The way some people talk AWS has already won the cloud battle and the spoils are left to the rest. The beauty of the cloud and their customers is as fast as VMs can be spun up, new businesses can figure out better ways to spin up VMs. Here is Gartner’s infamous magic quadrant on IaaS.

So how’s this for a change. DigitalOcean doesn’t show up anywhere in this graphic. Yet has just received $37.2 mil series A funding and has spun up its 1,000,000 VM.

In the past 15 months and with only a handful of engineers we’ve been able to hit some amazing milestones. We’ve launched over 1,000,000 virtual servers, processed 18,000,000 events, opened new datacenter regions in San Francisco and Singapore, for over 100,000 customers.

DigitalOcean had a simple vision. Make life easier for the developer. Vs. Amazon make more money. Make things stickier, make it hard for people to leave AWS.

We started DigitalOcean in the summer of 2011 with a simple mission: to make developers lives easier. We thought that the other players in the space had made IaaS too complicated. We focused on user experience and simplicity. Guiding ourselves with a single principle, can we build a product that we would love ourselves?

With three engineers we built the first version of our product and with help from the Hacker News community our growth exploded when we announced our SSD powered cloud.

Part of the problem AWS is having in its efforts to make it harder for people to leave it makes it harder to get started as well.