Comment by brainless
4 years ago
I think you need to get a reality check. I have worked as an early engineer to 12 or more startups in the last 15 years and am very active in communities ranging from HN, IndieHackers, OnDeck or a dozen others.
I have not come across a single founder in the last 5-6 years who does not start with AWS credits or is not craving for them.
AWS is nothing but monopoly and they have utilized access to their cash to buy early customers. The same goes for Google and MS. The smaller hosting providers that you believe exist actually are stuck with whatever customers they used to have or a chance new WordPress blog.
Everything doesn't run on AWS. In Europe where a company might only sell to one country, like Sweden where I live for example many won't see the traffic required to scale beyond a single box, those same smaller companies might also not want to pay with their kidneys to host that one VM. Cloudflare is making this possible, so for smaller businesses and sites one could argue that Cloudflare is the real monopoly (entirely different markets).
Now companies like Shopify is enabling people to run a shop without any ops for peanuts.
Or smaller SMB it environments, we run a small datacenter at my company running VMware software to run our customers domain controllers, erps, fileservers and such, though this is decreasing, we used to run Exchange too, but migrated every customer to Office365 because it's cheaper than on-premise licensing, and we have 0 ops. The fact that we're local means we can offer dark fibre to many customer sites, giving them 0ms latency to us, making even the chattiest shit system run like things were on their premises. I guess we're "computing at edge" :p
Not saying you're wrong that AWS is a cloud monopoly, but everyone isn't purchasing in the cloud market (the majority of the worlds money doesn't flow through startups going global). And there's also Azure which is growing at an incredible rate challenging AWS at migrating legacy workloads to the cloud.