I would say this market is due for some consolidation. AWS has basically has enjoyed a nice market share for the last fifteen or so years. In recent years MS an

I would say this market is due for some consolidation. AWS has basically has enjoyed a nice market share for the last fifteen or so years. In recent years MS and Google have become credible alternatives and in addition to that there are now numerous smaller players that you could feasibly use as well. The key challenges in this space are standardization of commodity features, making the whole business of using any of these solutions less complex, and driving cost down. This goes against how the big three are making of course which is exactly through vendor locking aggravated by complexity. Once you figure out how to use this stuff, you have a lot of non portable stuff depending on that vendor. Replacing that costs money and is never a priority. That's why AWS stuff can be such a PITA to deal with. It actually ensures customers can't move away that easily. However, the common feature set shared by most of these cloud hosting solutions (running vms, databases, docker, load balancers, networking, etc.) is a combination of expensive to use and still too hard to manage. So, the game for new players in the market is being more convenient and less expensive to use. Ultimately private cloud and the cost of getting started as a PAAS provider getting lower means that this is a race to the bottom. Most of the smaller providers already lean heavily on OSS solutions. The question is whether the big three can long term afford to not support the emerging standard stuff. For example at least for me all the convoluted proprietary AWS stuff is actually increasingly a reason for me to avoid depending on them. It was great when they were the only company with decent solutions but that is increasingly less true.