I love Azure Functions for small jobs and deploying Kubernetes cluster from Github actions to Amazon EKS is blast. But I think it is only business customers and not for small startups or pet projects.
At work I am using Azure and AWS and I used to have GCP and AWS for my pet projects as well but now my projects run on Hetzner VPS’s and Cloud. Main reason for my decision to favour Hetzner over these big guys is uncertaincy and confusion of billing. It’s nice if I suddenly become next Facebook to have scaling possibilty but that is least of my worries and quite nice problem to have. What I like VPS’s and Hetzner Cloud is straight forward and simple pricing per month. If I want Cloud instance with 2Gb RAM and 1vCPU it’s 3 Euros. If I run out of resources I can scale up like going to 32Gb is 35 Euros.
I have small startup where I have worker process written on Python, API written on Node and client running as SPA (Vue.js/Nuxt.js). Data layer is on PostgreSQL/Redis. Without thinking, I set this up in AWS and it worked nicely but soon I noticed this is 100 Euros/month. Since this is in Minimum Viable Product stage I decided to move to VPS. So I spin up VPS with Ubuntu on it. I deployed everything there and changed Github actions. It took me one evening and I don’t consider myself sysadmin. But I think installing Linux with above tech stack is easier than to understand how to run same setup on AWS, GCP or Azure. If in some point I need scaling I can always move back Kubernetes setup on AWS but sometimes less is more.