Truth be told if you're a European business, U.S. cloud providers weren't a good deal for a long time. Not since the advent of NVMe's and cheap 100G NIC's, well, that's for sure. Let's have a look at AWS R8 class, which is their most recent native instance type with real, modern I/O. Now, these are ostensibly powered by AWS Nitro 6th-gen networking, which is a 600G NIC. However, if you fancy NVMe drives (R8gd) which you do normally, you won't be getting more than 50G full-duplex. If you want to hit 100G+, you will need R8gn instances which don't offer ANY storage. So if your idea of data engineering is not calling from the 90s, well, you're stuck between a rock and a hard place mate!

Good news is you can get PCIe 5.0 servers, I/O gear, and host it yourself for a mere fraction of semi-capable AWS bill.

Bad news it doesn't matter if you don't get enough uplink bandwidth, no control over the routing table in the core routing infrastructure leading up to your WAN, or actual routers capable of hardware-filtering 100 gigabits worth of line rate per link. And you will need all these things if you want to at least try and match what Cloudflare/Cloudfront is doing from routing standpoint. (It will be much harder though to match them from the CDN standpoint...) DDoS protection is overrated, but it's not for reasons people commonly think.