what made you choose trusting a cloud provider with your ingress/egress rather than a VPN provider?
b. The other reason I went with a cloud provider like AWS is that their static IP seems to be whitelisted fairly well especially with their own service - Amazon Prime. So I have had not problem watching videos while traveling. Also in the past macOS and iOS updates were problematic via VPN. But that seems to have gone away. Maybe because they bypass VPN? I don't know for sure.
c. Many of my friends have been asking for help. I figured if I went with one of the big 3 cloud providers it would be easy for me to basically create an instance image preloaded with all the scripts and WG etc. that they can then run from their own accounts.
d. The big 3 cloud providers uptimes are far better than many of the VPN providers.
Relatives of mine got setup with a VPN in under 5 minutes just by:
1. download (vpn client)
2. pay (for a month or two)
3. switch it on and forget it.
In terms of on-boarding new users to use secure and recommended tools, I find this a massive achievement.
VPN providers are far more likely than AWS to do the kind of shady things that might matter to your relatives, like selling their personal data.
It's meaningless. VPN providers come in the same full spectrum of integrity as people or companies.
At some point you can’t, you can only make a best judgement based on what they’re telling you and what you’ve found elsewhere.
How do you know that AWS isn't spying on your systems? Are they transparent? Do AWS release detailed transparency reports on their servers? You are identified when you pay for AWS no?
I'd rather trust a specialist privacy VPN provider like Mullvad, than me rolling my own VPN on a provider that isn't even transparent and that is hard to use for consumers other than myself.
my 2c.
For instance, at work we are mostly remote, and use a VPN (OpenVPN here) to access the local network at the office with our on-premise build servers, and it also allows developers to work together sometimes (one running a debugging server on their dev laptop, another debugging the client from their own laptop as if they were sharing a local network, when actually they are hundreds of miles apart)
It didn't sound ad all like the OP was using his VPN to dial into work. He was dialing into a purpose-build VM which wasn't stated to do anything else - just tunneling his traffic for some unknown reason.