Buy some cheap computer like X99 with Xeon from AliExpress, add some cheap GPU like Tesla K80 and "train" your LLM models on it. Now you can pirate what you want and you are untouchable because every big AI company will give you lawyers for free of charge because if judge would decide against you, then the precedents would be against them as well.
Most cloud providers have a similar offering to AWS Lambda, plus it is not that hard to convert your code from the event handling pattern impose by AWS Lambda to a long running container running in K8s or VMs like you are doing yourself
IMO the lock-in fear is overblown as the top cloud offerings (S3, Lambdas, K8s as a service etc) are already commoditized among the top providers, the exception being specialized databases like DynamoDB, Spanner, Cosmos …
Not saying there wouldn’t be some major work to switch your operations from eg AWS to GCP, but it is also not a hard lock-in
I hesitate to call Hetzner "cloud". Hetzner is an EC2+S3 competitor, not an AWS one. IMO the minimum for being a real cloud is you need hosted Postgres, hosted Kafka, hosted Kubernetes, and S3-compatible object storage. Without the first three Hetzner is just not in the same product category. Nobody sensible buys AWS for the comically overpriced EC2.
Another missed component is a real autoscaling load balancer. This often gets missed and taken for granted. Possibly due to if you haven't seen a good one (AWS) you might not realise what you're missing. Most aspiring "cloud" companies have fixed capacity single tennant load balancers which is not cloud in any definition.
It's far cheaper to do it yourself, but the entire point is that you outsource the management of the service. Lots of people don't want to deal with database failovers, or - god forbid - deal with Kubernetes control plane issues.
On the opposite, it is more expensive, and any large enough company should probably at least consider renting metal rather than services. For a small org, though, it lets you avoid a lot of infrastructure/ops work.
If your threat model is AWS deciding you break their AUP, the issue is with you doing AUP breaking stuff. This ain’t your personal Google Play account.
Self reliance is very important as we can see with USA temporarily not updating Ukrainian F16's radars and jammers and degrading them in the process. Then it is better to have a weapon with worse performance than the best thing on the market but not being subjected to whims of same random leader on the other side of the world who things that your struggle for independence is inconvenient for his business.
Sooner or later people will figure out that it is working exactly the same with nuclear weapons and then non-proliferation treaty will be null and void.
