Published: Nov 4, 2025 by Isaac Johnson

You see me write about Google Cloud, Azure and occasionally about AWS. I used to write a lot more about alternative clouds as well. IN 2019, I touched on Vultr, Digital Ocean and Linode.

I may not write much about them today, but I still occasionally touch on Alicloud. Let’s talk about why…

IBM Cloud

In 2020, I wrote up about IBM Cloud and their Container Registry. It was easy to sign-up and use.

However, in 2023, I attempted to move to a paid account so I could try some non-free features.

What happened was my account was disabled for no reason:

They not only closed the case, but were quite rude about it as well and they never emailed me back.

Revisit in 2025

I went to revisit this recently. Again, in each case I get blocked by an error with credit cards then get caught in an endless login loop

You can see the login issue on that YouTube recording here

They followed up saying I would need to email from that signup account (which is an addy.io forwarder)

This is where it got even weirder. I had a phone call that day where they asked me “tell us why you want to use IBM Cloud”.

I was a bit taken back. I replied “…to compare with AWS and GCP… Do you want me to use your cloud?”. The representative just said they would email me and I would need to reply.

They indeed emailed me and gave me 1 day to respond and provide actual scans of a government issued ID by way of insecure email. They, again, demanded to know why I would use IBM cloud.

I was pretty plain in my reply. I’m not doing that

as you might expect, the next day

Oracle Cloud

This is not the first time it has happened. I had similar struggles with Oracle Cloud which I wrote about in Dec 2020

Upon sign-up, I had a phone call from a lady in Ireland who asked why I wanted to use Oracle Cloud.

I gave them the benefit of the doubt and said to compare and she unblocked me. It was a for a free-tier cloud account with limited usage; why do an international call over that?

I also have some lingering disdain for Oracle (ever since they gutted Sun Microsystems and PeopleSoft). That said, they still were pleasant enough and I wrote about them on at least one occasion.

Summary

The fact is, there are the big three clouds: AWS, Azure and GCP and then the rest.

While I do not include Oracle in my list of companies I would use, but I do use Alibaba Cloud because they make me smile.

I should expand on that - they are just plain strange - in a good way. It’s like the science projects from a middle school classroom and there is that one oddball kid and you don’t really know what he’s going to bring, but you know you’ll go out of your way to see what strange thing he’s presenting.

For instance, just this summer I added some real payment details to Alicloud just to try out Qwen3 Coder CLI.

Seriously, you can federate to Google to login to Alicloud, that is just wild

This is completely real - I just logged in and they are doing a 6day timed countdown to give me a free cloud server on trial. I don’t know how that makes sense, but dammit you got me - i want to try that!

Geo-politics

Additionally, there is a weird reverse going on in the world. It used to be everyone wanted a US cloud provider to avoid authoritarianism and privacy violations. I avoid politics on this blog, but the US is no longer what it was and so clearly, from a global perspective, there is a desire to now avoid US companies and providers.

There is a real and present desire for cloud providers that can remain outside US jurisdiction. I am really surprised this hasn’t raised the visibility on companies like Hetzner and UpCloud. I have used UpCloud a few times by way of Aiven.io.

The Cloud Brain Drain

Even if one has no concerns about government overreach in certain countries, there is also the fear that some cloud providers are experiencing some real brain drain.

As I write this in October, there was a terrible weekend outage in AWS in us-east-1 that took out a lot of the internet. It was suggested that the brain drain was the cause, fundamentally. AWS keeps cutting jobs and there are consequences for those actions.

I spoke to an old friend who was high up there and since I didn’t ask for permissions, I’ll keep some details confidential, but the person talked about the rigorous hiring process they had and when their team was let go, that person pointed out that now they have these very smart, well vetted senior engineers who went through a lot to get hired now out there who will be passionate about not using AWS.

Clouds I do use

Let’s flip the script - I do not work at Google. I know people who do and Google treats them well. I know people who work at Microsoft, and Microsoft treats them well. If either company came after me, I likely would join their ranks. Google even has a solid GDE program (of which I am a member) that lets senior people like myself know things in advance, weigh in on things where appropriate, and get occasional swag

I don’t get paid by them, but then again, I get excited to write about some cool new thing (honestly, if Microsoft or UpCloud did similar, I would write about them).

If you want to know why I write about New Relic more and more, it’s because they invited me into the fold, to share thoughts - I don’t even get cloud credits with them.

My point

So this is why i come back to IBM Cloud and similar providers. What are you doing IBM? seriously, wtf. If you don’t let passionate bloggers, writers and experimenters try your products, they are going to (insert Lewis Black gif)

.. they aren’t going to try your products.

And my other point - I’m looking at you OVHCloud, UpCloud, Hetzner and the like, hit me up - or people like me. There is a need. There are a lot of people who are anti-AI and want more blog write-ups and content around Cloud usage that is not LLM hosting.