[HN Gopher] Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-n...
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Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native
Author : jamesblonde
Score : 691 points
Date : 2026-01-31 10:34 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| adrianN wrote:
| I kind of share the opinion of the FSF Europe that it is less
| important where software comes from compared to whether it's
| libre, but for cloud hardware I really hope that we manage to
| create competitive European offerings. Maybe we're lucky and this
| European initiative will produce more than five Fraunhofer
| institutes and a gift to SAP.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| I thought I heard that hetzner was pretty cheap, haven't looked
| myself though...
| adrianN wrote:
| Price is probably not the only factor in competitiveness.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Well Hetzner's support's phenomenal too.
|
| Sure they might not have all the same offerings but they
| are really easy to abstract upon and personally I feel like
| hetzner is seriously one of the best cloud providers.
|
| Hetzner is absolutely 10x more competitive than AWS. It's
| actually hard to match the competitiveness of hetzner with
| their scale actually. I seriously can't understate this
| enough but AWS being competitive is really somewhat of a
| mass delusion or maybe the fact that Companies don't know
| other alternatives exist but I genuinely find it absolutely
| strange.
|
| Also, just go ahead and try hetzner and see their
| competitiveness out for yourself. Seriously, one of the
| best (netcup another german hosting is really great too and
| they can be even cheaper at times and its something I
| personally use and can vouch for both netcup/hetzner)
| matt-p wrote:
| They are OK but I would not have them as my /only/ cloud.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I have used Hetzner off and on for years, nice products and
| services.
|
| I don't care what provider you use, if your business or app
| use case needs any sort of reliability have a plan for
| reinstalling code and data on alternate providers quickly as
| possible.
|
| There are horror stories of people and companies being cut
| off because of pressure from the US government, or having one
| of the Google/Microsoft/Amazon tech giants cancelling
| accounts.
|
| Really, in today's world, why totally rely on anyone?
|
| EDIT: it seems prudent to maintain a cloud account in Europe,
| US, and Asia and have a plan for moving application code and
| data around if required. Outside the US I have mostly only
| used Hetzner, but Alibaba has impressive looking services.
| tirant wrote:
| I would say there's even less chance nowadays to generate a
| fully private set of European alternatives to American cloud
| offerings.
|
| Europes bureaucratization and the growth of the size of states
| has increased the last 10 years. I have less and less hope that
| we're able to set the right free market conditions for real
| competition to happen.
|
| That doesn't mean that won't be alternatives to American
| offerings, but most probably will come from somewhere else
| (Singapore, China, Taiwan...)
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > set the right free market conditions for real competition
| to happen
|
| Just as a curiosity, what exactly are those "right free
| market conditions" and where have those been successfully
| implemented before? Because I think most of us (Europeans)
| are desperately trying to avoid replicating the American
| experiment, so if that's the "right free market conditions" I
| think we're trying to avoid those on purpose.
|
| But maybe you're thinking of some other place, then I'm eager
| ears to hear what worked elsewhere :)
| ada0000 wrote:
| If the size of state and bureaucratisation are the main
| issues, one wonders how China got so far :-)
| stefanfisk wrote:
| In what sense is china bureaucratic when it comes to
| business?
| ada0000 wrote:
| Tax breaks, operations of state owned industry, other
| incentives etc are guided by five year plans implemented
| by a party bureaucracy.
| dmurray wrote:
| "You can't do X" is a much different experience from "you
| can do X, but you need to spend a year and thousands of
| man-hours of paperwork applying for permission to do it".
|
| In China, if the five-year plan prioritizes something,
| businesses will be up and running in months. In France,
| if the French parliament enacts a law prioritizing
| something, businesses still have to fight individual
| departments or local governments that have their own
| ideas about how they should regulate it.
|
| Don't confuse bureaucracy for authoritarianism.
| stefanfisk wrote:
| How is any of that a bureaucratic burden for domestic
| private companies in China?
| boondongle wrote:
| I can't believe we're talking about China in the context
| of a Cloud sovereignty issue and this is even a question.
|
| Having worked for these Cloud providers China has
| consistently used bureaucracy to exfiltrate Cloud
| technologies and to tip the scales of effectiveness of
| offerings through levers with China Telecom/Unicom.
| Analyzing the backbone, you could see it in real time.
|
| China basically offsets its bureaucracy by doing the one
| thing Europe has not done so far in this space: overtly
| hurt foreign competitors. It doesn't matter how superior
| your offerings are if the end customers end up throttled
| creating a less desirable experience than the less-
| featured, stable domestic competitor.
|
| Unfortunately - the elephant in the room is China got to
| where it was by being overtly adversarial with the US
| from the jump after 2010 which translated to a number of
| anti-competitive measures. The EU's in a spot because
| it's mostly responding to Trump and a poorly written US
| law. The US and EU are weird friends in that we could
| both exfiltrate each other's tech, patents, and
| industrial assets and move on with business but that's
| not actually what either side actually wants.
| stefanfisk wrote:
| China weaponizing bureaucracy towards foreign companies
| isn't really relevant though.
|
| AFAIK domestic companies operating in China don't have to
| endure anywhere near the amount of red tape that EU
| companies typically do when operating in the EU.
| creddit wrote:
| No one wonders that if they have any actual knowledge.
| Chinese government spending as a % of GDP is much less
| than say France. :-)
|
| https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/J
| PN/...
|
| Bureaucratisation in the realm of business is much
| smaller in most relevant ways for most enterprises in
| China as well.
| hartator wrote:
| Contradictory regulations is one of the symptoms of
| overregulation.
|
| I.e., complying to GDPR means you can't comply to
| cybersecurity laws.
|
| US has less of those.
| stevesimmons wrote:
| How exactly does GDPR prevent you from complying with
| cybersecurity laws?
|
| For instance, one of GDPR's 6 lawful bases for processing
| data is in order to comply with legal obligations.
|
| If you're going to make strong claims like that, the onus
| really is on you to give specific examples.
| closewith wrote:
| I wonder is the GP is referring to the CLOUD Act, as it
| is true that US companies cannot be compliant with both
| the GDPR and the CLOUD Act, but it doesn't weaken the
| case for European tech sovereignty.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Sounds like a broad blanket statement, have any specifics
| about this?
|
| GDPR and cybersecurity laws are designed to be
| compatible, not mutually exclusive, but I'm sure there
| are edge-cases. Still, what exact situation did you find
| yourself in here in order to believe they're mutually
| exclusive?
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| All US companies selling to European customers have to
| comply with GDPR. European companies selling only to non-
| European customers don't have to comply with GDPR. It's
| all about who your users are. Not where your company is
| registered.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| I think what OP means is that a US company cannot
| simultaneously comply with the CLOUD act and the GDPR.
| That case has also been made by some courts in the EU,
| that US law and practice are incompatible with the
| requirements of the GDPR. US companies who claim to
| process data in accordance with the GDPR seem to be
| deceiving their customers. Maybe I'm wrong but it seems
| to me that companies in the EU who rely on US services,
| corporations in the US, and even governments themselves
| keep quit about this unpleasant truth. It means that
| Microsoft Windows violates the GDPR, Google violates it,
| every US social network violates it, etc.
|
| Of course, as someone else mentioned, that is not an
| argument against EU sovereignty but rather one of its
| motors.
| buzer wrote:
| > European companies selling only to non-European
| customers don't have to comply with GDPR.
|
| Usually they do. European company processing personal
| data of non-EU customers falls with article 3(1) "This
| Regulation applies to the processing of personal data in
| the context of the activities of an establishment of a
| controller or a processor in the Union, regardless of
| whether the processing takes place in the Union or not."
|
| Of course if they do not process any personal data then
| it wouldn't apply but that's pretty unlikely (and if that
| was the case the EU customers data wouldn't fall within
| GDPR either).
| azan_ wrote:
| Ok, but it's not like nothing was done after Draghi report -
| EU formed at least 5 committees and commissioned multiple
| think-tanks to develop reports about possible development of
| the pathway to the programme that will work on bureaucracy
| and overregulation.
| deaux wrote:
| > Europes bureaucratization and the growth of the size of
| states has increased the last 10 years.
|
| None of these things matter. They're trivially set aside. All
| that matters is how many insane threats the US Gov keeps
| making. Hopefully as many as possible. This is what creates
| demand, and from demand, everything else follows
| automatically.
|
| Like, how can you not see this based on recent events? I'm
| willing to bet a house that in Feb 2026 there will be much
| more relative movement from US to EU clouds than in Feb 2015.
| Despite all of that "increased bureaucracy".
| pjmlp wrote:
| You mean late scale capitalism that treats employees like
| serfs?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Without a viable MS Office/Google Docs alternative it's all
| rather performative. If those get blocked the entire
| bureaucratic machine stops dead. Hell block just excel and
| entire countries might actually collapse.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| Fucking Libre Office!
| moffkalast wrote:
| Yeah if only.
| adrianN wrote:
| The dependence on US companies is deep and multifaceted. I
| don't think we should attempt nothing until a perfect
| solution is available.
| omnimus wrote:
| I have seen transitions from MS suite at universities and I
| don't think what you are saying is true.
|
| First assumption is that there are no alternatives so you
| can't replace Excel as a software. Obvious ones for Excel -
| LibreOffice, Collabora, OnlyOffice or Grist (which i highly
| recommend). The paradoxical problem is there is no clear THE
| ONE so organizations get into decision paralysis and never
| move anywhere.
|
| The other assumption is that even if there were alternatives
| people will not adopt them. In reality this is rarely issue.
| Turns out users/employees/students actually don't care much
| what software they have to use. They just use what is
| available or what they are told to use. So the reason why
| people use MS Office is actually because it's mandated from
| the top. Lawyers use it because state/gov/court communication
| requires it. Students use it because they need to submit
| thesis in MS Word. It's socially locked in.
|
| I've been at a university which switched over the summer from
| MS Office to LibreOffice. The results were boring. 40k people
| just adopted it, no drama, some liked it more (works on linux
| yay), took some people few weeks to learn/adjust. People are
| used learning new things.
|
| So can we stop with that story that 40 year old software
| which barely changed in last 20 years can't be replaced?
