[davidee]

Canuck here. We're considering getting off AWS and our exposure is mostly limited to EC2/RDS/S3. OVH has a bad rep in Canada from my limited experience, but it's always hard to tell what services folks were using and how and when.

Our biggest concern is a reliable replacement for RDS-postgres, which we've been using for about 13 years now and has been rock solid with the exception of a single, short period. Even then it was an update that caused high baseline CPU usage and AWS had it fixed in a few days.

Cost isn't the primary concern - though lower costs would be a nice side effect.

Shopping list:

- Good OpenTofu (or Terraform) support

- Reliable

- Good managed database (we could roll our own here if needed, I just don't wanna).

- Canadian DC

Nothing we do requires high performance or anything vendor specific. We also roll our own o11y and don't use AWS's vendor-specific solutions (at least not primarily).

[adriand]

I'm in the exact same boat (Canadian + same requirements). If you settle on something I would love to hear your experiences. While looking around I did find a Canadian provider:

https://www.fullhost.com/cloud-paas/

I'm intrigued but I'm also a little skeptical. They seem to do too much.

[davidee]

Will do!

I hadn't heard of FullHost, and I agree, something seems off with their offerings. The site is so noisy. This really stood out to me in their "DevOps Paas" database section: "An Innovative Approach to Clustered Databases".

Like, I totally understand marketing is marketing, but I don't want an innovative approach to foundational technologies. These are things that we know how to work and operate well. Now maybe I'm not their target market, but I want a careful, thoughtful approach.

Also, while I'm sure there are incredibly talented, smart people working at these more local hosting / cloud companies, please, please don't try to innovate with bread and butter services... just make it work, day in, day out. That's what I want. It's why we're still on AWS.

Anyway, I sent FullHost sales a little note with some questions. Will report back.

[davidee]

Update: no terraform support (sales rep didn’t even know what that was) but claimed API support - which would sadly mean rolling our own provider. Not ideal.

They tried to suggest their in house Click-Ops layer (they compared it to Cloudformation) was adequate - which is a bit suspect.

They did offer some significant amount of access for exploration for a flat rate of $100. I might just poke around though I really don’t want to spend my time writing an OpenTofu provider.

[adriand]

Thanks for the update. Vibe seems off. ;)

My thinking on this has shifted a bit, I'm now just thinking I'll set up on Digital Ocean's Toronto data centre. I believe (assume is the right word, I guess) that they have a Canadian subsidiary (I found this: https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-profiles.digi...), and if Trump did issue an executive order cutting off Canadian access to American technology, I would hope this would be enough isolation to at least give me enough time to migrate elsewhere without customer impact. Who knows.

Although I still haven't ruled out giving OVH a try.

My email address is in my profile, happy to keep in touch if you turn up other options!

[tokyotexture]

I know OCI isn't popular around here, but it ticks all the boxes you listed. Managed Postgres, Terraform, and Toronto/Vancouver regions. It'll end up being roughly half the cost of AWS at list for your average EC2/RDS/S3 workload.

[davidee]

I worked at a startup that was a supplier to Oracle for a while and had to work directly with their OCI API team. While I loathed the hubris of the “I work for Oracle” employees - the one thing they were absolutely militant about was legacy support and ensuring that if something was working it stayed working.

That said, part of the desire to get off AWS is finding slightly less nefarious set of characters to hand money to and Ellison (and his lot) doesn’t fit the bill.

[kouzant]

OVHCloud has a very decent support for automation - Terraform among others https://help.ovhcloud.com/csm/en-terraform-at-ovhcloud?id=kb...

[davidee]

Indeed. But that doesn't solve the issue that OVH's reputation for their Canadian DCs isn't great from the (again limited) information I have. If we had heard consistently positive things, we'd be there (or strongly considering them). A few platform engineers I worked with had worked at OVH in Canada - again no stellar reports sadly.