Ok, I'll bite. Why is it not a cloud provider? Most importantly, what is a cloud provider in your definition?

ExoticPearTree an hour ago | parent | next [-]

In my book a cloud provider is a provider where you can spin up VMs at scale, offers multiple geographic regions across the world, offers managed complementary services such as S3, CDN, GLB, IAM, Managed Databases, backup & restore, FaaS, container registry, managed K8s or another container orchestration platform, PoPs around the world.

Hetzner has an S3 compatible offering, a VPS offering and that's it. Their core business is renting physical servers. And I see lately they offer a load balancing service.

	▲	arter45 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You know, we used to have a single tech company providing essentially an entire tech stack to its customers. Its core enterprise pricing provided a platform with impressive compute capabilities, high redundancy, global support, strong backward compatibility and the backing of a company providing consulting and an ecosystem made of a lot of other software products. That company is still alive and well, although that product is probably less appealing now to new customers. I'm talking about IBM mainframes. Eventually, as the Internet (networking) and open source technologies (like Git and Linux) become more and more widespread, people realized they could build their services by combining products from different vendors (not to mention FOSS). I'm talking about the 1990s-2000s. Now, after 20-30 years, we're thinking that the same company must provide the entire tech stack or lose relevancy as a provider. To be clear, AWS and mainframes are pretty different from a technical standpoint, but I do wonder if we're kinda repeating the same cycle over and over. Asking the same company to provide everything and then build stuff with different products, to then find a new company which can provide everything and so on.

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smarx007 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/dear-hosting-providers-you...

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arter45 an hour ago | parent [-]

Not sure I follow.

It's one thing to say that a lot of AWS/Azure/Google users take advantage of many managed services.

But saying something is not a cloud provider because they don't provide a specific SaaS is kinda weird, especially if you read the NIST definition of cloud computing or when you consider that not every AWS user is using more than a handful of services (does that make AWS a cloud provider only for more "advanced" users?).

Sure, smaller cloud providers don't usually have all those services, but this doesn't mean they are not cloud providers. They cannot attract users who are more familiar with specific managed services, but they can probably satisfy the needs of other users who are more than happy with a smaller feature set.

Also, limiting yourself to a smaller portion of AWS/Azure/GCP services can facilitate migrations to other cloud platforms (think AWS -> Azure or viceversa), because you're less tied to specific proprietary tooling.

	▲	smarx007 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> because they don't provide a specific SaaS is kinda weird I think for most business stakeholders it's not about the number of services but rather the coverage of business-critical needs. When you have access to Azure Entra, you know that you can cover 90%+ of your auth needs with that service. If you have access to AWS S3, you know that your various storage needs would be possible to cover with that. If a managed Postgres is available, you know that most of the IT systems you run would be able to take advantage of that. You look at Azure their IAM/audit/observability offerings and it's the same. When you look at Hetzner as a business stakeholder, all you see are bare servers and and one object storage service that you are not sure of how battle-tested it is. And then you start thinking: "okay, I will need to run k8s or some other workload orchestration approach, my IT systems need Postgres/MySQL/SQL Server etc, I need auth, I need audit, I will need to build, operate, maintain all of that in-house". I am not saying that this is a wrong path for everyone, but Hetzner essentially leaves you no choice. And many business stakeholders who have been operating their own own-prem infra or colocated or rented IaaS plus a large dev team for decades and have since switched to one of the hyperscalers and reduced their dev/IT headcount - may not want to go back to the old model. > limiting yourself to a smaller portion of AWS/Azure/GCP services can facilitate migrations to other cloud platforms. Yes, which is why you insist (where possible/reasonable) on Postgres-compatible DBMS offerings, IdP solutions based on OIDC, observability on OpenTelemetry. > Sure, smaller cloud providers don't usually have all those services, but this doesn't mean they are not cloud providers Yes, it could mean that they are not cloud providers. > but they can probably satisfy the needs of other users who are more than happy with a smaller feature set Please see the linked article. This is essentially "users who are happy to build some of the furniture themselves".