Sure, Scaleway still lags behind the big three cloud providers in the US. But the US providers have a lot more money and been around much longer. Scaleway is quickly expanding its feature set though. They've recently introduced managed Clickhouse and OpenSearch among other things.
Hetzner Cloud is simple to use, but it's a distinguishing feature, not a bug.
Are we really bringing back this debate from 10 or may be 15 years when we started? Is Digital Ocean, Linode not a cloud provider. They were the VPS provider at the time.
I think in the end I agree with one of the argument, as long as these VPS providers give you a VPS that is charged per hour or per seconds, then they are cloud. Which ultimately is a server that is easily scaled up or down and charged on a time usage basis, when VPS at the time were a fixed monthly price.
The offer really has moved, and people are taking it seriously.
Also: not worst in every dimension at all. For instance, you actually get serious support, no matter your size, a much better version of what premium accounts give you at AWS/GCP etc.
I'll take the cleaner approach with predictable billing offered by the EU providers. Even if it means using my brain to RTFM and edit a couple of config files (which can then be rolled into automation via images or Ansible or whatever).
Maybe it’s the best approach? Maybe it’s more profitable and European companies want to grow their business?
Europe can fail on its own, but recreating the exact billionaires are able to scam everything will make it fail faster.
It’s painful being a non-EU person working here, and hearing people wax lyrical about sovereign EU cloud without an actual product or product plan.
And once a product is anctua shipped and offered it is like already 5 years behind what US clouds are offering.
It’s embarrassing really
Big companies that see the opportunity to be "Not AWS"?
A VPS provider who wants to grow their marketshare?
Nation states?
Not saying it'll be a small effort, but if the US continues to wield national laws to coerce American companies to negatively affect European citizens, it's possible.
National security by ruining the market and alienating allies to the point of uniting the world against you???
Now, database replication, not having to waste time to run/maintain clusters (be it Kubernetes or Elastic stack or something else), that I believe is well worth the money to offload to someone else, but even there you can get a much cheaper deal with someone that's not one of the three big cloud providers. I will also concede that Firebase is genuinely nicer to work with than its alternatives (Supabase very much included).
Clouds give you software-definable load balancers, networking, clustering, integrated systemwide security, and a boatload of managed services like message queues, databases, AI training and inference, etc. etc.
No-one sane implements all that using a collection of VPSes, because of a simple principle of business: it's more profitable to focus investment on your core competencies, and for almost all companies, managing a non-trivial computing infrastructure is decidedly not a core competency.
I run a PowerShell script once a day at noon, and I have no idea what kind of server it's running on, where in the world that server is, how much memory it has, or any other details. I get about a CPU, a dozen MB of memory, and a tiny amount of network capacity for about 5 seconds.
This is a very different experience from "We will rent you a VPS by the month".
My money would be on the French.
Sure France would spend the money. We’d see none of the results.
Lidl! https://horovits.medium.com/lidl-is-taking-on-aws-the-age-of...
I would argue that these aren't even "cloud providers", they are just VPS providers. Which is fine, but it's not the same thing.
There really isn't any European "cloud" service at all, which is a huge part of the problem. And I doubt there ever will be because who would even build it?
It would cost billions and billions of euros just to be "not AWS" (but worse in every way except location). Who is investing in that?