your apps in the cloud without concern for the hardware. AWS's equivalent is Elastic Bean Stalk - more than one layer of abstraction higher than the default offerings.