Agreed. However, Amazon's pricing and rather complicated infrastructure means that there will always be a market for people like the DigitalOcean's of the world (I just want a cheap VM, now).

I feel sorry for all the people in 5 - 10 years who discover Amazonis now in a position to charge monopoly rents.

And yet, they don't. Compare that to Oracle. Plus, when Amazon makes a new cloud architecture that gets popular, others copy it. OpenStack will have this if need be in a year or two and then you can port to OS in 5 years when the rent goes up.

Oh, and FWIW, when has AWS raised a price? My servers have gotten cheaper every year I've had them with AWS (3).

Regarding OpenStack and something similar, there is the underlying workflow service (not quite the same I know) called Mistral. A project called StackStorm that is related but adds event handling and a rule engine launched a couple weeks ago.

Though several of them run architectures on open technologies, which places them in a different situation entirely.