|
| This whole digital sovereignty is i think extremely scary
| proposition for Microsoft because just as they are now
| mandated solution by most western world... they are one law
| away (all state/university communication must be with libre
| software) to be on the other side of their current mandate /
| lock in.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well I hope you're right, the transitions I've seen
| proposed were mostly shot down because people refused to
| learn anything new and due to nebulous certification
| requirements that Microsoft of course has.
|
| Speaking of OnlyOffice, I've seen it crop up more and more
| lately and apparently it's Latvian, so maybe that will be
| the one eventually. Though my experience with it has been
| that it's not very stable (lots of crashing around
| embedding video anyway) and has a smaller feature set.
| XorNot wrote:
| That's the point though: there was never a particularly
| compelling reason to move so no one did. 5 years ago
| "what if America starts making threats?" would've been a
| ridiculous notion.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Proton.
|
| Also, Collabora office looks really great too.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Proton, only as transition technology.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Proton drive is fine, their docs service is usable but
| could use improvement. Their secure and private file and
| docs sharing with other Proton users could be a great
| feature, if you need it.
|
| EDIT: I just re-tried Proton docs and spreadsheets - much
| improved docs, and I think the spreadsheets are a new
| feature; looks OK but I am on mobile right now so minimal
| testing.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Rome wasn't built in a day.
| newsclues wrote:
| Software is a challenge but try replacing hardware. There
| isn't a replacement for AMD, Intel or nVidia.
| bambax wrote:
| We already have excellent cloud providers in Europe. But most
| importantly, most businesses using the cloud would be better
| off with simple on-prem solutions. So much cheaper to operate
| and control.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Right, but have you tried recruiting someone recently who is
| capable of running a pair of local servers (including
| organizing redundant power feeds), upgrading the OS on them
| with no downtime, and arranging for off-site backups of the
| enterpris's data?
|
| These used to be the skills of a generalist sysadmin for a
| small-site with on-prem services.
|
| Those skills are no longer available on the market. Students
| in the local apprenticeship program have one class about
| hardware, and they don't even touch it, just talk about it.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Offer just half of the typical AWS cloud bill and you'll
| magically have lots of candidates! But greed often doesn't
| let companies pay any more than "market rate" even if it
| means paying twice that to AWS or a vendor instead.
| gtech1 wrote:
| Just hired a 45yo who excels and loves and thrives doing
| this stuff. Proxmox, local storage, local backups + offsite
| backups. 1Pb of data, colocation costs are 5k/month. Guess
| AWS costs for similar
| 9dev wrote:
| > So much cheaper to operate and control.
|
| Until you factor in the salaries of the new employees you
| have to hire now, the cost of that hiring process, the
| compliance and security implications of operating servers on
| your premises, the ongoing maintenance of the software and
| operating systems, the new infrastructure to maintain,
| including but not limited to backup power supply and overall
| redundancy, the need to manage the lifecycle of the new hard-
| and software, the documentation for all of this... I could go
| on for a while.
|
| It's not like these cloud solutions are just solving
| laziness.
| Black616Angel wrote:
| But you can rent on-prem servers in some datacenter near
| you where all that is done for you.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Do not forget that it is also cheaper. Main difference
| would be scalability which you do not inherently need.
| Not for ordinary bau.
| 9dev wrote:
| First off, servers on someone else's premises are by
| definition not on-prem; and second, it still leaves you
| with a lot of the maintenance, management, and
| documentation overhead that comes with operating
| infrastructure equipment.
| no_op wrote:
| A lot of this could be standardized and packaged into a
| product, a modern take on the 'server appliance.' Unpack
| some gear, plug it together according to a nice diagram,
| connect to a management console that feels familiar to
| anyone who's deployed to the cloud.
| 9dev wrote:
| That's essentially the bet of https://oxide.computer
| newsclues wrote:
| Yeah, this seems like a big opportunity for that business
| model.
| belorn wrote:
| Listened to a story about a fairly large company that
| switched to cloud and then back to on-premise. When they
| went cloud they quickly found out that they needed
| employees to manage the cloud infrastructure. The employee
| costs were similar for both setup.
|
| Compliance and security testing does not go away just
| because you use cloud. The steps and questions will be
| different, but regulations like NIS and GDPR have extensive
| requirements regardless if you implement it yourself or buy
| it from an external supplier.
|
| I would also not recommend to go with a single cloud
| solution with no backup solution and overall redundancy,
| unless a $5 voucher is good enough compensation for the
| service being down a whole day. The general recommendation
| after the latest waves of outages was for cloud users to
| use multiple cloud providers and multiple backup solution.
| It is just like how on-premise solutions need off-premise
| backups.
| 9dev wrote:
| > Compliance and security testing does not go away just
| because you use cloud. The steps and questions will be
| different, but regulations like NIS and GDPR have
| extensive requirements regardless if you implement it
| yourself or buy it from an external supplier.
|
| That's a bit disingenuous. If I don't operate a physical
| server rack, I also do not need to take care of physical
| access control, fire suppression policies, camera
| monitoring, key handling, and a wide range of other
| measures I would be otherwise obliged to take care of
| under GDPR. You can absolutely outsource classes of
| problems. What's true is that that doesn't lift the
| responsibility from you to check your cloud provider
| fulfils these obligations, but that's very different from
| having to fulfil them yourself.
| belorn wrote:
| Go through a security review. It not as simple as just
| saying "we outsource that so we have no idea what they do
| or how they manage the data". It is disingenuous to claim
| that people can just outsource the whole problem and not
| care.
|
| This would be part of the responsibility of the cloud
| managers, which need to be hired, paid and trained, on
| top of the cost of paying the cloud providers. There is
| no free lunch.
| 9dev wrote:
| I am responsible for security reviews. I never claimed it
| was that simple, nor that there was free lunch. I said it
| is _easier_ to outsource it than to handle it yourself to
| an equal level of what a cloud provider is able to do,
| from a legal and operational perspective.
| belorn wrote:
| Easier is a very subjective measurement. Lets compare two
| solutions with different hires. One hire system
| administrators that rent space in a serverhall. The other
| hire cloud managers that rent space in the cloud.
|
| What can we definitive say about the difference be in
| salaries, training, and team size? Can we say anything
| specific about legal and operational perspective?
| pu_pe wrote:
| Sorry but I think it is indeed much easier to have a
| cloud provider take care of those things. That's partly
| how we came to the situation we are in: a lot of people
| outsourced this type of work to Microsoft or AWS, because
| it was easier.
|
| I get what you are saying, that responsibility is still
| yours for making the correct choices, and to know what
| the cloud providers are doing. In the real world though
| hardly anybody cares, even though we have threats like
| the CLOUD act in place. So, yeah, people should care but
| ultimately they often don't.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Exactly. People used to think that aws is somehow
| convenient(partially true) and much cheaper which it
| absolutely isn't. Hooking on anything trendy and pretending
| it solve all the issues is tech illness.
|
| For example micro services. You do not need infrastructure
| heavy software paradigms for large majority of use cases but
| it was just blindly accepted as new standart which we are
| now, again, moving away.
| lucasRW wrote:
| They are not European. They are French, or Swiss, or
| Scandinavian, each of those countries who may sooner or later
| not align anymore with your strategic interests. Countries
| should only trust themselves for sensitive stuff.
| gf000 wrote:
| I mean, the Euro-zone is way more interconnected than
| that..
| adrianN wrote:
| Why stop at countries? /s
| smarx007 wrote:
| Most European "cloud" providers sell "wood":
| https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/dear-hosting-providers-
| you...
| wiether wrote:
| Thanks for the link!
|
| I'm not sure it will convince the "haters" nor they'll get
| it, but I'll keep it close to share with some people that
| are confused but open enough to understand the nuance.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| > We already have excellent cloud providers in Europe.
|
| Please provide a list, no sarcasm. And please don't put
| Hetzner on it, as it is not a cloud provider.
| arter45 wrote:
| Ok, I'll bite. Why is it not a cloud provider? Most
| importantly, what is a cloud provider in your definition?
| smarx007 wrote:
| https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/dear-hosting-providers-
| you...
| arter45 wrote:
| Not sure I follow.
|
| It's one thing to say that a lot of AWS/Azure/Google
| users take advantage of many managed services.
|
| But saying something is not a cloud provider because they
| don't provide a specific SaaS is kinda weird, especially
| if you read the NIST definition of cloud computing or
| when you consider that not every AWS user is using more
| than a handful of services (does that make AWS a cloud
| provider only for more "advanced" users?).
|
| Sure, smaller cloud providers don't usually have all
| those services, but this doesn't mean they are not cloud
| providers. They cannot attract users who are more
| familiar with specific managed services, but they can
| probably satisfy the needs of other users who are more
| than happy with a smaller feature set.
|
| Also, limiting yourself to a smaller portion of
| AWS/Azure/GCP services can facilitate migrations to other
| cloud platforms (think AWS -> Azure or viceversa),
| because you're less tied to specific proprietary tooling.
| smarx007 wrote:
| > because they don't provide a specific SaaS is kinda
| weird
|
| I think for most business stakeholders it's not about the
| number of services but rather the coverage of business-
| critical needs. When you have access to Azure Entra, you
| know that you can cover 90%+ of your auth needs with that
| service. If you have access to AWS S3, you know that your
| various storage needs would be possible to cover with
| that. If a managed Postgres is available, you know that
| most of the IT systems you run would be able to take
| advantage of that. You look at Azure their
| IAM/audit/observability offerings and it's the same.
|
| When you look at Hetzner as a business stakeholder, all
| you see are bare servers and and one object storage
| service that you are not sure of how battle-tested it is.
| And then you start thinking: "okay, I will need to run
| k8s or some other workload orchestration approach, my IT
| systems need Postgres/MySQL/SQL Server etc, I need auth,
| I need audit, I will need to build, operate, maintain all
| of that in-house". I am not saying that this is a wrong
| path for everyone, but Hetzner essentially leaves you no
| choice. And many business stakeholders who have been
| operating their own own-prem infra or colocated or rented
| IaaS plus a large dev team for decades and have since
| switched to one of the hyperscalers and reduced their
| dev/IT headcount - may not want to go back to the old
| model.
|
| > limiting yourself to a smaller portion of AWS/Azure/GCP
| services can facilitate migrations to other cloud
| platforms.
|
| Yes, which is why you insist (where possible/reasonable)
| on Postgres-compatible DBMS offerings, IdP solutions
| based on OIDC, observability on OpenTelemetry.
