Load balancing, fault tolerance, high availability, arbitrary scale, messaging, orchestration, autoscaling, warehousing, big data processing, identity management, desktop management, secrets management, container registries, source code management, build tools, hardware test suites, gpu hardware, observability tools...
Those of use that use cloud providers know full well why we use them (and certainly know when not to).
It makes sense that bargain-bin providers would offer inferior reliability, but there are providers out there other than the big 3 cloud providers and the bargain-bin VPS providers.
GitHub for instance is apparently [0] hosted by Carpathia [1].
[0] https://github.com/holman/ama/issues/553
[1] http://www.carpathia.com/ (they should really fix https://www.carpathia.com )
Re #2: I love all the other stuff. I never use EC2. Lambda, Cognito, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, Route 53, and API Gateway are my default stack, managed by Cloudformation. Granted, I'm doing smaller projects, but the costs are minimal, the setup time is trivial, the documentation is excellent, everything is nicely compartmentalized and 'just works' together. And I only pay for the actual traffic to the site.
I think that's a myth. People assume it's true because it should be true. I don't think it is true.
> 2nd AWS is not only a VPS provider.
It's a glorified VPS provider. Most of the stuff doesn't matter to most of the people using AWS, but they go for it so they can put it on their resume and because they don't want to get fired for choosing something that's not a big name.