As this seems to be a repeating class of posts, the reality generally boils down to the same thing every time: - use requirements to find out what you need, no

As this seems to be a repeating class of posts, the reality generally boils down to the same thing every time: - use requirements to find out what you need, not buzzwords - comparing services with significantly different properties while ignoring those properties isn't helpful - playing datacenter in a virtual environment isn't the same as cloud architecture If you just need a virtual machine to do some stuff and loss of availability, reduced durability and lack of redundancy doesn't really matter, then you can get that pretty much anywhere. The same goes for DNS, object storage and SQL-based storage (ignoring database features). As soon as your needs for availability, durability and redundancy increase, your choices of service providers decrease because not every service provider provides the same servers at the same level. Integration of services is a whole different game as well and equally has fewer providers as the level of integration increases. Also: don't conflate integration with lock-in.