While it was once a controversial statement, more and more software projects are acknowledging that their primary competition is not another software project, but cloud platforms offering similar functionality as a service. The directness of the threat varies, depending on whether a major cloud vendor has targeted a given market yet, but it’s rare that there are businesses – or open source projects, for that matter – for whom the accelerating adoption of cloud services doesn’t have significant implications over a reasonable planning horizon.
The advantages of cloud providers are many. Most obviously, economics are clearly in their favor. Not only are the largest cloud providers in Amazon, Google and Microsoft better capitalized than stand alone providers, the breadth at which they operate generates enormous and daunting economies of scale.
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