They aren't even in the same ballpark. Hell, Google isn't even in the same ballpark as AWS and Google made $83million in the time it took me to read the article. DO is great, but doesn't belong in the same sentence as AWS.

Azure is closest I think. Enterprisey cloud hosting.

my goodness, I was reading through this entire thread and all I was thinking about is "How come no one is mentioning Azure".

I have tried Azure, AWS, and DO, and by far the most stable and usable one is Azure. I thought I was the only one who thought Azure was good...

Most people here (including me) are not windows people, so Azure is obviously not going to be the first place we look to.

They have linux VMs which is cool, but still not sure I would pick them.

MS has strong reputation of company with closed-source and vendor-locked stack, so many of us can't feel "first-class citizens" in the MS world. But they are working on their reputation, VS Code is a very good example, and I hope soon we will not afraid to trust them.

AWS doesn't target the same audience or have the same product line. They're related, but not at all the same product market. To illustrate this, AWS is infrastructure management tools, and DO is infrastructure management. The fact that AWS has infrastructure management as well (built on top of their own tools) is only relevant for the people that build out the rest of their infrastructure. DO is for folks that don't want to have to learn and understand infrastructure much at all. That's very doable these days for a lot of aspects of development, but it's also not at all what AWS is going for.

DO is closer to competing with just Elastic Beanstalk and maybe RDS (from the standpoint of a managed RDBM service, not the feature set).

> DO is closer to competing with just Elastic Beanstalk

Hu? DO is like EC2, a box on the net with an IP address. Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS that will auto-scale for you.

AWS is basically software defined enterprise/software defined business at this point. Their products and services are amazing, and they will certainly dominate the fortune with GOOG and M$, etc. I'd imagine the push down into the SMB will more a bit more difficult, the push up into the SMB with a more b2c(dev) product offering and community approach seems to be the the better game here, think Microsoft and Apple in the early days. These are still multi-billion dollar addressable markets, there is a lot of room to play in cloud.

But do they want to? AWS is going for a high price for a super super deep stack of 600 little services. I kind of like that DO focuses on their core VM thing.

Obviously you can't fake some things with just VMs (rolling your own VPC for example is kind of hard to do), but a lot of people don't need Redshift or SQS or any of the amazon SAAS things...