Always thought that a great statup idea would be to interact with dedicated server provider and offer on top of those cheap servers AWS like services.
The most common services like S3, Kafka, RDS (pg and mysql), Redis should be enough to cover most use cases.
With k8s and a dedicated smart team, it would be a possible adventure.
Moreover it can work great also on-premises. Several old medium business have their own physical infrastructure and they are not yet ready to move to the cloud.
> Always thought that a great statup idea would be to interact with dedicated server provider and offer on top of those cheap servers AWS like services.
The problem is the business model; managing all these common services is a big deal and takes serious engineering effort to keep online. You then fairly quickly should enter into relatively high prices to make this cost-efficient.
The cloud providers, however, have a trick: they can eat these costs and make serious $$$ on the actual compute, storage and bandwidth.
If you’re trying to compete with AWS et al based on price for bandwidth etc “but with common services such as S3”, you’re gonna have a really hard time convincing a customer your expensive managed Kafka is reasonably priced. And then you’ll just find yourself competing on just VPS servers...
In addition to my own products, I offer consulting to medium sized companies and my sales pitch is usually:
How much additional profit would it generate if I could cut your cloud costs by 20%?
Usually, the savings are even higher, but 20% is low enough to be easily believable, yet large enough for them to invite me to learn more.
The reason I do it manually is that many companies are afraid of the workflow interruptions usually associated with moving off the cloud. That's why I first analyze their deployment to calculate possible cost savings and then I offer them to hire me to take care of the migration. I'm pretty sure those companies would not feel comfortable switching to a different cloud by themselves.
For S3, it's not what most of the customers think they're buying, but what Amazon is actually selling is a storage service with 11 nines of durability:
It's "Simple Storage Service", and it does that one thing (storing practically unlimited amounts of objects) spectacularly well. Like 11 nines well. It doesn't do "inexpensive egress charges" well. Amazon never claimed that though.
I think a lot of people don't care about those 11 nines, and would love to buy something with perhaps only 5 or 4 nines of durability ("Maybe I'll need to upload it again once every few years, that's cool!") but which optimises for cheap bandwidth costs instead. Right now, I think that thing is an inexpensive VPS with an unlimited traffic (Hetzner were offering "unlimited traffic at 1GB/sec for the first 20TB, then throttled to 100MB/sec" for under 10EUR/month last time I went looking. And they're well above "the bottom of the barrel" pricing in cheap VPS land.)
i don't know about the US, but in europe a ton of these smaller, local parties exist. (usually called something like managed infrastructure or thereabouts).
Some of those companies are even more eyewateringly expensive than the story in the article.
I worked on a project a few years back where the client were paying $10k/month as a "managed service" fee, on top of about $4k/month worth of platform at full on-demand prices. I showed the client how they could have it all running on reserved instances for Prod and spot instances for dev/staging for under $2k/month - but no, somebody had signed up for $14k+ per month just to have someone to blame/shout at 24x7 if something went wrong. (And that company was ~85% likely to call me and blame it on the app before they even bothered looking to see if the platform was working...)
The most common services like S3, Kafka, RDS (pg and mysql), Redis should be enough to cover most use cases.
With k8s and a dedicated smart team, it would be a possible adventure.
Moreover it can work great also on-premises. Several old medium business have their own physical infrastructure and they are not yet ready to move to the cloud.