First Attempt: Open Telekom Cloud
A brief investigation into Deutsche Telekom's cloud service
On european-alternatives.eu my curiosity was quickly piqued by Open Telekom Cloud (OTC). OTC is the cloud service of Deutsche Telekom, the company behind T-Mobile. It has a large number of PaaS and SaaS services available, including container as a service and function as a service. These two services are quite rare finds in European cloud providers. The fact that it's backed by an established company with a proven track record in hardware and networking is also a nice bonus. There is also a Terraform provider for OTC.
So, I set to work to register an account with OTC. This is where I hit an unexpected roadblock.
It seems OTC does not permit private use. This is not just a matter of the signup form requiring a VAT number, as I first thought: the terms and conditions actually require customers to promise not to use our account for personal use. My suspicion is that this has to do with their 250 euro signup free credit. In theory one could use such a credit quite easily to simply host some private storage for a very long time, for example. If this is the reason, I really think that there should be a possibility to opt out of the 250 euro credit and just pay as you go right away. Allowing private individuals to try out your cloud platform reduces barriers to usage, which I think should be a good thing.
So unfortunately for now this ends my first attempt already.