So What is The Cloud Wars?

I lead up the engineering teams of the Telehealth Startup Caregility as the VP of Software Development. But I do a lot of IndieHacker projects/products to keep my technical skills sharp, learn new technologies, evaluate new technologies that may not be ready for Caregility just yet but may be in the future, and for some reason I just seem to be wired to always be building (and breaking) things.

Last month, I spent way, way to much money on cloud infrastructure for my IndieHacking projects. So as any engineer would, I drastically over-engineered a solution to find the best cloud provider for my projects. Along the way, I not only learned a lot of interesting things for IndieHacker products, but also for rapidly growing companies like Caregility, and larger enterprise-size companies. The Cloud Wars is a collection of my notes and learnings from this process that will be published in the form of blog posts over the next several weeks.

We’ll be comparing and contrasting the different types of cloud services, and pitting them against each other to see which platform reigns supreme.

Some of the different categories of managed cloud services we’ll be looking at are:

• Virtual Machines (VMs)
• Managed Containers
• Serverless Functions
• Cloud Storage (e.g. AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage)
• Managed Databases
• ML/AI Ops Platforms

For each category, we’ll compare the different options available from popular cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft, and Azure, as well as smaller providers like Vercel, Netlify, and Fly.io. We’ll look at factors like performance, ease of use, pricing, scalability, and availability, and provide real-world use cases and best practices.

In the coming weeks, we’ll dive deeper into each category and compare the different options head-to-head. So stay tuned for the next installment of the Cloud Wars!