Cool, I didn't realize that. Thanks for the correction.

I should mention that this was back in September 2014, where IBM was the only one offering anything in Canada (hence the migration).

Once we'd done all the work to decouple from AWS, it was fairly straightforward when Azure came knocking and offered us a ton of compute credits from their startup program. IBM had also rebooted a couple of critical VMs with no prior warning which left us wanting a cloud provider that took its tenants seriously. This was in ~May 2016 and we hadn't heard anything about a Canadian AWS datacentre, which apparently launched in Dec 2016.

We still use SES to this day because we haven't found a good alternative, so it's not like we hate AWS or anything. Just offering a (dated) perspective on why someone might choose Azure.