What’s a good small cloud competitor to AWS? For teams that just need two AZs to get HA and your standard stuff like VMs, k8s, etc.
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When I look at cloud, I get to think "finally! No more hardware to manage. No OS to manage". It's the best thing about the cloud, provided your workload is amenable to PaaS. It's great because I don't have to manage Windows or IIS. Microsoft does that part for me and significantly cheaper than it would be to employ me to do that work.
It basically allows me to forego having to make a server for the CRUD operations so I can focus on the actual business implications. My REST API is automatically managed for me (mostly with lightweight views and functions) and all of my other core logic is either spread out through edge functions or in a separate data store (Redis) where I perform the more CPU intensive operations related to my business.
There's some rough edges around their documentation and DX but I'm really loving it so far.
Along with that, ChatGPT has knocked down most of the remaining barriers I have had when permissions get confusing in one of the cloud services.
When you rent a bare metal server, you don't manage your hardware either. The failed parts are replaced for you. Unless you can't figure out what hardware configuration you need - which would be a really big red flag for your level of expertise.
So not only do you spend time on the wrong thing you don't even know how it works. And the providers goals are not aligned either as all they care about is locking you in.
How is that better?
We must be using different clouds.
For some of the much higher-level services … maybe some semblance of that statement holds. But for VMs? Definitely not "no OS to manage" … the OS is usually on the customer. There might be OS-level agents from your cloud of choice that make certain operations easier … but I'm still on the hook for updates.
Even "No machine" is a stretch, though I've found this is much more dependent on cloud. AWS typically notices failures before I do, and by the time I notice something is up, the VM has been migrated to a new host and I'm none the wiser sans the reboot that cost. But other clouds I've been less lucky with: we've caught host failures well before the cloud provider, to an extent where I've wished there was a "vote of no confidence" API call I could make to say "give me new HW, and I personally think this HW is suss".
Even on higher level services like RDS, or S3, I've noticed failures prior to AWS … or even to the extent that I don't know that AWS would have noticed those failures unless we had opened the support ticket. (E.g., in the S3 case, even though we clearly reported the problem, and the problem was occurring on basically every request, we still had to provide example request IDs before they'd believe us. The service was basically in an outage as far as we could tell … though I think AWS ended up claiming it was "just us".)
That said, S3 in particular is still an excellent service, and I'd happily use it again. But cloud == 0 time on my part. It depends heavily on the cloud, and less heavily on the service how much time, and sometimes, it is still worthwhile.
Maybe TCO still favors bare-metal but you have to spend a lot of time on configuration.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/hetzner/comments/rjuzcs/securing_ne...
Yes, the cloud is _different_ to manage and has some of the same fundamentals to overcome such as security and networking, but lacks some of the very large pain points of managing an OS, like updates, ancillary local services, local accounts, and so on.
I'm not sure why you would state that it doesn't solve the problem I'm invested in -- namely operating websites. It is the perfect cloud workload.