Ask HN: Is there a 'pure' cloud provider?

[feeblebee]

I'm looking for a provider that does only one thing.

There are the cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft that all have a monopoly in a different industry. Amazon in global E-commerce, Google for web search, Android, Maps, Email, ... and Microsoft for Office software and Desktop OS.

I personally don't like monopolies. The only way that I can try to improve the situation is via being promoting non-monopolies or being customer of the competition.

Which other providers that offer servers around the globe do you suggest that are

1. innovative, 2. not higher priced than the three above and 3. most important: trustworthy regarding security and stability?

With 'innovative' I mean like supporting kubernetes 'nativly' like EKS, AKS and GKE.

[walligator]

I'm using OVH and scaleway which both are cloud pure-players and offer much better pricing than the companies you mentioned.

OVH is the 1st European cloud provider (300k servers, 3.8M domain names registered ...) and are providing cloud services to major organisations, with a wealth of products and soon a managed Kubernetes service.

Scaleway is a much newer cloud provider backed by Online.net, a fairly big hosting company, which is itself part of Iliad (a major ISP in France and expanding to the rest of the world). Their managed K8S service is going to be released this year too. Their specificity is to offer ARM architectures at a very low price tag.

I'd check these 2 out as they offer different levels of services which should make you happy whether you want to create a small cluster for development or to a large scale-production grade one.

[feeblebee]

We checked OVH already and of course their pricing is great, but the managing software felt a bit dusty (was it OpenStack?). What is your experience here and in terms of stability? The support in our case was always fast though.

Thanks for mentioning scaleway! It would be nice if they could offer some bigger servers than 'just' 128GB RAM for my use case. But will definitely explore them.

[mpettitt]

If you trust Gartner's judgement, the only major players are AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle Cloud and IBM Cloud. Can read their definition of "innovative" in the Magic Quadrant report at https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-50WJ5CK&ct=180525&...

As you can see, all the players with a global reach are pretty dominant in some industry or another: database software, Chinese e-commerce, and general computing. If you don't need the global reach, though, you get more options.

[feeblebee]

Thanks. I feared this.

Without global reach, which companies would come into your mind?

E.g. if only Canadian and European data centers I can think of OVH but their cloud offering feels a bit dusty :)

[towolf]

Try Hetzner.