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.

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.