And beyond that, in terms of "simple VPS's" there are a TON of competitors and some of them are already starting to move "up the stack" by adding new features and services like object storage.
That's not to say that AWS isn't fairly dominant at the moment, but there is enough competition to keep them honest. See, for example, how they've had to continue to lower prices on a regular basis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Aircraft_and_Transport_...
Azure has more locations, and is better than AWS is several areas.
What Azure and GCE both have over AWS is better performance and better cost. AWS on the other hand has more services that just work together. So you either choose ease of integration or better performance. My company chose ease of integration.
Example, Amazon owns its CDN, Amazon owns all its services. Everything is in house, developed to work together, and just works out of the box, and you are dependent only on AWS.
Azure CDN uses Akamai. So it's not entirely in house designed and built. So we are now reliant on two companies working smoothly together rather than just one keeping it together. Not a huge issue, but something my company also had to factor in on reliablity.
Same with SLA. AWS has a better up time than Azure and GCE.
Again, not to say these services are inferior, but to say Azure is a better service is a lie. Does it have better performance on networking and HDD side? Yes, but I will take slower performance over a better up time, every time.
You shouldn't ding me on voicing a clearly labeled opinion as an opinion.
> but to say Azure is a better service is a lie.
Like you did here. This is ridiculous. You have your value judgement, I have mine. They're different.
That's not necessarily true: https://www.theinformation.com/how-aws-stacks-up-against-riv...
Maybe that should change. But... even if we take it at face value...
Name a company in the world that is competing at scale and cost with AWS.
In the US, Amazon is definitely nowhere near suffering a loss of customers from Google and Microsoft's offerings. and they're securing massive contracts with key institutions in the US.
There's 1 in China, I guess. That market isn't freely accessible.
Cloud services providers are a New Thing but a Thing which is absolutely critical to the world market. It's utterly unregulated right now, and that's pretty crazy given how much power it has. The only thing holding AWS rates in check is the threat of competition from 2 other American companies, and the hope of securing more critical telcom and bank contracts.