[cornflake23]

Quite frankly, it’s hard to recommend any Cloud Service nowadays. Technical issues apart, the strategy _everywhere_ is to maximize picking the customers’ pockets. AWS is super expensive, Azure is super unreliable and GCP … well, it’s reliable yet features on it could vanish at a moments notice.

Where might one go?

[surgical_fire]

> Where might one go?

Most should just own their infrastructure, or use a more simple hosting service. Most companies could go very far with that.

Unless youf business is a global one with hundreds of millions of users in many jurisdictions, there is really no reason to go for cloud services. They tend to be much more expensive then the alternative, and have many ways to lock you in by making migration very expensive and time consuming.

[nvarsj]

For a medium size biz, I'd probably still recommend using GKE or EKS. A smallish EKS cluster of a few nodes will cost <1k a month for everything, it's fully managed so you don't need to pay anyone except for the initial setup.

Otw the cheaper operational cost would be to setup a few hetzner servers and manage your own infra via kubernetes or docker/ansible runbooks. But you should budget a few days each month for maintenance and general support, plus you'll need someone skilled in server maintenance to set it all up (becoming a rarish skill these days).

If on a ramen budget, you can set it up and let it rot until everything breaks, then migrate to EKS. :)

[ashishb]

I have yet to see a GKE/EKS setup that does not require ~250+ hours of a mid-level engineer's time a year (amortized).

Unless there is a team of 20+ engineers, I cannot recommend Kubernetes to anyone. It is a great primitive that's too primitive for smaller teams.

[JackSlateur]

For every project you want to choose a cloud provider or whatever, you have to compute "time to production + cost of people + cost of provider"

When your needs are low, AWS and friends are very competitive: quicker deploy, no CAPEX, lower OPEX

If your needs are high, you should indeed build your stuff on top of instances

If your needs are higher, then rent rack space and build on top of baremetal

If your needs are even higher, then build your datacenter

As an example, I put my personal backups in the "cloud". Is 1€/mo for 100GB cheaper than using a VPS ? Hell yeah !