Firstly AWS sets the benchmark for security, transparency and compliance which we know you won't get from Linode for example. Secondly AWS has a damn good network. Thirdly lots of software 'understands' EC2 e.g. Cassandra, Hazelcast.
AWS' popularity comes not just from the wide array of decent, well integrated and cohesive services e.g. S3, SQS, ELB, ElastiCache but also all of the third party services that are hosted within the AWS network e.g. MongoHQ, IronMQ/IronIO. AWS is very much an ecosystem.
If you are building a new app from scratch there a lot of benefits to having others manage the commodity parts of your infrastructure.
AWS' popularity comes not just from the wide array of decent, well integrated and cohesive services e.g. S3, SQS, ELB, ElastiCache but also all of the third party services that are hosted within the AWS network e.g. MongoHQ, IronMQ/IronIO. AWS is very much an ecosystem.
If you are building a new app from scratch there a lot of benefits to having others manage the commodity parts of your infrastructure.