[ASalazarMX]

Tried to edit my original comment because two people asked the same, but it didn't update, so I'll resume it here:

- No devops, you have real sysadmins whose priority is security and system administration, not development.

- Not relearning to invent the wheel every six months. The technology changes incrementally. If you get out of the field for a few years, read the "what's new" sections of the new manuals to catch up.

- Documentation. IBM docs are great, remind me of NASA docs. They have everything you need, you can go days without googling a problem.

- Backwards compatibility. Decades old sources can be compiled, decades old binaries can be run. Architecture changes are handled transparently.

- Simplicity. The interfaces might seem primitive compared to PC OSs, but there's also less complexity, and less attack surface.

- Uptime. Almost everything, including CPUs, is hot-swappable. This doesn't add to the joy, but it's remarkable.

[MisterPea]

Very interesting. Having worked at AWS in the past, the company had very similar features/principles to what you have mentioned except for simplicity.

I think it's things like these which makes me thing AWS will remain the top cloud provider for the next few decades.

[xylophile]

You're spot on about simplicity, and it's the reason AWS may not remain the top cloud provider for much longer. There is no effort to implement any sort of consistency across their famed two-pizza teams -- that wouldn't be "Day one". So each service has its own IAM quirks, making basic security at scale a nightmare, and in some cases impossible.

Azure policies are comparatively a breeze, making it the smart and increasingly obvious choice for any regulated (read: large) corporation.