> Amazon doesn't provide useful tools for building durable multi-AZ applications. Most customers are not going to implement Paxos

Don't really agree here, yes they screw you financially on cross-AZ bandwidth, but all of their popular services are built to work well across availability zones.

Most people don't need access to a low level consensus service like Paxos, instead they will be using one of amazons managed database services, or s3, that provides higher level abstractions, and automatically manages consensus behind the scenes.