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.
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.