Corey is both on-point and hilarious and his newsletter[0] is worth reading. This particular post really resonated with me because AWS gets so much run for being impossible to compete with, but really it's not hard... you just have to pick an appropriate axis on which to compete. It's not likely you'll ever win on availability or integration with AWS services, but the farther you get (in terms of abstraction) from running a data center, there are places where AWS falls flat.
[0] https://www.lastweekinaws.com/