|
| > Sure, smaller cloud providers don't usually have all
| those services, but this doesn't mean they are not cloud
| providers
|
| Yes, it could mean that they are not cloud providers.
|
| > but they can probably satisfy the needs of other users
| who are more than happy with a smaller feature set
|
| Please see the linked article. This is essentially "users
| who are happy to build some of the furniture themselves".
| arter45 wrote:
| I did read the article.
|
| I agree that there is a difference between "wood" and
| "furniture".
|
| Although maybe a more apt comparison is IKEA vs another
| furniture store.
|
| With IKEA you have a relatively basic "style". You'd be
| hard to pressed a 1800 style table, for example, but if
| you are a student or someone who just wants to live in a
| new place, it's a pretty solid store to go. However, they
| give you the pieces (not just basic wood, already pre-
| made pieces) and you have to put them together.
|
| Other furnitures have a lot more choices in terms of
| styles and they allow you to just buy stuff without any
| DIY needed.
|
| Different offerings in the same space (no one in IKEA is
| asking you to cut wood and make your own chair legs or
| whatever), both valid.
|
| Furniture metaphores aside, what I'm saying is that there
| is a subset of users which is completely fine with those
| services, which are still provided in a self-service,
| pay-per-use way without the need to have admin rights
| over the entire platform. That's a cloud provider. A more
| limited one, sure, but it can still be a cloud provider.
|
| And when it comes to business stakeholders, coverage is
| important, but so are other concerns, including the
| ability to move out when needed (which still requires
| some sensible technical choice, because if you go "all
| in" you're complicating your exit strategy), or even
| concerns like the ones mentioned in the OP.
|
| Obviously, each company has its own risk aversion and its
| own decision making process, and so far market share
| heavily favors the Big Three even outside of the US, but
| this doesn't mean alternative options should be dismissed
| as "not cloud providers" just because they don't provide
| all those services.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| In my book a cloud provider is a provider where you can
| spin up VMs at scale, offers multiple geographic regions
| across the world, offers managed complementary services
| such as S3, CDN, GLB, IAM, Managed Databases, backup &
| restore, FaaS, container registry, managed K8s or another
| container orchestration platform, PoPs around the world.
|
| Hetzner has an S3 compatible offering, a VPS offering and
| that's it. Their core business is renting physical
| servers. And I see lately they offer a load balancing
| service.
| arter45 wrote:
| You know, we used to have a single tech company providing
| essentially an entire tech stack to its customers. Its
| core enterprise pricing provided a platform with
| impressive compute capabilities, high redundancy, global
| support, strong backward compatibility and the backing of
| a company providing consulting and an ecosystem made of a
| lot of other software products. That company is still
| alive and well, although that product is probably less
| appealing now to new customers.
|
| I'm talking about IBM mainframes.
|
| Eventually, as the Internet (networking) and open source
| technologies (like Git and Linux) become more and more
| widespread, people realized they could build their
| services by combining products from different vendors
| (not to mention FOSS). I'm talking about the 1990s-2000s.
|
| Now, after 20-30 years, we're thinking that the same
| company must provide the entire tech stack or lose
| relevancy as a provider.
|
| To be clear, AWS and mainframes are pretty different from
| a technical standpoint, but I do wonder if we're kinda
| repeating the same cycle over and over. Asking the same
| company to provide everything and then build stuff with
| different products, to then find a new company which can
| provide everything and so on.
| daneel_w wrote:
| _> Please provide a list, no sarcasm. And please don't put
| Hetzner on it, as it is not a cloud provider._
|
| In what way are they not a "cloud" provider? Because their
| managed services portfolio isn't as wide as AWS or Azure?
| What about Scaleway's services then?
| smarx007 wrote:
| Hetzner has no managed services except for the
| S3-compatible object storage. Scaleway is much better in
| that regard.
| daneel_w wrote:
| The implied question was what OP's idea of "the cloud"
| is, where they draw the line between "cloud" and server
| host. It's possible they simply aren't familiar with the
| Iaas/PaaS terminology.
| smarx007 wrote:
| I posted a link to what most cloud-native developers
| understand to be "cloud" a few times already. If IaaS is
| the only offering on the table, it's not cloud.
| nxm wrote:
| No, most wouldn't. Too much risk and overhead for most
| companies to do so... most companies should and do just focus
| on the business value they add, rather than the underlying
| physical infra
| bell-cot wrote:
| Yes, nice, true.
|
| But sadly, it feels like pigs will be singing Handel's _Messiah_
| before Europe 's leaders get off their fat asses and actually
| _do_ anything about their problems.
| abc123abc123 wrote:
| Why should they do something about it? They are not IT people.
| If you want to switch, do it today. Plenty of options exist.
|
| If you designed yourself into a corner by utilizing function as
| a service to program agains ta proprietary API, then you can
| just as well start from scratch or quit and join a company that
| knows how to avoid lock-in.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > The are not IT people.
|
| They are not farmers - but it's their job to make sure that
| their countries have secure supplies of safe food, long-term.
|
| They are not electricians - but it's their job to make sure
| that their countries have...
|
| They are not soldiers - but it's their job to make sure...
|
| The are not ...
|
| ...
|
| (Yes, I suspect that we have rather different concepts of the
| role of gov't, and the responsibilities of gov't leaders.)
| jgbuddy wrote:
| Thus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data than
| not having the US have access to EU data. Also it's not like it's
| impossible to encrypt things when you store them? This article is
| more political than logical or technical, it's unfortunate that
| government control / intervention in the free market to this
| degree can be spun into something positive.
| reorder9695 wrote:
| I wonder if someone could make a foss frontend for Google
| Drive/Dropbox/<insert product here> that transparently encrypts
| files on your device before uploading them, that would
| certainly make me worry less about those services.
| fsflover wrote:
| How about the metadata?
| l1am0 wrote:
| https://github.com/cryptomator/cryptomator
| 10729287 wrote:
| Isn't what Cryptomator stand for ? Am I missing something
| here ?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > unfortunate that government control / intervention in the
| free market to this degree can be spun into something positive
|
| I don't think most Europeans want a laissez faire-style
| "anything goes" market, we want corporations and people to have
| responsibility for what they do and the effect they have. With
| a little bit of nuance, some government control and
| intervention is needed in a healthy society, because we don't
| want to end up in the same situation the US currently finds
| itself in.
| adrianN wrote:
| ,,Cloud" ist a lot more than blob storage where encryption can
| help. As soon as you use a service that sees plain text (eg a
| database saas) encryption doesn't save you from the service
| provider (and by extension foreign government). But as the
| article points out, data exfiltration is one problem, the
| other, imo bigger, problem is dependence on a foreign nation
| for critical infrastructure. The US government can decide to
| shut down almost all European IT and there is nothing Europe
| can do about it right now.
| jraph wrote:
| > Also it's not like it's impossible to encrypt things when you
| store them?
|
| Apart from Signal, do you know of an actual US service where
| things are E2E encrypted, including metadata, that also allows
| several people working on the same thing at the same time?
|
| > not having the US have access to EU data
|
| It is a great deal about not having US access EU data.
|
| It is also about the US not having the power to cut the EU from
| essential services.
|
| > This article is more political than logical or technical
|
| Of course this is 100% a political matter (rather than
| technical). This is not a bad thing. Technical stuff doesn't
| live in a politic-free vacuum.
|
| > it's unfortunate that government control / intervention in
| the free market to this degree can be spun into something
| positive.
|
| And this stance too.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Its past political.
|
| I work in energy now, and we host stuff in AWS. So far so
| normal.
|
| However, with the tubthumping about invading greenland, We see
| that america is willing to evaporate any system that gets in
| the way of the sun king's world view. Sure, he says now that
| "we were never going to invade" but given the way you've all
| just given up your 1st, 4th, 10th and now 2nd amendment, we're
| not really that sure.
|
| This means that when the next recession happens and the EU is
| busy competing, he'll ask "hey we subsidies the EU by getting
| them to pay for AWS, why don't we turn it off?" I mean that
| sounds far fetched, but so did unrelated personally controlled
| federal militia roving around states disappearing US citizens
| without trial.
|
| tldr: you're damn right its about politics. He threatened to
| invade an ally, we aint hanging around to find out whats next.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Also to your point: "can't we just encrypt it?"
|
| Its someone else's computer. The TPM is controlled by someone
| else. You can't really process on a machine that has a
| compromised urandom/TPM
|
| Also the bigger issue is having all your access revoked over
| night. Thats the bigger fear.
| XorNot wrote:
| Exactly - it's about availability. If someone with remote
| access could knock out your business operations, how long
| would it take to adapt? How much economic cost could that
| incur, perhaps at a critical time?
| komali2 wrote:
| > You can't really process on a machine that has a
| compromised urandom/TPM
|
| Naive question: does zero knowledge proof solutions help
| with this?
| KaiserPro wrote:
| If you can process your stuff inside a zero knowledge
| wrapper then yeah. But most things can't be done like
| that sadly.
| tonfa wrote:
| > Thus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data
| than not having the US have access to EU data
|
| It's more about not being subjected to the whims of the US.
| High dependency on US vendors means high leverage for the US
| administration (export control, sanction, etc.).
