More importantly, it has managed to replicate the entire hosted rack experience without requiring a company employ staff to manage it. Rackspace is nice but the

More importantly, it has managed to replicate the entire hosted rack experience without requiring a company employ staff to manage it. Rackspace is nice but they use OpenStack, which still struggles behind the plethora of networking options and protections AWS has - including VPCs, load balancers, firewalls, subnets both private and public, and so on. There's very little I can't virtualize in AWS that I might find in a typical rack at a co-lo facility, and in that, AWS has no competitors. (There are other offerings with varying degrees of awesomeness - Softlayer comes to mind - but bang-for-buck, my company still bets on AWS. My only gripe is I/O and the need for local-SSD-fast disk access for clustered KV database stores, which may finally cause us to start looking elsewhere.)