I think a million VPS hosting companies just cried out in terror.
The major reason to use a VPS host instead of AWS is that AWS is complicated. This seems to be just as simple as DO or a million other VPS hosts, with the added benefit that it's easy to hook up to Amazon's other services if you need to.
Until their clients see the iops of Lightsail's non-local SSDs. Don't know of any other VPS provider that uses network as their only storage. Small boxes will likely not run a memory-only job (they only have 1GB), so I doubt that Lightsail will be used for much more than reverse-proxying traffic from AWS to get huge discounts there.
There's a lot of managed services on AWS and it's growing rapidly. But they're delivered through partners, not AWS directly. I didn't write down the numbers from this segment of the Re:Invent Global Partner keynote yesterday but, as I recall, "next generation managed service providers" was highlighted as a big growth opportunity.
I think the point was that Amazon's customer service is awful, compared to smaller, much more nimble companies where you can get a technical person on the line and get much more personalized service from someone in the US.
The major reason to use a VPS host instead of AWS is that AWS is complicated. This seems to be just as simple as DO or a million other VPS hosts, with the added benefit that it's easy to hook up to Amazon's other services if you need to.