I know I viable alternative to the big clouds.
Don't use them! They cost too much in dollar terms, they all try to EEE lock you in with "managed" (and subtly incompatible) versions of services you would otherwise run yourself. They are too big to give a shit about laws or customer whims.
I have plenty of experience with the big three clouds and given the choice I'll run locally, or on e.g. Hetzner, or not at all.
My company loves to penny-pinch things like lunch reimbursement and necessary tools, but we piss away latge sums on unused or under-used cloud capacity with glee, be ause that is magically billed elsewhere (from the point of view of a given manager).
It's a racket, and I'm by mo means the first to say so. The fact that this money-racket is also a dat-racket doesn't surprise me in the least. It's just good racketeering!
Yes. Cloud is great for a very specific usecase. Venture capital startups which either go viral and explode, or die within a year. In those cases you need the capacity to automatically scale and also to only pay for the resources you actually use so you the service pays for itself. You also have no capex and you can drop the costs instantly if you need to close up shop. For services that really need infinite and instant scaling and flexibility, cloud is a genuinely great option.
However that's not what most traditional companies do. What my employer does, is picking up the physical servers they had in our datacenters, dump them on an AWS compute box they run 24/7 without any kind of orchestration and call it "cloud". That's not what cloud is, that is really just someone else's computer. We spend a LOT more now but our CIO wanted to "go cloud" because everyone is so it was more a tickbox than a real improvement.
Microservices, object storage etc, that is cloud.