AWS were first and dominated.

Microsoft moved late with Azure, but as they had so many customers in B2B already with SQL Server and Office, that they soon grew market share. Google Cloud followed and acquired companies like Firebase to differentiate.

    Market Share 2026


    AWS 28%
    Azure 21%
    Google 14%

IME quite a lot of poor tech decisions come down to techies being too dogmatic in their beliefs[1].

Move to AWS? All techies want to add that to their CV so sure why not... Who cares if it's the best decision as long as the CVs get improved.

============================

[1] My personal bugbear are techies who are adamant that nothing but google chrome can be used by the regardless of the fact that when pressed they can't find a single site that doesn't work on FF. Usually the goalposts are moved at some point in the discussion from "sites don't work on FF" to performance even though FF with uBlock origin cuts actual downloading of ads to zero compared to the uBlock lite on chrome. They'll next complain about memory used in FF compared to google regardless of the lack of any measurements and even though these same techies are using bloated electron apps daily anyway!

As you can tell, this really is a personal bugbear of mine.

Mostly because they’re the defacto SaaS providing that niche product for your niche usecase. The breadth of AWS in incredible.

Smaller annual opex is far easier to get approved then large multiyear capex with deprecation.

AWS was also cheaper in the beginning but has been slowly ratcheting up the pricing making colocation or on-premise viable again for some workloads which have steady compute demands.

What do you see as the alternative for the purposes of this discussion? Are we talking cloud vs. on-prem or colo, or are we talking AWS vs. other-cloud?

For the first (cloud vs. non-cloud) it's clear that cloud has some advantages because you don't have to manage hardware.

For the second (AWS vs. other-cloud), at least in my experience, AWS is simply the best experience available. If anything the other cloud providers go out of their way to offer special deals and cozy customer relationships to try to get customers to switch, but AWS is still the gold standard in availability and uptime and ease of use.

The gap is narrowing as the field becomes more commoditized though. And I think that's what we're really seeing here. As things like k8s get more common, solutions are becoming more and more substrate-independent, so companies hunt for smaller, more local, cheaper, ambitious alternatives. Everyone is scared of vendor lock-in so it's getting harder for cloud providers to offer distinguishing features.

They get you hooked on a teaser tariff. Like $100k worth of AWS, Azure, GCP credits. Like a good drug dealer, the first hit is free. Once you've convinced yourself that moving to AWS is the right move, based on the teaser rate, they've got you in their jaws. Most of your IT team is gone, most of your on-prem/colo hardware is outdated, and for tax reasons it's better to lease than to purchase capital intensive equipment. But now the low AWS rate is gone, you can't go back, and you'd look like a fool for calling your decision a mistake.

I really like AWS. But I feel like there is a lot of money to be made in consultants overselling services built on it. And a lot of traditionally expensive IT teams are being replaced with even more expensive cloud "architects".

For very small companies (startups) AWS makes a lot of sense because you have very few employees and you don’t want that limited employee time being spent managing servers

I can try to answer for US.

We're small (< 25 people). We maintained a single rack in a colo, and all the servers were showing their age. We weighed lease cost for replacement (along with hassle of actually doing it), and migrated into AWS last January.

It's been ... messy. I'm not certain we'll stay. It's easier in the sense that we can bring up arbitrarily many new machines without needing to call Dell when a host gets full, but it's definitely not cheaper. And weirdball AWS-only things get in the way. Oh, and literally nothing is simple or easy in administration or setup.

If I had it to do over again, I think I'd have bitten the bullet and leased more boxes instead.

Allows you to move stuff from capex to opex while remaining in compliance and governance lines.

They’re not idiots. A lot of thought went into it, and the idea it’s all just incompetent BS dreamt up on a golf course is madness.

Not enough humans to deal with physical machines and the compliance issues around them.

I agree if we are operating a cat meme distribution business that AWS starts to look a bit overkill. Something like a banking consultancy is a different matter. Good luck passing due diligence as a bank's vendor when you are also physically responsible for the machines. You can do this, but it sucks and it's your entire job + overtime + on call.

AWS has a dedicated feature (artifact) that can serve as the foundation of your compliance package. If you are racking your own machines you get to start with a blank pile of forms.

Because AWS technical expertise are second to none. And for most companies their AWS spend is small % of overheads. Sure they could spend less but their marketing department is lighting money on fire so that would be premature optimization.

They provide a service that simply nobody (except GCP and Azure) can easily match.

It's expensive, but you get what you pay for.

It’s easier in most companies to get a cloud bill approved than to ask for a big chunk of cash for hardware and also to pay someone to set it up