domust

I'm in a position where I can learn any of the 3 major cloud providers at work.

I have strong reasons to believe that I have to pick one, so how do I pick one?

I don't know enough about each cloud provider to be able to decide on my own.

I've already asked Software Engineers and System Engineers for advice.

Both groups have very different and often conflicting/incompatible values.

For example, which cloud provider would you pick if you had to choose?

- System Engineers: Only AWS.

- Software Engineers: Anything, but AWS.

Why?

- System Engineers: It's cheaper and easier to maintain.

- Software Engineers: It's cheaper and easier to use.

Why cheaper?

- System Engineers: You don't need in-house solutions to hard problems.

- Software Engineers: Look at the pricing.

Why easier?

- System Engineers: Mistakes are often prevented.

- Software Engineers: Less concepts to learn.

For example?

- System Engineers: Kubernetes cluster with all nodes in the same AZ is not allowed.

- Software Engineers: To get a Kubernetes cluster, you don't need to know what AZ is.

As you can see, there is hardly anything common in their answers and it doesn't help that I find myself somewhere in the middle of these 2 extremes.

A couple of years ago I've read about this concept (already forgot the name) of using self hosted data storage with cloud applications. Basically, you as a user own your data and only permit the cloud hosted web application to access it - not own it and manage in your place.

I was thinking of a similar concept, but in the context of mobile applications. The mobile application itself would be accessible via Google Play Store/App Store, but the backend part would be self hosted and upon opening the application you would have to specify how to access backend.

My question is how would I access the backend if it was hosted on let's say rpi running in the living room? It's not a problem as long as I'm within the home network, but I want seemless network transition without losing access when entering/leaving the house. I was told https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/zero-trust/access/ could be used for this, but to me it sounds a bit of an overkill to use it for an application which would never be used by more than a single digit amount of users. This looks more suitable: https://github.com/boringproxy/boringproxy but I still don't like it due to password and not exchanged in advance key (like ssh) authentication. Ideally I would want this accessible via Wireguard which shouldn't require any additional setup given a modern router.

Maybe there are better/other options I'm not aware? Let me know your opinions/thoughts.