The other thing that AWS has going for it is widely adopted third party support. Pretty much any software, site, tool or service that has any sort of cloud moni

The other thing that AWS has going for it is widely adopted third party support. Pretty much any software, site, tool or service that has any sort of cloud monitoring, deployment etc feature will be integrated with AWS. This not true for any of AWS's competitors. I've never seen a third-party provide support for an AWS competitor before supporting AWS. I know monitoring tools that do not support Azure, Google Cloud or Rackspace. I know libraries that don't support all of them but always support AWS. In addition most sysadmins and developers will be more likely familiar with AWS's tools, API and dashboard. They'll be more likely to already have their development environment set up with AWS command lines tools. You ever heard of someone with HP cloud tools installed [1]? I frequently browse dotfiles on GitHub and often see non-sensitive AWS credentials and aliases. I've never seen a Rackspace or Google Cloud thing in them. AWS wins on mindshare. It's also a proven system. Infrasture decisions are really important, and downtime is very bad and when you choose AWS you know at the very least that if your shit goes down because of provider issues everyone else will be down too and you can kind of get a pass (although outsourcing downtime is kind of shitty), but if you're not on AWS and your shit goes down because of the provider people will ask you why aren't you using AWS. Your customers and investors might actually be unhappy with you because of this. As for support Google also has terrible support, Rackspace's managed support is very expensive and actually probably not what a competent team would want, otherwise it is easy to get a person on the phone at Rackspace, so that is commendable. Support doesn't scale, but if you are paying AWS a lot I bet you can get support. I don't really like the mono-culture of AWS everywhere, but I feel like the points above need to be raised. A standard on APIs like OpenStack would be nice, but implementations will differ and AWS will fight this kind of change and because of their dominance getting traction will be hard. [1] this is actually a thing: https://docs.hpcloud.com/cli https://docs.hpcloud.com/cli