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| IMHO, this is the EU using current events to push for more
| power and control for itself over member states in many areas,
| including new areas like defence. Apparently member states and
| people are fine with that or even driving it... Turkeys voting
| for Christmas comes to mind.
| Findecanor wrote:
| It is also about not having the US government cutting people
| off from their data on a whim, such as happened to the
| International Criminal Court.
| jeppester wrote:
| > Thus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data
| than not having the US have access to EU data.
|
| The EU governments do not have free access to data in a non-
| transparent way. That's the main difference between EU and
| American laws.
|
| > Also it's not like it's impossible to encrypt things when you
| store them?
|
| The GDPR lets you store any data in a third country, so long as
| it's impossible for that country to decrypt the data. E.g. it
| has to be encrypted before it's transferred.
|
| It just severely limits what you can build, to a degree where
| it's probably easier to just use a cloud that can be trusted to
| follow the GDPR.
| yobbo wrote:
| They mean google docs/gmail or office365.
| andersa wrote:
| This will happen automatically once an EU native cloud _exists_
| with comparable pricing. Get on it. No one will pay 10x to store
| data in Europe.
| simianparrot wrote:
| Bingo. And for that to happen the EU must be a competitive
| market. And that doesn't happen by strangling innovation with a
| thousand regulations passed down from Brussels by unelected
| bureaucrats.
| throwaway09809 wrote:
| Your HN handle is a good fit for your comment
| simianparrot wrote:
| It's tongue-in-cheek given how AI-bros seem to think human
| intelligence is no different from the function of an LLM.
|
| At least I'm not hiding behind throwaway accounts.
| atoav wrote:
| Ah the good old unelected bureaucrat-myth. And then you check
| and the very (usually right wing) politicians rallying
| against the bureaucrats voted for this or that regulation
| themselves.
| deaux wrote:
| Complete, utter bullshit. There are maybe 4 countries in the
| world with significantly less dependence on US tech. Out of
| those 4, one has magnitudes more government interference,
| another one has even more rules and regulations - including
| even stricter data privacy laws than GDPR - than the EU, the
| third has slightly less than the EU but also the lowest local
| tech % our of the 4, and the last one is Russia.
|
| But sure, it's the rules and regulations that are the
| problem.
|
| If you have any knowledge on the topic I don't need to name
| the other three.
|
| Talking software as that's the discussion here, not hardware.
| simianparrot wrote:
| Ok so where's the European alternatives? Where are they?
| Because in my experience as a Norwegian citizen who has
| started and run tech companies, we simply can't compete on
| this kind of tech because energy is more expensive, all the
| added costs of employment are so incredibly expensive
| (despite massive amounts of immigration, which only drains
| our welfare state anyway) and all the EU-based rules and
| regulations we must follow even when we're not direct
| members; all of these things and more related to them are
| absolutely stifling.
|
| In this environment there is zero chance of an "AWS-like"
| competitor or anything remotely like it in the tech sector.
| And if you say "Hezner" I've got a bridge to sell you.
| zppln wrote:
| What is the cost of storing data in Europe today?
| atoav wrote:
| Depends on the amount of traffic. 4TB with 4TB traffic a
| month cost roughly 27 Euros am month at Hetzner.
| tariky wrote:
| France cloud provider scalaway has great prices. In some
| services they are cheaper then AWS. So I think that devs just
| need to research a bit more.
|
| Also Hetzner (germany) is super cheap when compared with US
| hosting providers.
| dewey wrote:
| You are missing one of Europes largest hoster: OVH
| (Originally from FR)
| blackbear_ wrote:
| Luckily our friends overseas have shown us the way of dealing
| with uncompetitive local industries: tariffs.
| Epa095 wrote:
| 'Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM (now Microsoft)' has
| been an important factor around my neck of the woods. A cheaper
| European alternative would never even make it to the
| comparison. That is changing now though.
| pjmlp wrote:
| They certainly will if regulations are part of it.
|
| US has their tariffs and last stage capitalism, we have our
| government enforcement laws.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| But those do exist and they are generally a lot cheaper; not
| more expensive.
|
| BTW. it's all hosted in the EU if you use it in the EU. Amazon,
| Google and Azure have data centers all over Europe and using
| those is not optional for EU based companies. If that wasn't
| the case, they'd have no business here. Companies legally have
| to host in the EU and do business with US cloud providers
| through EU based subsidiaries (mostly based in Ireland. There's
| a bit of a murky situation with what level of access US
| intelligence agencies have exactly to all the data or who
| copies what where and when. But generally, data isn't supposed
| to leave the continent unless that's needed/required.
|
| I work in Germany. We currently use Google Cloud. It's cheap
| and convenient enough. Our spend is only 300 euros/month or so.
| I could replace it. One of our customers insisted on Telekom
| Cloud; so we support that as well. I've used Hetzner in the
| past. There are a few other providers. It's not that big of a
| deal. But it's not a big/urgent issue for us.
|
| However, Vms, object storage, elastic load balancers, managed
| databases, etc. are all commodities at this point. You don't
| need to pay AWS 2-3x for that. They aren't magically any
| better. They certainly aren't any faster. AWS squeezes hard on
| those VCPUs.
|
| And there's a lot of exotic stuff that some people use. AWS is
| offering lots of that. But most of those things are a
| combination of a bit niche and very pricey and more aimed at
| enterprises than startups. When it comes to GPU hosting, AI
| stuff, etc. the premium options that Amazon offers really add
| up really quickly. I'm sure it's fantastic. But many people I
| talk to in Europe use alternative/cheaper solutions.
|
| For bread and butter hosting, AWS is just expensive and
| overrated. Big companies don't seem to care much and are
| sensitive to big brands and the warm fuzzy feeling they get
| from expensive consultants telling them what to do. And AWS is
| very good at vendor lock-in. That's also why IBM still exists
| and why companies like Oracle still do a brisk business
| separating rich clueless enterprises from their cash. Vendor
| lock-in is all they have left at this point. But those are at
| this point the idiot option. AWS is increasingly like that. The
| times are gone that they are a sane solution for startups. Ten
| years ago they'd lure you in with "free" hosting for a year and
| then you'd be hooked for the life time of the startup. But it's
| not that obvious anymore that is a good choice for cash
| strapped startups.
|
| Btw. Hetzner now operates in the US. It's a pretty good deal
| there as well. It's not like you have to give your money to
| Amazon.
| fsflover wrote:
| US services sell your data for additional profit and damp
| prices. How are you supposed to compete with that?
| andersa wrote:
| If that's the issue, then EU will have to either allow this
| or subsidize alternatives that don't, otherwise they will not
| be able to compete.
| fsflover wrote:
| The third (and the best) option is to outlaw private data
| exchage with no consent and strictly enforce this with
| fines. See: GDPR.
| atoav wrote:
| At Hetzner 4 TB storage (S3 compatible) with 4 TB traffic cost
| 27.32 Euro/Month.
|
| According to AWS calculator the same 4 TB cost 102 Euro/Month
| with their standard S3 tier.
|
| So I gladly pay 0.3x to store data in Europe, with a European
| service.
| willtemperley wrote:
| This poses a fundamental problem for many SaaS providers. How can
| you guarantee client data aren't sent across the pond when all
| the app state is held server-side?
|
| The answer is obvious with native apps, where it's standard
| practice to provide server endpoint details, so client-verified
| data locality is simple.
|
| I don't really know how this is practically possible in SaaS web
| apps.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Europe will never have competitive offerings until they pay their
| employees the equivalent of what FAANGs pay.
|
| If you work for GCP or AWS in Europe, you'll easily get twice as
| much income as if you do the exact same job for Hetzner or OVH.
|
| You can't build equivalents to GCP and AWS without paying the
| same. I work for a FAANG right now in Europe and I wouldn't
| consider even a single second any European cloud provider as
| potential employers.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Europe will never have competitive offerings until they pay
| their employees the equivalent of what FAANGs pay.
|
| Stop focusing on the absolute number of "$/year", and things
| will make more sense. Seemingly you'll be able to live a more
| lavish life in Spain given 1/4 of the salary compared to FAANG,
| yet your life is better and you can afford more.
|
| Higher salaries aren't always better, especially when you're
| almost willfully ignoring more important things like purchasing
| power and quality of life.
| mgh95 wrote:
| > Higher salaries aren't always better, especially when
| you're almost willfully ignoring more important things like
| purchasing power and quality of life.
|
| Senior SWE salaries I'm finding in a quick google search in
| Spain are 80k eur. According to levels.fyi [1] Google (and
| presumably the other clouds) are paying 170k eur. The
| comparison isn't even "is 4x the salary better in the US?"
| it's "is 2x the salary better in the same place?" which is
| obviously yes.
|
| [1]
| https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-
| en...
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Again, by focusing solely on the salary you're missing the
| bigger picture. I know y'all are conditioned to just
| focusing on the salary, but there is so much more to life.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| While this sounds like great philosophical advice, in
| practice big salaries do attract employees regardless. If
| you want to solve the "brain drain to American companies"
| problem, ignoring the fact that they pay better isn't
| likely to help.
| mgh95 wrote:
| I don't think I am. Spanish employees of Google benefit
| just as much from Spanish employment law as Jose's Web
| Dev Shop. It's the purest comparison considering it's
| within the exact same country.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Unfortunately my landlord does not agree and wants his
| payment in actual money, and so do a lot of services we
| rely on to live.
| Juliate wrote:
| But you still won't get with 170k in the Bay Area, what you
| get in Paris, Madrid, Nantes or Barcelona with 80k.
|
| In France, if you get 80k net, you do actually get ~160k,
| half of which is collected/distributed before by your
| employer to various mutualised funds (health, retirement,
| unemployment, state taxes, employee benefits, etc.).
|
| And the mechanism is somewhat similar in other EU
| countries.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 80k net is 6.6k. If you're getting 80k (which is the very
| upper end of the range) it's likely you are in Paris,
| where you're gonna give at least 2k of that on rent for a
| shitty damp place, and double that for something decent.
|
| Trust me I would love to quit consulting and be able to
| have a chill permanent job that can afford me a good flat
| and lifestyle. I'm still searching. Spain situation is
| very similar last time I ran the numbers.
|
| Definitely no fucking way I'm helping anyone build a
| cloud provider (a cash cow considering the margins in
| there) for such pay. If I want to sell my soul to the
| devil, the one across the pond is gonna give me twice as
| many bucks for it.
| Juliate wrote:
| 2k for a rent in Paris gets you nice places if you have
| the time to spend to look for it. Cooking your own food
| at home definitely makes a huge difference every month.
|
| The suburb is quite nice too, if you get a few home-
| office days. For 4k? you can have a big house+garden at
| 30min from Paris center
| (https://www.seloger.com/classified-
| search?distributionTypes=...)
|
| As a SRE, I got 65k in Nantes before I quit, and I've
| never had to think about any single expense at all, not
| once (having kids, house, dog, car, garden). That would
| still have been quite confortable in Paris (swapping the
| house for a smaller flat, and without the car/dog/garden
| though).
| mgh95 wrote:
| > But you still won't get with 170k in the Bay Area, what
| you get in Paris, Madrid, Nantes or Barcelona with 80k.
|
| Note the 170k eur is in Spain -- not the bay area. I
| compared salaries of Google in Spain to the average
| salary of a senior SWE in Spain. The point isn't that the
| big tech pay more in the bay area compared to Spain. The
| point is the big tech companies pay more in Spain
| compared to other Spanish companies.
