Oh my god I’m gonna make this into a poster, my DBA friends will love it. But seriously these are not common skills — these are skills you pay $200k for and still struggle to find quality people. If you found yourself somewhere where the average SWE can set up a metal to production ready HA DB with turnkey live restores dm me your location so I can start looking on Zillow.
Also we’re just gonna gloss over that the AWS setup includes a HA managed load balancer that Hetnzer doesn’t as well as the k8s control plane.
Normally I’m on here telling people how not scary and complicated on-prem (ish in this case) deployments are but I think I’ve actually found someone who actually swung the other way.
I think the natural evolution is that both smaller cloud providers AND open source catches up, providing either managed services that are equivalent, or software that effectively makes your DB and other services feel like a managed service.
Linode, DigitalOcean, Hetzner, OVH and many others will probably be enough or sometimes better for your use case while still being cheaper.
I would be really curious to know what people think of the support from Oracle Cloud. Their pricing is significantly lower then AWS and many of the interfaces seem so similar it would just be search and replace on our terraform templates to start bringing things up. If I had to go multi cloud they would be the first place I investigated seriously, but it’s a no-go if their support is anything like GCP.
Overall they're different tools, for maybe different situations. I like AWS and it'd be my usual go to (I'm AWS certified) and also like Azure (I love Azure resource groups - they make life pretty nice). Not used GCP in anger. I've also spent years running software on premises (I kind of miss these days as I did a load of travel when things went wrong!).
The smaller players have insanely good pricing and I'd see why you'd want to use them. But for something like an e-commerce application I think I'd just feel happier hosting it on one of the big players. Not to mention it might be an easier sell from e.g. a compliance point of view (disclaimer, I've not read up into what e.g. Hetzner supports in terms of PCI etc compliance).
I imagine hybrid solutions and infrastructure software like Nextcloud (but for PaaS and businesses) will be the next step.
If the business is large enough, choosing to become vendor-locked means becoming less cost effective and therefore less competitive.
Switch the bandwidth past Cloudfront, and you still pay bandwidth costs that no one else charges.
It's no wonder Cloudflare and a bunch of other providers have latched onto this in their positioning to AWS.
