OK, so, you're saying migration and remote drives over IP is the secret sauce of AWS / EC2?

Per Wikipedia, live migration was added to OpenVZ in April 2006, one year after OpenVZ was open-sourced in 2005, five years after Virtuozzo was first released as a commercial product in 2000, 3 years after the company was started in 1997. Straight from Wikipedia. I would guess that prior to April 2006, live migration was already available as part of commercial Virtuozzo for quite a while, probably.

Not to mention Xen. Isn't it common knowledge that EC2 was powered first by Xen, then by Linux-KVM, switching in 2017? What exactly is their secret sauce, except for stealing OSS and not giving back?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuozzo_(company)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVZ#Checkpointing_and_live_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/aws_writes_new_kvm_...

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Dropbox is a little different, but, even then, doesn't everyone simply use Google Drive today? What's so special about Dropbox in 2025?

Just look at Virtuozzo. Why did SWsoft/Parallels open-source it into OpenVZ? The decision makes no sense, wasn't Virtuozzo their whole product they were selling to the hosting providers?

The answer lies in the complexities of the kernel code. By open-sourcing the underlying technology, they're ensuring immediate compatibility with all upcoming kernel changes. Had they kept it in-house, it'd be a nightmare to continue to integrate it with each upcoming Linux release, riddling the technology with preventable bugs, and eventually losing to competitors, including Xen and Linux-KVM at the time. OpenVZ was extremely popular in the VPS community until just a few years ago, before we had more RAM than we known what to do with, before Linux-KVM replaced both Xen and OpenVZ in the majority of the hosting environments in the last 10 years as of 2025.

I do agree with the other commenter that you're just rewriting the history here. All of these EC2 clouds are simply repackaged OSS (Xen and then Linux-KVM in the case of AWS EC2). If Amazon had actually developed some truly unique kernel stuff, we'd see it OSS by now, because of the difficulty with maintaining those kinds of kernel forks locally. But we don't. Because they haven't.

You are failing to understand that the product is not the technology. The product is the interface. One of the products you listed had the “cloud” interface we are familiar with today.