>> From a Quality of Service point of view there can, of course, be differences due to how the service is managed, scaled, supported, etc.
Yes,
I asked Hursley the same question some time back - referring to the difference between AWS Quickstart and MQoC and received the following:
"Hi @johan.hellstrom - we (IBM, specifically our team) are responsible for producing both the MQ on Bluemix service, and the MQ AWS QuickStart.
The key difference is that the MQ service on IBM Cloud is a "managed" service - our Operations team are responsible for keeping the basic infrastructure available/running, we provide simplified upgrade/patching etc. By contrast the AWS QuickStart is an automation template for one-time deployment of MQ in AWS, after which the customer is responsible for running their own operations, upgrade/patching."