|
| And 170k eur in Spain is much more than 80k eur in Spain.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I'm not comparing European salaries with American ones, I'm
| comparing salaries paid by American cloud providers IN EUROPE
| with salaries paid by European cloud providers.
| lnsru wrote:
| I upvoted you. That's absolutely true for other roles as well.
| Like hardware design engineers. At US company in Germany one
| gets real salary. At German big company one will make 2/3 of
| that salary. People are not stupid, why choose fraction of the
| salary when one can take it all. There are outliers, but
| majority will want to work for more than less money.
| p1anecrazy wrote:
| Be the change you wish to see.
|
| If professionals like you join European companies it will help
| grow their business and offer competitive salaries.
| raincole wrote:
| ~30% salary cut isn't a change many people wish to see.
| deaux wrote:
| There's a reason gambling companies end up paying more than
| market rates for the same roles, and it's not out of
| generosity.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| That's absolutely not how any of this works.
|
| If they can get top talent for half the salary they won't
| suddenly start paying more.
|
| There is only one solution: EU governments heavily subsidize
| those European cloud providers which enables them to offer
| top salaries and therefore attract top talent.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| It would also help not taxing those incomes at 60%.
|
| Every time I look at a permanent role in Europe, if I
| didn't already close the tab based on the offered salary, I
| plug the number into a take-home calculator and then I
| close the tab for sure.
| deaux wrote:
| There's always money to be made from being a traitor. Maybe
| next time Yandex Cloud or Aramco Cloud offers you 50% more and
| off you go.
|
| And yes, I've walked the talk, so I can say this.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Laughable hyperbole.
| abc123abc123 wrote:
| This already happened. Hetzner, OVH, and countless other local
| cloud companies exist. It is only the path of least resistancd
| and market inertia, that stops companies from switching.
|
| I run on Hetzner and am saving big bucks compared to the
| ridiculously high priced AWS.
| atmosx wrote:
| Comparing EU cloud providers to AWS is like comparing a 1963
| Zastava to 2025 high end BYD because both of them are cars and
| can drive from point A to point B.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| The Zastava doesn't have a bunch of superfluous computers
| that track you, is easy to service, and reliable?
| pjerem wrote:
| Except 95% of companies have no need of ultra scalable super
| cloud.
|
| If you are a very big SaaS company that is not Google or
| Apple, you are probably serving hundreds of thousands, maybe
| millions of unique users. AWS may be convenient, but you
| don't /need/ it, you can build an infrastructure that will
| handle such workload with any of the big european providers.
|
| You'll just lose in comfort what you'll gain in data
| sovereignty and infrastructure costs.
|
| I worked for a 7MEUR MRR company that had maybe a million of
| users who used the software every day. The thing ran on a
| dozen of OVH servers, including multi-site redundancy.
| omnimus wrote:
| Exactly. AWS proposition was much more alluring where
| compute was more expensive and it required yearly
| estimations and updates.
|
| In times when one physical server can have 32, 64 or even
| 96 cores... you pack your own little datacenter right there
| and it's pretty cheap to simply overkill it, have one or
| two servers for redundancy and bye.
|
| So many businesses will happily run from 4 core 10usd VPS
| (that would have been beefy server 20 years ago).
| niemandhier wrote:
| But that is what people actually want.
|
| I want a 1985 Mercedes that is build like a tank and outlives
| me.
| Etheryte wrote:
| I know that's not what you really meant, but as an
| unrelated tangent, modern cars are safer exactly because
| they're not built like tanks. The car crumpling up even at
| the smallest of crashes is good, because the more the car
| crumples, the less any of the impact is transferred to the
| passengers. It might mean the car is totaled and you need a
| new one, but that's better than someone in the car being
| totaled.
| bborud wrote:
| Yes, modern cars are superior when it comes to safety.
| But the daily experience is orthogonal to this since most
| people have serious accidents very infrequently. In your
| daily experience reliability and economy is more
| important.
|
| And in computing, having a bit of downtime 1-2 times per
| year is often a price worth paying if avoiding it
| requires 90% more cost and effort. (Of course, people end
| up having downtime anyway because they have something so
| complex that they have 100x the number of ways something
| can fail).
| xyst wrote:
| AWS is overrated junk, got it.
| bborud wrote:
| Well, isn't it?
|
| It is easy to argue that it is expensive and complex. Since
| it is. And lots of people have made that argument. I don't
| think I've seen anyone argue in favor of AWS while skimming
| the threads here.
|
| So this is your opportunity to make the case for AWS.
| xyst wrote:
| I am not arguing for AWS.
|
| It _used_ to be great and free tier made it easy enough
| to migrate most personal use cases to their
| infrastructure. But they have enshittified the free tier
| to a point where it's unusable without forking over
| obscene amounts of money.
|
| Plus their support is non-existent unless you are one of
| those big corps.
|
| Plus for a 1T+ company. You would think that their
| infrastructure would be top tier, never go done, best
| practices?
|
| Nope. us-east1 continues to be dogshit and their typical
| response is to fork over more money for multi region and
| zone support.
|
| And yes, the scale at which aws advertises is largely
| overkill for many companies. Even some Fortune 500.
|
| But technology is driven by clueless C-level executives
| that get easily impressed by deck presentations from aws
| marketing.
|
| Instead of investing in workforce. They invest in cLoUd.
|
| It's a huge joke.
| elygre wrote:
| I think it's more about the absolutely stripped model vs the
| loaded one.
|
| The basic services are more or less the same, but the
| hyperscalers provide hundreds of services where smaller
| providers have only ten.
| jopsen wrote:
| Some of those services are utter crap though..
|
| This is just my opinion, but there are some services that
| just package software as VM and let's you spawn it with a
| fancy button, leaving you with a largely unmanaged
| instance.
|
| There are other services like S3, BigQuery or SQS that
| feels like magic.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| I promise you, a person buying a vehicle for their business
| will be looking at ROI rather then smart features.
|
| Computing at this scale is not marketed to flashy fanbois.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| > Computing at this scale is not marketed to flashy
| fanbois.
|
| Every vain CxO is a flashy fanboi at heart
| tryauuum wrote:
| when you compare IT stuff to cars, the discussion pivots to
| discussing cars, please think twice before using any
| analogies / comparisons with the physical world
| Etheryte wrote:
| But discussing cars is great, just like the Porsche 964
| Carrera 4 Jubilee.
| atmosx wrote:
| Or the Porsche 356 A. Or the Alfa Romeo Giulia sprint
| veloce.
| bborud wrote:
| Well, if the Zastava had 5-10x the amount of horsepower and
| storage space of the BYD for the same amount of money.
| Because that's what is often the reality. Bare metal is
| unreasonably efficient compared to cloud services for not
| that much more know-how.
|
| I do tech DD work for investment funds etc and one thing I
| often see are slow, complex and expensive AWS-heavy
| architectures that optimize for problems the company doesn't
| have and often will never have. In theory to ensure stability
| and scalability. They are usually expensive and have
| nightmarish configuration complexity.
|
| In practice complexity tends to lead to more outages and
| performance issues than if you had a much simpler (rented)
| bare metal setup with some spare capacity and better
| architecture design. More than half of serious outages I have
| seen documented in these reviews came from configuration
| mistakes or bugs in software that is supposed to manage your
| resources.
|
| Nevermind that companies invest serious amounts of time in
| trying to manage complexity rather than remove it.
|
| A few years ago I worked for a company that had two competing
| systems. One used AWS sparingly: just EC2, S3, RDS and load
| balancers. The other went berserk in the AWS candy shop and
| was this monstrosity that used 20-something different AWS
| services glued together by lambdas. This was touted as "the
| future", and everyone who didn't think it was a good idea was
| an idiot.
|
| The simple solution cost about the same to run for a few
| thousand (business customers) as the complex one cost for ONE
| customer. The simple solution cost about 1/20 to develop. It
| also had about 1/2500 the latency on average because it
| wasn't constantly enqueuing and dequeueing data through a
| slow SQS maze of queues.
|
| And best of all: you could move the simpler solution to bare
| metal servers. In fact, we ran all the testing on clusters of
| 6 RPIs. The complex solution was stuck in AWS forever.
| misir wrote:
| All aws is selling a web gui on top of free software. You
| still have to know ins and outs of the software to manage
| it properly.
|
| Heck their support is shit too. I have talked to them to
| figure out an issue on their own in house software, they
| couldn't help. My colleague happened to know what was wrong
| and fixed the issue with a switch of a checkbox.
| 202508042147 wrote:
| +1 for bare metal! I wish I could convince more C level
| people that that's what we need most of the time.
| carderne wrote:
| Out of interest, what control plane do you use for a
| Hetzner/metal setup? Kubernetes ecosystem?
|
| I use Coolify for side projects, haven't investigated
| whether I'd want to use it for bigger/importanter stuff.
| aerhardt wrote:
| Hetzner doesn't even have an RDS service. I've heard rumors
| for years but they haven't done it. Also, while I agree
| that leaning too much on the cloud leads to lock-in - this
| is an abstract concept that needs to be guarded against
| when managing technology, always, anyway - and vendor-
| driven hellish architectures, "vanilla cloud" offers other
| conveniences other than compute, bucket, storage managed
| and load balancers, like IAM, good CLIs, secrets
| management, etc. Only Scaleway or OVH seem to be timidly
| developing what I would consider "vanilla cloud".
