How to choose a cloud provider for your digital service

Choosing a cloud provider feels like a technical decision and is often treated that way – handed off to the developers, settled on feature lists. But for the vast majority of digital services, all the major platforms handle the technology. What actually separates AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and the European alternatives lies elsewhere: in cost, in talent availability, in ecosystem, and in legal factors. Here’s a decision guide at the buyer level, where those questions get to carry the most weight.

The comparison factors that decide

The major cloud providers resemble each other more than their marketing suggests. The differences that matter for your decision are rarely technical.

Pricing deserves a warning: cloud providers’ pricing models are notoriously hard to compare, because the cost depends on exactly how the service is used. A platform that looks cheap in a worked example can turn out to be the most expensive in practice. Calculate based on your own expected usage pattern, not on list prices.

Talent weighs heavier than you’d think

The most underestimated factor is access to people. A cloud platform is only as useful as the number of developers you can hire or contract who know it. Choose a platform with plenty of talent in the Swedish market, and both recruiting and consultant support become easy. Choose a niche platform you can’t find people for, and every change becomes expensive, with heavy dependence on individual people.

That makes talent availability a heavier factor than the price per compute unit in a spreadsheet. A few kronor cheaper to run matters little if you can’t staff the solution. So don’t just ask what the platform costs – ask how easy it is to find people who master it.

When European is justified

The American cloud giants dominate for good reasons – breadth, maturity, and ecosystem. But in some situations, legal factors outweigh breadth, and that’s when a European alternative becomes justified.

• The public sector often has requirements and expectations that argue strongly for keeping data in Europe.
• Especially sensitive data, like health information, makes the question of foreign access a heavy factor.
• Customer requirements can decide it on their own: if your customers require European data handling, that’s a business reason regardless of the technology.

A European cloud removes some of the questions around foreign access, but as a rule has a smaller ecosystem and can cost more. The decision becomes a trade-off: weigh the need for European handling against what you give up in breadth, maturity, and sometimes price. For many services, breadth carries the most weight, but for the most sensitive data, the trade can be worth it.

Avoid getting welded in place

The most important question in the long run is how dependent you make yourself. Every major cloud provider offers unique proprietary services that are convenient but exist only there. The more of the solution you build on such services, the harder and more expensive a future move becomes.

So distinguish between two ways of using the cloud. Using it as infrastructure – compute and storage in a standardized way – makes a move relatively simple. Building yourself into a provider’s special services makes the solution efficient but rooted in place. A reasonable stance is to reserve the most provider-specific services for where they genuinely deliver major value, and build the rest in a way that can be moved.

A scenario: the choice behind the choice

A company was torn between three major clouds and spent weeks comparing technical features. When they instead asked the right questions – which platform can we find developers for, which fits our existing environment, where does the data need to sit – the choice suddenly became easy. Technology had seemed like the safe bet; the real differences lay in talent and fit.

They chose the platform they could easily staff, built the foundation in a movable way, and reserved one proprietary service for the single part where it delivered a real lift. Two years later, when they needed to adjust, it went smoothly.

Want help weighing the cloud choice based on what actually matters for you, rather than feature lists? At Weapp we’re happy to have that conversation – get in touch with a description of the service you’re going to run.