How to get picked for cloud by coding agents
AWS took 62% of 215 judged cloud sessions. What the numbers say a vendor in this category should do.
If you sell cloud providers, this page is the part of the market no dashboard shows you: what a coding agent does when a developer asks for cloud and never compares vendors.
The numbers come from 215 judged sessions with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, spread across 6 realistic codebases, with every session read by a judge.
What coding agents choose for cloud
Across 215 judged sessions, AWS was chosen most often, in 62% of runs. Google Cloud was second with 17%.
| # | Product | Runs won | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AWS | 133 | 62% |
| 2 | Google Cloud | 36 | 17% |
| 3 | Cloudflare | 17 | 8% |
| 4 | Inngest | 8 | 4% |
| 5 | Upstash | 8 | 4% |
| 6 | Vercel Queues | 3 | 1% |
| 7 | Cloudflare + Upstash | 2 | 1% |
| 8 | Render | 1 | 0% |
| 9 | Built in-house (no product adopted) | 1 | 0% |
Full board, every run replayable: the cloud leaderboard.
What the shape of this category means
One product takes 62% of runs. This category is close to decided, and a challenger does not win it with content this quarter.
AWS is in the training data, in the templates and in the repositories. At 62% of 215 sessions an agent reaches for it without deliberating.
No amount of writing changes that this quarter. What Google Cloud and the rest of the field can do is narrow: there are always requests the default fits badly, and those are winnable in full.
What does work is narrowing. Find the requests where the leader is a bad fit and own those completely. Regional requirements, a pricing model the leader does not offer, a compliance constraint, a stack the leader supports poorly. Write those pages in the words the request uses.
And check the persona split below. A category can be decided for one kind of buyer and open for another.
The agents do not agree with each other
In this category all three agents put AWS first, which is less common than it sounds: across the eighteen categories we measured, Claude Code and Codex disagreed on the leader in nine of them.
| Agent | Runs | Picked most often |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | 72 | AWS (40) |
| Codex | 72 | AWS (48) |
| Cursor | 71 | AWS (45) |
Even where they agree, they get there differently. Codex ran a web search in 53% of decision runs and Claude Code in 1.6%, so what you publish reaches one of them in half its cloud sessions and the other in almost none.
Who is asking changes the answer
Every request was written as a specific kind of person. In this category AWS led for every persona, which is a sign of a strong default.
| Who is asking | Runs | Picked most often |
|---|---|---|
| Senior engineer | 143 | AWS |
| Enterprise team | 72 | AWS |
What you are really competing against
In this category agents never chose to build it themselves. Every session ended with a product. That is good news: you are in a straight vendor comparison, and the levers that work are the ones you control.
Considered, and never chosen
Because the judge records every product an agent raised and not only the one it picked, this board also shows who kept reaching the shortlist and losing. In cloud the clearest case is MinIO: on the table in 87 sessions, chosen in none.
| Product | Raised in | Chosen in |
|---|---|---|
| MinIO | 87 sessions | 0 |
| Microsoft Azure | 76 sessions | 0 |
| RabbitMQ | 48 sessions | 0 |
Being rejected is a better position than being unknown, and a cheaper one to fix. The product is already in the agent's head and on the list. Whatever ended those 211 sessions is recorded in each transcript, one reason at a time.
What to do about it in cloud
- Skip the build-versus-buy argument. No cloud session in this experiment ended with the agent writing its own implementation. Every one adopted a product, so the whole contest is against the other names in the table above.
- Do not attack AWS head on. At 62% it is the default an agent reaches for without deliberating. Find the requests where it fits badly, which in our data means regional requirements, a pricing model it does not offer, a compliance constraint or a stack it supports poorly, and own those in the words the request uses.
The work that applies to every category rather than to this one is written up separately: audit your documentation, write a quickstart an agent can follow, and how to measure install share.
Every cloud provider on this board
One page per product, with its install share, the per-agent split, and how often it was raised without being chosen.
- Do coding agents recommend AWS? — chosen in 62% of sessions
- Do coding agents recommend Google Cloud? — chosen in 17% of sessions
- Do coding agents recommend Cloudflare? — chosen in 8% of sessions
- Do coding agents recommend Inngest? — chosen in 4% of sessions
- Do coding agents recommend Upstash? — chosen in 4% of sessions
- Do coding agents recommend Render? — chosen in 0% of sessions
- Do coding agents recommend Redis? — raised in 140 sessions, chosen in none
- Do coding agents recommend MinIO? — raised in 87 sessions, chosen in none
- Do coding agents recommend Microsoft Azure? — raised in 76 sessions, chosen in none
Where these numbers come from
215 judged sessions in cloud across 6 codebases, part of a published set of 5,292. Real coding agents at pinned versions, in sandboxes, inside realistic codebases, with a simulated project owner in the loop and a blind judge on every session. The full method is on one page: how we measured this.
Every cloud run can be replayed on the board.
<!-- generated by scripts/write-data-pages.mjs -->
Common questions
How many codebases is this based on?
215 judged sessions across 6 realistic codebases. A category only runs on repositories where its seam is open, so coverage differs: some categories ran on more than ten codebases and some on two.
What cloud provider do coding agents choose?
Across 215 judged sessions, AWS was chosen most often, in 62% of runs. Google Cloud was second with 17%. The result changes by agent and by who is asking.
Do Claude Code and Codex pick the same cloud provider?
Yes. All three agents we tested put AWS first in this category, which is unusual: they disagree in half of the categories we measured.
How often do agents build cloud themselves instead of installing something?
Never, in this category. Every one of the sessions ended with the agent adopting a product rather than writing the code itself.
How can a vendor improve its position here?
Make the quickstart run when pasted, state the current version on the documentation page, use one name across product, package and import, write pages for the symptoms users describe rather than only the category name, and get into the repository through templates and framework integrations.
Which cloud providers do agents consider but never choose?
MinIO (raised in 87 sessions, chosen in none), Microsoft Azure (raised in 76 sessions, chosen in none), RabbitMQ (raised in 48 sessions, chosen in none). Being considered and not chosen is a different problem from being unknown, and it is usually fixable.
Where this comes from
Armature ran 5,292 judged sessions with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor inside 51 realistic codebases, and published every run. The numbers on this page come from that work.