I did use AWS for good 5 years and every time it's been inferior, e.g. launching times of EC2 instances were double that of Google Cloud, better than azure though (might have changed with new instance type may be), N2 and N1 instances in gcp are usually faster in start, stop delete cycle than AWS as recently as last week. Networking stack between regional nodes is not as performant with higher latency than google cloud with its andromeda network stack, on top its more expensive than google and microsoft for bandwidth. Even though I put critical comments for GCP on this article, I feel AWS fare no better, indeed I feel its worse.

I have yet to see any good open source project by AWS team in the wild like Kubernetes, Linux Kernel Namespaces and Cgroups, Map Reduce from Google or .NET from Microsoft. So far what I have seen is that AWS just leech on other open source like PostgreSQL to build Aurora and RDS service without really contributing back to PostgreSQL, because postgreSQL comes with BSD license AWS can just leech on it. Same for elastic search and many other open source they leech on. I am still waiting if they are really just leechers or giving back to the open source community. Like Amazon Redshift is based on an older version of PostgreSQL 8.0.2, and Redshift has made changes to that version [1], but nothing is made open source because BSD license do not require it. This is just one big example but there are many. For open source community and contributions I feel Google and Microsoft are much better than Amazon and AWS by miles. It's just that due to early start AWS is reaping benefits by leeching on open source.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/c_redshift-an...

It seems like you were much more on the infrastructure side than the development side. The discussion was about .Net. What was your experience with the SDKs to judge where AWS was behind MS supporting it?

How does open source help an end user who is deciding which cloud provider to use?

AWS is infrastructure as a service with some priorietray API's to provide platform to build applications. These platforms are build from open source projects which does not have GPLv3 or AGPL license. So AWS is largely an IaaS service not really a platform, open source library or system development company like Google or Microsoft.

AWS does not develop .NET SDK, as I mentioned in my earlier post there is no contribution of AWS in development of .NET, so they just provide infrastructure support of what ever Microsoft and the open source community releases.

In general microsoft acts as a steward to develop .NET and related infrastructure on Azure, then AWS copy and launch it as .NET infrastructure as service. They play catch up with Microsoft in this area.

I will stand corrected if you can show me that AWS (i.e. Amazon) has active open source .NET framework core developers in their internal team developing and enhancing .NET SDK or CLR open source versions.

They do the same with AI and ML Services. It is built using TensorFlow, sci-kit learn, pytorch, CNTK and various python and C++ open source libraries. Again I have yet to see example of AWS (i.e. Amazon hiring core developers of these libraries and release open source versions). They don't develop these libraries just leech on it to create it's own API's. I have yet to see any framework from AWS like TensorFlow, Keras, Pytorch and CNTK.

Again, the discussion was about AWS being behind Azure with respect to support for .Net. When deciding which cloud provider one should go with, why should I care as an end user which company did more for open source?

There is nothing to copy as far as .Net. Microsoft releases a new version of .Net, all AWS has to do is make sure that its SDK’s support it. But there usually aren’t any breaking changes.

As far as the other services that I could see needing to support, the only ones that I can think of is CodeBuild and lambda. For those two, you can create custom Docker images and runtimes respectively.

And the other question, are you a .Net developer?