Ask HN: Beyond AWS/Azure/GCP, what cloud providers should I know more about?
This question potentially lacks the situational context necessary to provide the answer&#x2F;insight it&#x27;s really looking for.<p>What&#x27;s the SaaS going to look like technically? Lots of compute processing? Or maybe large volumes of data? Perhaps machine learning? Or is it just a simple website and app deal?<p>Then there&#x27;s the question of the technical competence on the ground (and the opinions that tag along for the ride). On the one hand, what&#x27;s the expertise level? On the other hand, what do people prefer using? (And separately, what to people have experience with?)<p>I wonder (I don&#x27;t have enough context to competently move the slider to &quot;proper accusation&quot;) if somewhere along the way a general search for un-turned-over rocks got specialized&#x2F;narrowed into &quot;the overhead&#x27;s all in the sheet metal benders&quot; (the hardware). If this *is* the case, the only correct course of action (IMO) is to wind the train of thought backwards (oohc oohc) back to that frame of reference, then apply <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Five_whys" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Five_whys</a> until you&#x27;re somewhere alien and interesting.<p>(Reiterating the caveat at the start of the previous paragraph, this is all massive conjecture and just-in-case assumption.)<p>If there was in fact a point at which hardware was specifically called out as a primary focus of optimization, I would loudly note that this type of hyperfocus leaves space for entire forests&#x27; worth of trees to fall over without ever being noticed, in this case <i>for all of the software</i>. Not just certain bits of it but like the whole kit and caboodle, unnoticed.<p>A related alternate possibility is that hardware optimization might be being treated like an axis point to orbit around, which can contribute to seeing things like immovable Mt Everests, and the construction of great and confusing Rube Goldberg machines to work around... perceived resistance that isn&#x27;t really there.<p>To offer a 180-degree counterpoint that sorta flies in the face of the abstraction-away you <i>might</i> be trying to do here, if you want to look at different providers, I would suggest adopting a pat-answer strategy of keeping the architecture cloud-agnostic *<i>where reasonable to do so</i>*, and further suggest trying multiple providers - how does their support help out when it&#x27;s 3am and you have no attention span and you accidentally something ridiculously straightforward? What&#x27;s the performance like relative to the workload? What do all the engineers that are going to be headdesking against this stuff every day think about different options? Etc.<p>It&#x27;s quite possible this reply is entirely misguided, in which case please ignore. I&#x27;m still learning the art of reading intent through text, I have a long way to go.