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Scaleway (maybe upcloud as well) are also great and atleast
| Scaleway from what I know has many many features and its
| really competitive with the offerings it provides in general
| and has many offerings.
|
| Your point's a little moot.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| Hm, equating AWS to a 1963 Zastava is pretty demeaning to the
| Zastava. At least the Zastava was cheap junk, not premium-
| priced junk.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| > _I run on Hetzner and am saving big bucks compared to the
| ridiculously high priced AWS._
|
| IMO even Americans should take a look at whether they need to
| be using the big cloud providers or not. They're so much more
| expensive compared to smaller hosts like Hetzner, Digital
| Ocean, Vultr, and so on. It depends on what you're doing, of
| course, but I'm American and moved off of Azure last year due
| to the price and the complexity it encourages.
|
| Reposting my comment from another thread on the same topic a
| few days ago:
|
| > This is why I moved off of Azure and over to Hetzner's US
| VPS's. For what I was deploying (a few dozen websites, some
| relatively complex .NET web apps, some automated scripts,
| etc.), the pricing on Azure just wasn't competitive. But worse
| for me was the complexity; I found that using Azure encouraged
| me to introduce more and more complex deployment pipelines,
| when all I really needed was Build the container -> SCP it into
| a blue/green deployment scheme on a VPS -> flip a switch after
| testing it.
| alecco wrote:
| Sadly the EU leadership is a bunch of professional bureaucrats
| living in a comfy bubble completely disconnected with the people
| or reality.
| xoac wrote:
| As opposed to.. the harsh realities of the Bay Area tech scene?
| alecco wrote:
| I'm not happy with the upcoming techno-feudalism, but a bunch
| of (mostly) un-elected lawyers and economists have no clue on
| how to build cloud.
|
| And it's not that they want to help EU citizens, they just
| want to be techno-feudal lords themselves. Or worse, more
| like CCP.
| nullsanity wrote:
| I think reductionist opinions about the "Free market" and price
| competition being the only factor are naive. Culture and trust
| are major components of a project, and cultural sensibilities and
| development culture can be a part of procurement decisions.
|
| I worked for a company that chose Tresorit over any other option
| because it gave them Data Sovereignty, E2E encryption, and most
| important, it was not American.
|
| There is intrinsic value in being "Not made in America" and data
| sovereignty is a major issue for a lot of organizations. Just as
| an American company would be concerned about storing their data
| in China, the rest of the world is/should be concerned about
| storing their data in the US.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| We are a little misled, on purpose, with the term
| "sovereignty", though. For instance, if you are a French entity
| then sovereignty means your data stay in France. Moving things
| to de facto EU control is the opposite of sovereignty.
|
| I think Chomsky would have a lot to say about this and the
| broad manufacturing of consent taking place across Europe.
| jfengel wrote:
| And for a lot of cases, that's ok. The world is a connected
| place, and it's more economically efficient for that. You
| work best when you trust your friends. You balance self
| reliance, according to your best judgment.
|
| It's sure worrying to watch a good friend become an enemy.
| But you won't fix that by swearing off friends entirely.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| This means exactly nothing in relation to my comment, but
| that and the bare downvotes are actually a good
| illustration of my point about manufacturing consent.
| kergonath wrote:
| > For instance, if you are a French entity then sovereignty
| means your data stay in France. Moving things to de facto EU
| control is the opposite of sovereignty.
|
| It's something that crops up fairly often and I think most of
| the time from people who are profoundly misguided or just
| cannot understand that other people might see things
| differently. Germany is _never_ going to annex parts of
| France while the EU is a thing. It's on purpose. The whole
| construct is full of feedback mechanisms that make it
| physically impossible.
|
| So yes, for a French company using Hetzner is a bit more
| risky than OVH, but not that much, and either of those are
| much better than Azure or AWS.
|
| The big countries all have projects for national
| infrastructure for things like defense and taxes. In these
| cases everything needs to be directly controlled by the state
| and it makes sense to use a local company. Most of the time
| that would be companies you've never heard of.
|
| For random users in the EU, it does not matter because all
| big service providers will be following the same regulations.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| So if someone doesn't agree with the narrative and points
| out the obvious manipulation taking place they are wrong,
| misguided, or simply stupid... I mean, you couldn't prove
| my point any better, could you? And quite ironic, too about
| others seeing things differently...
| EinigeKreise wrote:
| What this means to most people is really independence from
| the US, whatever the wording. Could you expand on this
| "manufacturing of consent" part? Who's doing the
| manufacturing here and at the bidding of whom?
| drooopy wrote:
| The same chomsky who claimed that Epstein is a "highly valued
| friend and regular source of intellectual exchange and
| stimulation"?
| snowpid wrote:
| In addition: the same chomsky who wanted to send Ukraine
| into oblivion?
| barnacs wrote:
| As if the surveillance and regulation by the unelected EU
| bureaucrats was any better for the European citizens...
| ndr42 wrote:
| Even if you are right and everything is the same regarding
| surveillance and regulation: there are other important aspects
| that make the move to move european data out of the US
| worthwhile.
| barnacs wrote:
| > other important aspects
|
| like what?
| ndr42 wrote:
| I will just provide 2 examples, but you can find a lot
| more.
|
| If your data is in the hands of a nation that uses this to
| block you from your data you should do something about it.
| [1]
|
| If your data is in the hands of a nation whose
| representatives are threatening your territorial integrity
| (greenland) you should find alternatives.
|
| [1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Criminal-Court-Microsoft-
| s-emai...
| barnacs wrote:
| Right, but next time your data may be threatened by some
| European idiot rather than one from the US.
|
| To quote from my other comment:
|
| > In my view, data can only be protected by its rightful
| owner. And for that, we need education, not regulation.
| ndr42 wrote:
| maybe, but education won't solve the issues I outlined
| above. So in interest of european security I'm all for
| regulation of this.
| preisschild wrote:
| "Unelected EU bureucrats"
|
| Clearly shows you have absolutely zero idea about what you are
| talking about and just take your talking points from people
| like Elon Musk
| blell wrote:
| Educate us, tell us when did we vote for the commission and
| the likes of von der Leyen. (If your answer is "you didn't
| vote for it, but you voted for someone who voted for someone
| who voted for it in a secret ballot" I am going to chuckle)
| casper14 wrote:
| Do Americans vote for the supreme court or the chair of the
| fed?
| raincole wrote:
| And when did Americans vote for the director of FBI? Chair
| of the Fed? The local judge who can sign a warrant
| permitting the police to rummage your house?
| smallnix wrote:
| Even that would be wrong. Von der Leyen was strong armed
| into her position by Merkel and the other heads of states,
| overruling Timmermans nomination.
| sekai wrote:
| > Educate us, tell us when did we vote for the commission
| and the likes of von der Leyen. (If your answer is "you
| didn't vote for it, but you voted for someone who voted for
| someone who voted for it in a secret ballot" I am going to
| chuckle)
|
| Voters place their trust in representatives who then act on
| their behalf during the EP voting process and other
| legislative matters, such as electing the President of the
| European Commission
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| By that logic the president of the USA is also "not
| elected"
| barnacs wrote:
| I happen to live in the EU so I may have a slight clue what
| I'm talking about.
|
| But if you want an authority on the subject, look up Yanis
| Varoufakis and how sovereignty and democracy worked out for
| Greece when shit hit the fan.
| MadDemon wrote:
| Greece took on more debt than they could serve. Do you
| expect the tax payers from other countries to just pay for
| that without significant changes to how Greece operates? If
| you can't pay your debts and you can't print your own
| currency, you lose some sovereignty. But I feel like Greece
| would have been worse off if they still had the drachma and
| tried to print their way out of the crisis.
| barnacs wrote:
| Pretty much every single country in the world has taken
| on more debt than they can serve. And the 2008 crisis
| wasn't triggered by Greece either. The private creditors
| should have taken the loss. And that holds true for the
| rest of the world.
| sbergot wrote:
| Europe was able to impose policies to Greece because Greece
| was requesting loans from Europe. Those loans were required
| because other investors were unhappy that Greece had hidden
| the real state of its finance in its reports.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| European citizens have the right to shop around. If they choose
| a cloud provider from a European country with higher data
| protection than their home country, they can send a message to
| their own government.
|
| Swiss data protection law is an example of this. An Italian
| municipality could choose to use Infomaniak or Exoscale and
| increase their sovereignty and privacy.
| barnacs wrote:
| As a European citizen, I can assure you, my options are
| getting ever more limited. Several global companies have
| kicked me off their platforms recently due to all the
| regulations they can't be bothered with. Those that make an
| effort to comply are by default required to submit to the EU
| surveillance system. At the same time, I have no illusions
| that any of this would somehow protect my data from the NSA
| and the like.
|
| In my view, data can only be protected by its rightful owner.
| And for that, we need education, not regulation.
| debugnik wrote:
| > 61 percent of European CIOs and tech leaders say they want to
| increase their use of local cloud providers.
|
| Oof, the company I work for is proudly telling us we've just
| migrated from a local provider to Azure, and partnered with
| Google for "digital sovereignty" solutions. Glad to know that's
| not the trend everywhere.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| >Google for "digital sovereignty" solutions.
|
| Tell them about the Cloud Act and let those rusty wheels turn a
| bit. There is no sovereignty when working with a U.S.-based
| cloud company.
| debugnik wrote:
| I'm personally very aware of that, and I wish Europeans
| dropped our collective tech-inferiority complex, but I'm
| currently a junior at a large corpo and that's not even my
| business branch; I can't steer it.
| vander_elst wrote:
| I think that Google has some partnership with Deutsche
| Telekom where they provide the software and Deutsche Telekom
| Runs it because Google doesn't have the encryption keys. In
| that case Google even if they want they cannot provide the
| data. Anyway that is still not digital sovereignity as Google
| might decide to stop providing updates or add a backdoor...
| kioku wrote:
| > This isn't just compliance theater; it's a straight-up national
| economic security play.
|
| The woes of LLM contrasts...
|
| In all seriousness, the points made ring true not only for
| European companies and should make everyone consider the
| implications of the current situation, as dreary as they are.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external
| production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own.
| We used to live in a world converging toward maximal
| international trade, when in fact it was exploiting
| underdeveloped nations. As we progress globally, and as the
| development gap shrinks, we have noticed power dynamics which
| weren't well guarded against in the old way.
|
| So now what? How do we preserve a lot of the efficiencies of
| the past, while strengthening the resilience and redundancy.
| How can multiple nations create policy which drives business on
| partially compatible protocols?
|
| If I allow myself to be optimistic, I'd be hoping for more
| international lawyers and trade agreements. Protectionism is
| natural, but taken too far, isolationism is a death sentence.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on
| external production, so to do other countries want to reduce
| their own._
|
| If anything, I'd say for other countries it's more urgent.
|
| If China embargoes deliveries of light bulbs to Europe, all
| the light bulbs already in place keep working. The pain would
| grow over time - giving a grace period, to ramp up local
| production.
