Comment by carlhjerpe

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.