- Automation/APIs are generally lousy. Some try (Digital Ocean is trying to shed its past and become a real boy--err, cloud), but stuff like Linode is infuriating to work with when you expect to be able to just do something like "declaratively describe your infrastructure and go". Or when you expect to have monitoring and alerting on hand without having to reinvent every wheel yourself.
- Networking is usually real bad. SDNs are your friend. Yeah, learn you an iptables and all, but this is the future, we can do better. (DigitalOcean is almost to the point AWS was at, like, eight years ago with EC2 Classic? Something like that.)
- Geographically-centralized but independent systems are hard to come by and so fault tolerance is a Big Problem. AWS loses an availability zone, my stuff keeps rolling. Can't say the same elsewhere.
- Value-add services. The sibling comment's complaining about RDS, but RDS configuration hits probably the 98% case and You Don't Have To Learn It. I'm a little more hesitant about lock-in services like SQS, SNS, etc., but moral equivalents exist elsewhere for the most part, you can use them pretty effectively.
- Networking is usually real bad. SDNs are your friend. Yeah, learn you an iptables and all, but this is the future, we can do better. (DigitalOcean is almost to the point AWS was at, like, eight years ago with EC2 Classic? Something like that.)
- Geographically-centralized but independent systems are hard to come by and so fault tolerance is a Big Problem. AWS loses an availability zone, my stuff keeps rolling. Can't say the same elsewhere.
- Value-add services. The sibling comment's complaining about RDS, but RDS configuration hits probably the 98% case and You Don't Have To Learn It. I'm a little more hesitant about lock-in services like SQS, SNS, etc., but moral equivalents exist elsewhere for the most part, you can use them pretty effectively.