Abandoned as in not being updated, and therefore falling behind all its competitors. Fair enough that services often continue to work the way they always have,

Abandoned as in not being updated, and therefore falling behind all its competitors. Fair enough that services often continue to work the way they always have, but I'm thinking more of the case where you're actively developing something, and the AWS service has major bugs or is missing significant features that all the alternatives have which makes your job harder building on top of it. Elasticsearch was a famous example, it went years without any updates during which time upstream Elasticsearch itself improved dramatically. Then they picked it back up again once the elastic.io hosted product got good enough that it was a much better alternative. Another example is ECS, which was out in the wild for a couple of years with a very limited feature set while GKE was completely eating its lunch and upstream Kubernetes got a lot of major improvements. Then AWS released EKS which sort of seemed to replace ECS for a while, but they have gone back and forth now for a bit with ECS having some features that EKS didn't have (e.g. fargate for a long time) and vice versa. There are all sorts of other support bugs I've stumbled across in their forums, too many to recall. Often years old threads that have never really been addressed. Edit: another one that comes to mind is cloudwatch/the entire monitoring & logging stack. It's very basic, not really a viable alternative at all to something like splunk. As such an important thing, I always kind of expected it to get better but it just didn't, you had to export your own logs/events to a separate ES cluster, or to Redshift via S3, or something else, etc. Whereas GCP Stackdriver is a much better solution out of the box.