> Who is using Joyent?

Folks for whom a business relationship with Amazon is not possible because of competitive reasons, for one. Regulatory compliance is another.

There're also some big names using Joyent (one of whom is a Fortune 1 company last I heard…) whose policies endorsing third parties are too restrictive to allow their trademarks to be used there.

Would that be walmart? i just googled 'fortune 1' and that was the first result

I actually can't confirm that! What I said in my comment previous ("Fortune 1 company") is exactly what I heard over the course of one of Bryan Cantrill's other talks.

That said, though, I'm sure that'd be the intended inference.

My understanding is that the bulk of Walmart's compute is run on a private openstack setup, after migrating it off of Rackspace.

https://gigaom.com/2015/02/17/openstack-comes-up-huge-for-wa...

My understanding is that a portion is on OpenStack, a portion is on legacy bare-metal, and a portion is in the Public Cloud (Rackspace and presumably some Joyent per this thread). Source: I work with a bunch of ex-WM employees and have interviewed a bunch more over the past six months.

> the market wants what Amazon is selling

You say that as if it's an immutable fact, as permanent as the laws of nature. Market demand changes all the time.

> no amount of blasting VMs is going to undo that.

I wouldn't be so certain, especially if you have strong performance and ergonomic arguments to back you up. Even more so if you actually have a better alternative to offer.

Strong opinion, weakly held. If you have any evidence to counter AWS cloud dominance please do share. Sources: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/05/28/gartn..., http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/194876/5-things-we-learned-a...

AWS is clearly dominant right now, as your links show. What I'm disagreeing with is the idea that it will be dominant in the future.

On the other hand, who's to say they won't start offering containers on bare-metal and keep their lead?

Nearly everyone who was ever disrupted had the exact the same attiude that you emit here. Blockbuster video probably thought "the market wants what we are renting! physical media ftw baby" fast forward and they are dead.

I'm being dramatic here and I obviously don't think amazon will die. But lets re-visit this post in 5 years and I bet AWS is selling a lot more bare metal. Because thats what the market will want.