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It would be except IBM Cloud is never cheaper than AWS.

More likely their service offerings are growing so fast that trying to make the pricing structure coherent is like a hyper-aggressive game of whack-a-mole.

Unfortunately, that API changes regularly and often in undocumented ways that causes breakages for customers. Its really a lot of fun to deal with when suddenly a bunch of automation breaks and it turns out an unannounced push fundamentally re-writes foundational API calls.

FWIW - IBM Cloud today has basically no benefit over AWS, Azure or GCE or even against some of the smaller regional players like AliCloud. The notable exception would be if you need to run a bare metal solution and leverage their free backbone which is a pretty narrow use case these days. The main selling point previously was to stand up your own VMware environment but even that came with a laundry list of caveats (unsupported hardware, limited VLANs, non-flexible IP space) that made it painful to use. Today AWS is vastly more performant, flexible, reliable and has a bunch of useful services you don't get from IBM Cloud.

Sorry, didn't mean to put you on blast like that.

Yeah the move from FreeBSD to Linux wouldn't have been fun for you guys either. And yeah, the WDC POPs were some of the most overbuilt from a bandwidth perspective and that was almost entirely because of you guys. Pretty sure there's a Cisco sales rep enjoying a nice holiday home in Connecticut as a result of the growth you guys did.

You guys were one of the best use cases for the SL model, which really hasn't changed in 10+ years. You had very few dependencies on the less-reliable (read: all of them) services inside the SL stack and mostly managed everything on box and in software. In a few POPs you guys were running about 50% of the total SL backbone bandwidth. There were a lot of sad panda hats when you guys started to transition away.