|
| If America embargoes AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft? The
| pain would be instant and severe.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I'm absolutely not an expert, but critical things for power
| and food production not to mention medical supplies and
| emergency equipment are also tied up pretty deeply in
| international trade.
|
| The world would break pretty quickly if we all just stopped
| trading with each other.
| michaelt wrote:
| Sure, but many products can be sourced from a load of
| countries.
|
| If you can't get natural gas from Russia you can get it
| shipped from America or Australia or Qatar - it's
| expensive as hell, and you might need to quickly build
| new regasification plants, but your economy keeps
| running. And there's no remote kill switch that disables
| the gas you already have in-country.
|
| That's not the case for the services provided by AWS,
| Google, Apple and Microsoft though - the 'competition' is
| one US provider vs another.
| agubelu wrote:
| That would be as close to a declaration of war as you can
| get without firing a bullet.
|
| The immediate and obvious response would be for the foreign
| branches of those companies to be declared "of national
| interest", nationalized and forced to keep operating.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"nationalized and forced to keep operating."
|
| Assuming there is no some kill switch which would render
| a whole infra including hardware inoperable.
| martijnvds wrote:
| It's called us-east-1?
| solatic wrote:
| AWS China is a completely separate partition under
| separate Chinese management, with no dependencies on us-
| east-1. It also greatly lags in feature deployments as a
| result.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| We saw the damage crowdstrike caused in a few hours
| gopher_space wrote:
| I'd imagine the government would be in talks with the
| highest ranking local Amazon employees long before, but I
| can't imagine a country trusting the hardware or wanting
| to manage the jank.
| bborud wrote:
| It is risky to believe that the development gap alone makes
| for higher economic efficiency when manufacturing things in
| China. There are very real structural differences in how
| various industries are organized. Not least in terms of
| geography.
|
| This is an aspect the west seems to have missed entirely as
| there are no attempts to learn from it or emulate it.
|
| Everyone knows about Shenzhen. Not everyone knows that this
| is how every major manufacturing industry is clustered in
| China in various cities and regions.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| My point was that the development gap is what lead to the
| current situation, not that it's just cheap labor that
| makes Chinese stuff cheap.
|
| My point about maintaining higher economic efficiency is
| actually the same point you're making. How can the globe
| (not just the west vs the east) learn from the past and
| build for the future. We live in a magical world with
| translation services available to billions of people, how
| can we empower them to organize around the right ideas. How
| can we preserve culture and art while flooding ourselves
| with technologies developed globally? Who pays for security
| and research? Intellectual property law in general?
|
| So many big issues and questions still need a lot of work.
| bborud wrote:
| I think Congress is actually the biggest obstacle to
| efficient manufacturing in the US. It is a body where the
| primary motivation of representatives centers around what
| they can get for their constituents, not what makes sense
| nationally. So any government spending (eg procurement)
| will actually tend to drive fragmentation as
| representatives fight for their states.
|
| Take for instance the space sector. It is fragmented by
| design. By Congress. Not only is it spread all over the
| country, making collaboration expensive, time-consuming
| and clumsy: there are essentially six different federal
| space agencies of which NASA is just one. This is
| terribly inefficient.
|
| I remember when reading about the Apollo missions it was
| astonishing just how much time they lost by different
| parts being built all over the US and then shipped across
| the country to be integrated. Utter engineering madness
| that was only made to work because one could pour immense
| amount of cash on it.
|
| This is why companies like SpaceX was able to run more
| efficiently: they do a lot more in vastly fewer
| locations. Ditto for Lockheed during their golden years:
| Skunk Works was famous for having "everyone under one
| roof and within walking distance of each other". (That
| Skunk Works neither exists anymore, nor can it exist, but
| that's a longer story which is also about extreme
| inefficiency).
|
| It is reasonable to assume that Europe wouldn't do any
| better. Or any setup where politicians are inclined to
| optimize for regional gain. You'd probably end up with
| the same political fights over who gets what if the EU
| were to push towards more of the kinds of manufacturing
| that you find in China.
|
| We know we're inefficient and we have some idea of why.
| We like to blame factors that are easy to politicise or
| evoke emotion (environment, exploitation of the poor
| etc), but I don't think they are as important as people
| tend to think.
|
| We just don't want to change. And there are legitimate
| reasons for that. Chief among them that we're
| uncomfortable with strong central control. (Well, we used
| to be. It only took a majority of republicans about a
| decade to turn 180 degrees on that question and prefer an
| all-controlling federal government dominated by the
| executive branch)
| detourdog wrote:
| I think Susan Collins is a great example of this. Her
| support of Kristi Noem is based on deals she finds
| acceptable for Maine residents. The fact that other
| states suffer at the hands of ICE doesn't effect her
| decision's. Collins feels she only is responsible for
| Maine and not humans that live outside of Maine.
|
| I find this sort of compartmentalization offensive to the
| common good.
| fakedang wrote:
| That's representative democracy for you. Heck, even China
| faces the same issue, but they get to make it a
| competition between provinces, on who can win the favor
| of the emperor. Helps for them that the emperor has
| supreme authority though.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The US did this with automobile and steel industries
| concentrated around the Great Lakes. It's not some kind of
| profound insight on the part of the Chinese.
|
| The downside is that it decimates entire regions if/when
| the demand for what they produce drops.
| bborud wrote:
| Yes, it has its risk, but that isn't why the US or Europe
| don't cluster industry to create higher efficiency. The
| risk can be mitigated. The political willingness and
| ability to do it deliberately just isn't there.
| dmix wrote:
| > we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded
| against in the old way
|
| The clearest example is a dependency on a single wealthy
| nation for military and world policing. It's a good thing for
| individual countries to be able to project their own foreign
| policy goals like containing Russia without having to rely on
| the whims of another country's politics. Even here in Canada
| we should be able to defend their own arctic border reliably
| and be able to project power to China/India beyond strongly
| worded letters.
|
| > I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade
| agreements.
|
| Ignoring the US's recent moves there does seem to be more
| trade deals than ever between 'middle powers'.
|
| > isolationism is a death sentence
|
| The best way to maintain global relationships is to offer
| tons of value. Similar to how China can get good trade deals
| and influence simply because they have so much to offer
| economically. This isn't just issues of diplomacy.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > like containing Russia without having to rely on the
| whims of another country's politics
|
| That's true, but at the same time it was probably already
| the case before invasion of Ukraine, and it is definitely
| the case now.
|
| The main issue is political fragmentation: would Paris and
| Berlin risk lives of French and German people (soldiers and
| civilians due to retaliation) to save Vilnius?
|
| But if the answer is true (as obligated by the Treaty of
| Maastricht, independently of NATO) then Russia stands no
| chance with conventional weapons against the whole Western
| Europe, the balance of military, demographic and industrial
| power is ridiculously lopsided (involving nuclear weapons
| would also raise the same political question about the
| French willingness to nuke Russia in retaliation to Russia
| nuking Poland but if the answer is yes, Russia cannot win a
| nuclear war either (which everyone would lose)).
| HPsquared wrote:
| The answer is always going to be "maybe", but hopefully
| enough of a maybe to deter hostile actions. That puts
| everything in an uncomfortable state of uncertainty.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Better uncomfortable state of uncertainty than
| comfortable state of war. Nuclear or conventional.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > The main issue is political fragmentation: would Paris
| and Berlin risk lives of French and German people
| (soldiers and civilians due to retaliation) to save
| Vilnius?
|
| This is a wrong question. If one day Russia feels brave
| enough to attack any NATO country, the right question to
| ask is, "Do we want to fight this war on someone else's
| soil or on ours?". This is the reason why Europe is so
| focused on helping Ukraine BTW.
| vasac wrote:
| > Do we want to fight this war on someone else's soil or
| on ours?
|
| Russia thought so too.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| What do you mean? There was never any question of
| attacking Russia and fighting any war on their soil.
| Nobody in their right mind would attack a country with
| the 2nd largest army and nuclear weapons. The war in
| Ukraine definitely made this army still very weak, but,
| except Ukraine defending itself, I don't see anyone
| rushing to attack Russia anytime soon. It makes no sense
| now and made no sense before they invaded Ukraine. There
| is nothing to win by attacking Russia and a lot to lose.
| pqtyw wrote:
| > with the 2nd largest army
|
| By what metric?
| tokai wrote:
| >would Paris and Berlin risk lives of French and German
| people (soldiers and civilians due to retaliation) to
| save Vilnius?
|
| Yes very much.
| generic92034 wrote:
| Absolutely:
|
| https://www.bundeswehr.de/en/news/eastern-flank-new-
| brigade-...
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Well said.
|
| One of the USA's greatest exports is intelligence and
| higher education, and what has been happening with that and
| the general anti-intellectual atmosphere is to me the most
| concerning as an american. Ironically, public education in
| america has been pretty bad for a while. But I'm going to
| start rambling here... way too many problems, and no damn
| leadership.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"like containing Russia"
|
| I think at the moment Canada faces way bigger problems from
| the south.
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > I think at the moment Canada faces way bigger problems
| from the south.
|
| Exactly. Not only there's the absurd campaign from the
| Trump administration on how Canada should be a state but
| there are also the recent treasonous talks between
| representatives from the Trump administration and the
| Alberta separatists.
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/eby-alberta-
| separatism-9.70...
|
| Putin's regime might be a cancer of humanity, but
| Canadians have far more reasons to feel threatened by the
| Trump admin than from Putin, even if Trump is a proxy for
| Putin.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"Putin's regime might be a cancer of humanity"
|
| It will go away at some point unless global west will
| start behaving in the same manner.
| pyrale wrote:
| > How do we preserve a lot of the efficiencies of the past,
| while strengthening the resilience and redundancy.
|
| Open source with clear international governance and
| maintainer/contributor base, in such a way that a
| geopolitical rift leaves both sides with working software.
|
| That works for tech and the infrastructure, of course, but
| not for the corporations built upon them.
|
| > more international lawyers
|
| I don't see that as a significant source of safety in our
| current world.
|
| > isolationism is a death sentence.
|
| The current US admin isn't isolationist, it's merely
| reverting back to 19th century imperialism.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| > If I allow myself to be optimistic, I'd be hoping for more
| international lawyers and trade agreements.
|
| One of the issues with the current system is that the WTO
| appellate body, which is effectively the court of world
| trade, requires USA approval for any appointments, which both
| Trump and Biden have refused to give. This effectively makes
| the WTO completely impotent.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Didn't the rest of the world form their own WTO without the
| USA in it?
