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by sharms 1461 days ago
Each cloud comes with unique service / API complexity and despite being managed services that experience does not translate 1:1 across clouds. For example AWS IAM policies cannot be reused, and there may be differences in availability, durability, feature set et al. A good reason to choose AWS may be to minimize deltas between stacks, and often it is a fair assumption that their service offerings have been used by a significant amount of enterprises.
1 comments

> it is a fair assumption that their service offerings have been used by a significant amount of enterprises.

AWS revenue is 62B. Azure Cloud revenue is 23B. GCS revenue is 22B. I'd say that at 42% of the market, other cloud provider service offerings cumulatively are used by a significant amount of enterprises as well. These revenue numbers are probably artificially deflated due to the land war going on between these business units (i.e. Azure/GCS have to offer larger discounts to steal business from AWS) so it's hard to actually compare without deeper analytics access into these providers. Regardless, even individually these are massive revenue numbers indicating there's plenty of deployments on each of the clouds. Also, the "nobody got fired for IBM" reasoning is pretty flawed in tech; it's kind of ridiculous how often this argument is made.

Just to preface this next bit. I'm not asking about scenarios like "I run all parts of my business on AWS" which could change the benefits towards AWS (vendors love lockin because it raises prices). I'm asking mainly about a greenfield project that is selecting between the clouds equally.

> Each cloud comes with unique service / API complexity and despite being managed services that experience does not translate 1:1 across clouds

AFAIK the vast majority of all of this has been thoroughly commoditized. Do you have anything specific that you see as an important product/feature that Amazon has that the other's don't?

> AWS IAM policies cannot be reused

Not relevant for new deployments & AWS IAM policies are famously overly complex resulting in security vulnerabilities due to misconfiguration, but sure. IAM policies are unique to each cloud provider.

> and there may be differences in availability, durability, feature set et al

Experientially it seems like Google has an advantage there - AWS seems to have more frequent and longer-lasting outages. I doubt durability has a major difference & feature sets tend to be fairly even between them (might matter for the long tail). Also, that statement feels kind of empty as all it says is that there "may be" differences without stating any or which provider might come out ahead.