They (1&1, Strato, HostEurope, Hetzner, …) don't even try to provide OpenStack packages or something leightweight-ish using Docker, except if you pay every single hour of their manual work. 1&1 build something called ProfitBricks.de which focusses of "designing your infrastructure in the browser", however they build a big Java EE legacy framework with a nasty SOAP-API. Their sales pitch is something like "we are cheaper than amazon/they rip of their customers".
And still they neither contributed support to LibCloud or fog.io so neither Chef, Puppet, Ansible nor SaltStack work out of the box with it. I don't understand those people.
I talked to some colleagues about scaling with Hetzner and their answer was to just overprovision like crazy since Hetzner's so cheap anyhow.
If you run some cluster FS on your single, external network interface, it's quite easy to DoS your cluster.
There is no option to place a service inside a DC, you can ask them but this will result in a manual provision taking days —or be ignored. Also you don't know how the different DCs are connected in terms of internal bandwidth and external reliability. Hetzner itself says their inter-dc connections "are not optimized", whatever that means.
If you run multiple customers on your system and one get's DoSed, Hetzner will disconnect your system. Sure, this was good enough 2-3 years ago, but they didn't change their DoS, provisioning and networking setup.
I use both AWS and Hetzner. Both have very different offerings aimed at different use cases. AWS gives you simplicity, but everything is crazy expensive. Hetzner and friends give you much more powerful hardware, but you have to setup things yourself.
I think DigitalOcean is a nice example of how fast you iterate. They did many things right, some wrong. But the don't settle. They are building new things like private networking, their v2 api, IPv6 (hetzner doesn't provide v6 on vservers iirc EDIT: they do now).
The default answer I got when asking for features that e.g. US, UK or FR based ISPs already have is: "But it's not hosted in Germany! The cloud is insecure!"
Today we know, that it doesn't matter, where in Europe you're located as intelligence services cooperate and share all data. So Hetzner for example is required to provide access to german intelligence services by law. They share it with the NSA. So it's FUD.
So maybe this provides some insight of my kind of emotional initial posting.
You don't need any of the buzzword-y technologies you list to be supported directly by the host. If you want Docker, you can run it yourself.
VMs are over-rated.
If you're using the cloud as "just another data center", I feel like you're missing many of the benefits of software-defined infrastructure and disposable systems.
Honestly their cheap-server-design could be a great foundation for something, if they federate it and provide it. It's nearly unmanagble to do it yourself as you don't have a privat interconnect, availability/redundancy (e.g. in which DC the put a system) and you can only have one failover IP/network per system.
Also they have really bad luck with hard drives. I've had SMART errors/disk replacement in 3 or 4 disks on a single machine over the past 2 years.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/images/aw...
I had a potential client from the Netherlands (pre-NSA) say no thanks as we are a US based company and he didn't want the possibility of the US government obtaining his data. Fair enough I wasn't going to change his mind. Those who travel frequently internationally know (or should) about a program called Global Entry. Basically let's you go though the border using a machine instead of talking to an immigration officer. At the time it was available to US citizens (with a squeaky clean record) and Dutch citizens. What kind of information sharing must the Dutch be doing with the US to allow us to basically open our borders?
Back to data centers and pretending governments aren't in bed with the NSA for some reason or another and a non US company owns the data center. Who do you think is providing the pipe going into that data center? Almost certainly a US company (or it is 1-2 hops away).
If AWS setup deployment in Amsterdam, I can't imagine it wouldn't be in one of those places.
Of course the problem remains that Amazon is a US company and thereby required to cooperate with US authorities and hand them over customer data if requested, so some businesses might still not want to host their data there. Still, I'm excited that they're finally coming to Germany !
