Ovhcloud is French. Telekom is a German company and they have open telekom cloud. We actually use this on a project (and I don't recommend that to friends).
Gaia-X is a european initiative and consortium to build some standardized cloud ecosystem. The goals are a bit hand wavy and since Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are actually part of the consortium, it's not really clear what the goals are at this point. I haven't heard much about this since it was announced a few years ago.
I've used AWS, Gcloud, Hetzner, Telekom Cloud, and a few other things. My view on this space is that it needs disruption. Amazon was disruptive when they launched in 2006. It was great and it enabled a lot of companies to stop worrying about maintaining infrastructure. That's 15 years ago. It's a commodity product at this point.
The problems I see:
- Companies overcharge for their services. AWS especially is very expensive to use. To the point that the monthly cost of some of their more expensive things about pays for the hardware they give you. Of course it delivers a lot of value. But it creates an opportunity for others to offer cheaper services.
- Most providers try to lock you into their platform with a combination of complexity and convenience. Once you are on a platform, switching it out for another becomes really expensive. Things like openstack exist of course but are a combination of complex and not that comprehensive.
- The services offered by these companies are very hard to use for what they do. You end up micro managing lots of bits and pieces and you need expensive devops people to do that for you. There are better ways to deploy software to server these days that feature higher levels of automation and convenience.
To disrupt the big providers, you'd need to be as good but an order of magnitude cheaper. Instead of focusing the commodity things that everybody has (buckets, vms, load balancers, etc.), the real value is in the more advanced stuff they offer. Things like Fargate or Google cloud run. Basically Kubernetes without all the moving parts to worry about. Don't offer database servers but scalable elastic data bases.
In short, that's where the money is and the reason Amazon is so ridiculously wealthy. They overcharge for this stuff and they don't get any real competition so they get away with it. If you think about it, a lot of this stuff is very resource efficient. So it should be cheaper than getting a lot of hardware that you then under utilize. Instead, it's more expensive. AWS pockets the difference.
That's what needs disrupting but it will be a race to the bottom once this starts happening. I think that's overdue though. So this Swedish company might be onto something.