[ecarlin]

Rackspace Cloud tries to balance delivering the power of cloud with the simplicity/constructs of traditional infrastructure. It doesn't have the complexity of AWS, but that strength is also a weakness since it lacks the features and sophistication of AWS. So, depends on what is desired. The AWS complexity can absolutely be challenging for small teams. That's one of the reasons Rackspace created Fanatical Support for AWS (http://www.rackspace.com/aws). While AWS provides economies of infrastructure, Rackspace Fanatical AWS provides "economies of expertise" via management tools and hundreds of AWS devops engineers, architects, etc. The two services are very complimentary and even small teams can tap into expertise at scale to overcome the AWS complexity hurdle. One option worth considering for those who want the power of AWS and are concerned about complexity. [Full disclosure: I work for Rackspace. I helped build the Rackspace Cloud and now work on our Fanatical AWS team.]