Meanwhile AWS is growing at 20%/year, Azure at 33% and GCP at 35%. That doesn't seem compatible with any kind of major cloud repatriation trend.
I am not anti-cloud and pro cloud. My major problem with the new trend is that a lot of people are basically rediscovering pre "Cloud" era. which is VPS, Dedicated server and Colocation. And people are suggesting Hetzner or OVH or many other players are equivalent to AWS. While I dont disagree AWS is charging a lot for their offering, putting AWS to other services isn't even a valid comparison.
Completely ignoring the basics such as Server / CPU / RAM / SSD quality. Network quality such as interconnect, redundancy, as well as Data Center quality. If you rally want to do simple price and spec comparison you might as well go to Lowendbox to find a low cost VPS which some people have been doing since 2008.
I really wish there is a middle ground somewhere before using Hyperscalers. Both DO / Linode couldn't reach a larger scale. Hetzner is expanding their Cloud offering only and no dedicated outside EU.
Although to be fair, most hobbyists only need basic services like cloud servers/VMs, and hyperscalers like AWS are an awful deal compared to other options if you only need compute + storage + bandwidth. You don't need to use S3, Lambdas and Cloudfront to host a personal blog, a simple VPS will be more than enough.
It feels like most devs nowadays prefer using services that abstract away the infrastructure, at the cost of not developing SysOps skills, so I don't see a future where the Cloud is going to lose relevance.
While there are valid use-case where you get value from the extra services the hyperscaller are providing, most of the time people go for AWS “because everybody does it” or because the choice was made by a consulting company that doesn't pay the final cloud bill and is optimizing their own added value at the expenses of the customer's one.
I've been doing freelance work for 7 years now for roughly two dozens if companies of various size, and I can't tell you how many massively underused AWS / Azure VPS I've seen, but it's more than half the cloud bills of the said companies (or division for big companies since I obviously only had the vision on the division I worked for and not the whole company).
But I think the argument is - do they need to be? How much of the services of AWS (Google/azure/etc) are really needed by the majority of customers?
For companies that need hyperscaling services, I get it. There are definite benefits to the cloud when operating at extremes (auto scaling up and down). But for the majority of workloads, I think you could be well served by a more barebones offering.
Some companies want the space to grow into it. At my job, we just started getting into video decoding. AWS has elastic video processing services. Where as DO would cost way more to setup those services on our own.
Very many. And none of them are EC2 (or its equivalent). Any service that comes with the consumption based charging (i.e. no 24x7 running costs whether it is used or not) and offers a clearly defined functional feature, has plenty of appeal to cloud customers. Another part of the appeal is the mix and match nature of mature cloud platforms: the customers get substantial freedom to choose from services they can instantly start using, or roll (and maintain) their own albeir at a higher cost.
I.e. if the customer wants a queue, they get a queue, and nothing else. The cloud platform abstracts away and takes care of the underlying platform that «runs» the queue and eliminates the operational overhead that comes with having to look after the message broker that provides the said queue. There are other many examples.