Much of what people call cloud is a commodity at this point. If you need vms, object storage, load balancers, vpcs, etc., which is what most people would need, that works in a lot of solutions. And you can usually also find managed databases, redis, and a few other bits and bobs. If you like Kubernetes (I personally don't), the whole point of that is that it kind of works everywhere.

People over pay for AWS mostly because of brand recognition. And it's not even small amounts. You get a lot more CPU/memory/bandwidth with some of the competitors. AWS makes money by squeezing their customers hard on that. Competitors do the obvious thing of being a bit more generous. Companies could save a ton just switching to competing solutions. Try it. It's not that hard. Some solutions are obviously not as complete.

This not about US vs. EU but about sovereignty. If you are married to AWS, that's a weakness in itself. Ask yourself how hard it would be to move to Google cloud. Or Azure. Or whatever. If that's very hard, you might have a problem when Amazon jacks up the prices or discontinues a product.

We use a mix of Google Cloud and Telekom Cloud for some of our more picky customers in Germany. Telekom Cloud is not very glamorous. But it's essentially openstack. Which is an open source thing backed by IBM and others. I wouldn't necessary recommend Telekom Cloud (it has a few weaknesses in support and documentation). But it does the job. And unlike AWS, I can get people on the phone and they are happy to talk to me.

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general1465 2 days ago | parent [-]

> If you are married to AWS, that's a weakness in itself

I have tried Lambdas and then got this "oh-shit moment" when I have realized that if AWS would be to kick me out, I would be absolutely screwed.

Now I am slowly dispersing and using VMs instead and avoiding all the AWS-specific stuff as much as I can.

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reese_john 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Most cloud providers have a similar offering to AWS Lambda, plus it is not that hard to convert your code from the event handling pattern impose by AWS Lambda to a long running container running in K8s or VMs like you are doing yourself

IMO the lock-in fear is overblown as the top cloud offerings (S3, Lambdas, K8s as a service etc) are already commoditized among the top providers, the exception being specialized databases like DynamoDB, Spanner, Cosmos …

Not saying there wouldn’t be some major work to switch your operations from eg AWS to GCP, but it is also not a hard lock-in

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jacquesm 2 days ago | parent [-]

Most cloud providers have the same exact issue that AWS has: they're US based.

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keepamovin 2 days ago | parent [-]

Not Hetzner tho

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tormeh 2 days ago | parent [-]

I hesitate to call Hetzner "cloud". Hetzner is an EC2+S3 competitor, not an AWS one. IMO the minimum for being a real cloud is you need hosted Postgres, hosted Kafka, hosted Kubernetes, and S3-compatible object storage. Without the first three Hetzner is just not in the same product category. Nobody sensible buys AWS for the comically overpriced EC2.

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everfrustrated 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Another missed component is a real autoscaling load balancer. This often gets missed and taken for granted. Possibly due to if you haven't seen a good one (AWS) you might not realise what you're missing. Most aspiring "cloud" companies have fixed capacity single tennant load balancers which is not cloud in any definition.

	▲	keepamovin 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Is it so hard to wire up some health/load checks and hook the provider API to spin up more VPS?

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keepamovin 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Is it really so much cheaper to pay for "hosted" apps rather than just plumbing your own on VPS/metal?

	▲	tormeh 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's far cheaper to do it yourself, but the entire point is that you outsource the management of the service. Lots of people don't want to deal with database failovers, or - god forbid - deal with Kubernetes control plane issues.
	▲	pyrale 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		On the opposite, it is more expensive, and any large enough company should probably at least consider renting metal rather than services. For a small org, though, it lets you avoid a lot of infrastructure/ops work.

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selkin 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If your threat model is AWS deciding you break their AUP, the issue is with you doing AUP breaking stuff. This ain’t your personal Google Play account.