There is indeed a large gap in the market between outsourcing all your infrastructure to Hyperscalers vs. hosting it on DIY-bare-metal and/or VPC providers. An open source alternative to AWS would do much to fill that gap, and we are building just that at Ubicloud (I'm one of the co-founders).
So far with Ubicloud, you get virtual machines, load balancers, private networking, managed PostgreSQL, all with encryption at rest and in-transit. The Ubicloud managed service uses Hetzner bare metal as one of its hosting providers, which cuts costs 2x - 10x compared to AWS/Azure. Would love to hear any feedback if you'd like to give it a try, or go through the repo here: https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud
> You can set it up yourself on these providers or you can use our managed service.
Are all the bits and pieces necessary for starting one's own managed service open source? In case somebody is interested in starting their own commercial cloud. How easy would that be to deploy?
There's OpenStack. It's a private IaaS. Had loadbalancers, ipv6 support, support for K8s hosting via the magnum component (and other container orchestrators), HA via Masakari component. The networking is very flexible. It does not currently have functions as a service, I believe that was in the Senlin component, but that's been abandoned, I believe a new incarnation of the idea is in the works though. With something like Kolla-ansible a containerized OpenStack infrastructure is pretty damn easy to manage, upgrades are just making sure you make any needded changes in the global config file (just a vimdiff with the new sample one included in the release) and then literally just a kolla-ansible upgrade -i inventory-file.yml.
I'm just a home labber and I've run OpenStack via kolla-ansible for like 7 years now, and Ceph since the jewel release I think almost 8 years ago for storage. Both are pretty easy to manage.
So far with Ubicloud, you get virtual machines, load balancers, private networking, managed PostgreSQL, all with encryption at rest and in-transit. The Ubicloud managed service uses Hetzner bare metal as one of its hosting providers, which cuts costs 2x - 10x compared to AWS/Azure. Would love to hear any feedback if you'd like to give it a try, or go through the repo here: https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud