No question, during each vendor selection for the cloud the Amazon Web Services are always a big option. However, I frequently experience situations where companies make a decision against the use and instead prefer another provider. Enclosed are the two most common reasons.
Legal security and data privacy
The storage location of the data, especially the customer data, is the obvious and most common reason for a decision against the Amazon Web Services. The data should still be stored in the own country and after switching to the cloud not be located in a data center of another country in the EU. In this case the AWS data center in Ireland is no option.
Lack of simplicity, knowledge and time to market
Very often it is also the lack of the ease of use. This means that a company don’t want to (re)-develop its existing application or website for the Amazon infrastructure. Reasons are the lack of time and the knowledge to implement, what may results in a longer time to market. Both can be attributed to the complexity to achieve scalability and availability at the Amazon Web Services. After all, there are not just a few API calls. Instead, the entire architecture needs to be oriented on the AWS cloud. In Amazon’s case its about the horizontal scaling (scale-out) which makes this necessary. Instead, companies prefer vertical scaling (scale-up) to migrate the existing system 1:1 and not to start from scratch, but directly achieve success in the cloud.