Presumably Kubernetes is the answer here, but you need to run a lot of things yourself that come for free with GKE. Also “just buy bare metal” ignores the massive effort involved in operating a data center.

I don’t think so. But knowing my company’s capabilities and proficiency, it was obvious it was never going to work. Would have been much more logical to buy from one of the many local providers who run their own data centers. It doesn’t really matter because in the end the solution is so bad that we try and use GCP anyway whenever we get the chance.

Yep, you have OpenStack, which is the standard, and running some huge deployments, like these: https://www.openstack.org/use-cases/

OpenStack is probably the closest but it will not have everything GCP or AWS has

It's probably enough for most organizations, though.

Depends on what is desired... theoretically using Proxmox and VMs containing CapRover hosting docker containers should get you everything you want... but the ability instantly scale upwards is difficult to do yourself.

> the ability instantly scale upwards is difficult to do yourself.

If your business involves any amount of low priority bulk compute, this gets much much easier. You simply let the low priority stuff fall behind while your order to Dell for new servers is being delivered...

Also, if you have compute that could be on-prem or could be in the cloud, you can set up a kubernetes cluster spanning both and let non-privacy-sensitive overflow to GCP as needed.

All of the above rarely comes out cost-effective though, because while the raw compute is cheaper to DIY-it, when you factor in the staff time to build, maintain, and deal with the shortcomings of your bodged-together on-site solution, it's going to come out much more expensive.

To be honest, it depends on your SLA for uptime.

We've built out something homebrew like this using cheap compute desktops but you're still going to pay a lot upfront.