there's a lot of affordable examples such as hetzner - what's missing?
For example:
* Object storage: lots of horror stories out there regarding flakey performance so hard to justify sticking mission critical stuff there.
* Private networking: Again, too many anecdotes about loss of service. Lots of people just using the public IP6 interfaces to avoid their private networking entirely. And private networks are IP4 only.
* Kubernetes CSI: I've had issues with this where a PV gets in some locked state and I can't remove from console.
I'd love to see more competition here.
We (lithus.eu) deal with their custom solutions team regularly and often provision private networks in the 10-100G range. On top of that we deploy MinIO and OpenEBS/Mayastor, and the whole thing just hums along very nicely indeed.
Its not just cloud. There is a lot of reliance on mobile OSes too, also American (and anything that needs updates is effectively controlled by whoever supplies the updates).
From past HN stories the EU is developing an age verification app that only works on Google attested Android or on iOS. The NHS relies on AWS. British courts use MS Teams for remote hearings. The majority of my clients (apart from some I guide elsewhere) use AWS - its the safe choice. AWS is the current "nobody ever got fired for buying X" supplier. Gmail holds the same position for email.
And it also seems that themoviedb.org also has an IP ban on Hetzner, found this out last week trying to build a tool that would've needed it to enrich its data.