[convolvatron]

Note that once you have virtual machines, those other things can be provided using that same virtual machine interface. Layering and standards are really useful. Spin up your own storage cluster? if you want...pay a managed service from a third party on the same cloud? whatever makes sense to you. I find it appalling that because money was so cheap, people got used to just throwing it at the hyperscalers 'rich offerings', and now we have multiple generations of people that think RDS is some magic box that would take billions in investment to replicate.

[messh]

This matches my experience. I run a pay-per-use VM service (shellbox.dev) entirely on Hetzner auction servers with Firecracker microVMs. Sub-second boot, full Linux environment, SSH-only interface. The entire "cloud" layer is Firecracker + Btrfs reflinks for instant copy-on-write cloning. No managed Kubernetes, no proprietary orchestrators.

The total cost of that stack is remarkably low — cheap enough to offer VMs at $0.02/hr running and $0.50/mo stopped, which undercuts most hyperscalers for bursty workloads. The "billions in investment" framing is exactly the problem. Most of what hyperscalers sell is convenience wrappers around commodity compute, and the lock-in is the product.

Wrote up the economics here if anyone's curious: https://shellbox.dev/blog/race-to-the-bottom.html

[kasey_junk]

We didn’t do it because money was cheap we did it because there are tons of benefits to not having to inventory your own compute. Everything from elastic scaling to financial engineering was improved via the hyper scalar options and it’s ridiculous to act like those options aren’t valuable post hoc because Europe doesn’t have a native one.

I think the Heztners and their ilk are coming along nicely and probably can support a lot of Europes cloud computing needs, but they aren’t in the same league as the hyper scalars when it comes to capabilities currently. It would be great if they got there for everyone though.