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Which seems completely pointless if they don't also
| revoke the USA's "Most favoured nation" status.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"but taken too far, isolationism is a death sentence"
|
| I would argue that few large countries have everything to be
| self sufficient. For the rest - they would have to band
| together to avoid being at the mercy of their bigger
| overlords.
|
| As for efficiencies of the past: I think they lead to a
| complete monopoly / near monopoly in few critical areas. The
| result - the monopoly power becoming a political weapon and
| or critical vulnerability.
| miohtama wrote:
| Russian and China are already getting rid of Microsoft.
| Zigurd wrote:
| True but obv. Only lunatics would use a Russian cloud
| service. The interesting part is whether and what extent
| China is different. Also, why Europe should start treating us
| like Russians.
| kaffekaka wrote:
| You have a pro-russian leader.
| philipallstar wrote:
| The massive sanctions he's placing on Russian oil make
| that impossible to believe.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| You must be one of the few who still believes what Trump
| says to the media after nearly 100k proven lies.
| philipallstar wrote:
| Is that because there are no primary or secondary
| sanctions? Or are you just ignoring what I'm saying?
| watwut wrote:
| You are ignoring Trump literally adopting Russian
| proposals and demands in that war as they are. Trump and
| america flipped sides, seeing Russia as admirable peer
| and Ukraine as someone who should shut up and put up.
|
| Trump want deals with russia to enrich himself. For that
| he needs Ukraine to loose. Bad thing is Putin does not
| have enough, he wants the rest of Europe too.
| throwaway902984 wrote:
| I think it is fair to separate putin and russia. I mean,
| I don't think he uses our society as proxy for his own
| ego. I think he really likes Putin.
| wokkel wrote:
| Those can also be explained by favouring usa/venezuela
| oil while still supporting Russian politics. For example:
| in the Ukraine war he is constantly seeking ways and
| arguments to support putins position even though he is
| one of the few leaders worldwide who do this.
| philipallstar wrote:
| They're not favouring - they're even enforcing secondary
| sanctions on Russian oil on China and India, which is
| difficult and expensive.
|
| The fact that you can divine pro-Putin things from his
| speech means nothing compared to him performing massively
| powerful economic action against Putin.
| varispeed wrote:
| These sanctions make no difference, except make people
| say things like you say.
| isodev wrote:
| > why Europe should start treating us like Russians
|
| Because your CEOs have become power players in your
| politics and that's generally a Russian/Oligarch thing.
|
| Like Apple trying to wiggle their way out of the DMA and
| when their bs arguments fail in court they send peach daddy
| with tariffs and what not.
| allarm wrote:
| > why Europe should start treating us like Russians.
|
| I don't know, maybe because your president is a dangerous
| lunatic? I really enjoy these "are we the baddies?"
| moments.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| I'm not sure he's getting it yet. Maybe he's just not
| personally affected yet.
| throwaway902984 wrote:
| Was that not an imperative statement agreeing with your
| cathartic comment? A little weird there isn't an explicit
| "this is why", but asking questions with a poorly
| conjugated why along with bad punctuation isn't usually a
| native speakers habit.
| bee_rider wrote:
| They said in a follow-up comment that they intentionally
| wrote something ambiguous, so... I don't know, I wouldn't
| waste too many cycles on comments that are deliberately
| unclear.
| throwaway902984 wrote:
| Are you asking a rhetorical question or making a statement?
| Zigurd wrote:
| Ambiguity is a thing.
| throwaway902984 wrote:
| I was asking for the other commenters, to clear that up.
| ericmay wrote:
| > The interesting part is whether and what extent China is
| different
|
| Much worse for the EU, both strategically and economically.
| You'll be able to buy Chinese services and give them your
| data and money, but you won't be able to operate in their
| market. Germany is feeling the pain there. [1]
| Strategically they're a Russian ally and are actively
| supporting Russia's war against Ukraine and further aims
| against the EU.
|
| Something like Russia -> China -> US as worst to least
| worst partners.
|
| The EU should invest in technical and military capabilities
| and divest from _reliance_ on other countries and echos the
| US American position very closely.
|
| [1] For example https://www.autoblog.com/features/germanys-
| auto-industry-is-...
| tosapple wrote:
| While they ditch Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle: we still use
| Linux, Sel4, ASML and ARM.
|
| There's lots of interesting stuff to watch out for.
| akudha wrote:
| What is wrong with using Linux?
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Linus Torvalds is very pro-corporate, pro-tivoization, he
| thinks GPL3 was a terrible mistake.
| palata wrote:
| Is he pro-tivoization, or is he not against it?
|
| I heard him talk about GPLv3 someday, and what he said
| was that it was a mistake to call it "GPLv3", as if it
| was the evolution of GPLv2, because for him it should
| have been a totally different licence.
|
| Which I find fair: there are different kinds of copyleft
| (like MPL vs GPL), it makes sense to say that GPLv2 is a
| different concept than GPLv3. Whereas I don't know if
| anyone should use GPLv1 because GPLv2 sounds like it
| fixed GPLv1 without changing its spirit.
| hbogert wrote:
| what's wrong with using european stuff? (ARM, ASML)
|
| :P
| dijit wrote:
| Isn't ARM owned by Softbank? (Japanese)
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Isn't Sel4 Australian?
| christophilus wrote:
| All of the things OP mentioned are non-US tech. I think
| the OP was speaking from a US perspective, though it's
| not clear.
| krzyk wrote:
| What's wrong in using Linux. It is an open source project
| with origins in Finland and still lead by a Fin.
| woodson wrote:
| ...who lives in Oregon, in the US.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Hey, we'd break away if we could.
| tempsaasexample wrote:
| I spend a month in Oregon every year mushroom hunting and
| elk hunting.
|
| Once you're away from a few key cities, Oregonians are
| more conservative and hardcore than even central
| Californians.
|
| I think you underestimate your state if you think they're
| anti American.
| UltraSane wrote:
| AWS in China doesn't have KMS
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > Russian and China are already getting rid of Microsoft.
|
| I don't know what you mean by China "getting rid of
| Microsoft" in the context of cloud providers. I mean, Azure
| is already present in China's internet, and just like any
| cloud provider present in China it's presence is a
| partnership with local cloud providers.
|
| Russia is getting rid of Microsoft not because it has a
| choice. They are subjected to sanctions due to their invasion
| of Ukraine, and that essentially cut their access to all tech
| services. By that measuring stick, Russia is also getting rid
| of Boeing and Airbus.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| The most interesting part is that they do not rely on
| Western software solutions (Russia still needs hardware,
| China may reach full autonomy soon enough). If they could
| do it relatively quickly, EU can do it too. And EU now has
| exactly the same incentives.
| paradox460 wrote:
| It's not just big, it's large
| sunshine-o wrote:
| If Europe wants to reach digital independence it really has to
| look at thew big picture.
|
| 1. European banks mostly sell debt and Nasdaq/Magnificent 7
| stocks to their clients. This is what EU citizen invest in.
|
| 2. Data centers run on semiconductors made in Asia and cheap
| energy. Software is almost "the easy part".
|
| 3. The whole migration to "the Cloud" (aka MS/AWS/Google), CAPEX
| to OPEX transition during the ZIRP era was a scam sold by the
| same ruling class that now tell you need to revert to the
| previous model.
|
| 4. Human capital has to be considered. Having big consulting
| shops making banks on exploiting foreigners is not a sustainable
| path to build digital independence (see the content of the recent
| trade deal with India, an US and Russia ally).
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Can Europe build AI datacenters though?
|
| Europe has no wafer production and no companies that produce
| GPUs.
|
| That means it is dependent on Taiwan for wafers and the USA for
| GPU design.
|
| Then there is the question wether there is a will to invest.
| Gemini gives me this list of publicly traded companies in the US
| and what they invested in AI infrastructure in 2025:
| Amazon: $100B Alphabet: $90B Microsoft: $80B
| Meta: $70B Tesla: $20B
|
| For Europe, I get this list: Deutsche Telekom:
| $1B
| enoeht wrote:
| ASML & IMEC are European.
| smallnix wrote:
| Isn't every AI datacenter chip manufacturer critically
| dependent on EU (ASML)?
| ninkendo wrote:
| Sure but the US isn't vowing to eliminate all dependencies on
| EU goods. (Just burning all their good will.)
| fweimer wrote:
| Aren't Mali GPUs designed in Europe?
| raincole wrote:
| I mean, if after three years all we got is Mistral, it's
| obvious that EU is out of the current round of AI race.
|
| It might even be a positive thing. If the AI 'bubble' bursts
| they might end up saving tons of money and can buy idle GPUs at
| a discount.
| malka1986 wrote:
| Yeah and we could run kimi. Th issue is energy, we should
| keep building nuclear reactor and renewable to power it.
| margorczynski wrote:
| Well it is like Thiel said in a recent interview - European
| companies and investors are very risk-averse and will never be
| a vanguard like the ones in the US.
|
| You'll never get here that kind of cash for any risky project,
| it usually is low risk + low margin.
| 202508042147 wrote:
| Maybe we don't need that kind of money for things like office
| software, email, reasonable sized databases, VPS etc.
| ozim wrote:
| Feels like people write that like it somehow is failure on
| investors side.
|
| If you are investor on US market having 300M people speaking
| roughly the same language and then high possibility to easily
| spill over the world upsides on the bet are really high,
| burning cash to have a chance hitting jackpot are much much
| higher than in EU.
|
| In EU you are starting in a single country so like 60M people
| and your payoff is capped from start at most likely scenario
| you go big in a single country and then you basically have
| clean start in next country.
|
| That is the reality of game theory, not some failure of
| imagination or being scared to take risks - payoff is just
| not there, in US you have a shot at insane payoff in
| relatively short term.
| lII1lIlI11ll wrote:
| > If you are investor on US market having 300M people
| speaking roughly the same language and then high
| possibility to easily spill over the world upsides on the
| bet are really high
|
| The topic is cloud providers. Do you think it would be
| critical for a EU-based cloud provider to translate their
| admin GUI to Elfdalian, Basque and Romansh in order to
| succeed? Or perhaps there are some deeper underlying causes
| for European failure in modern computer tech that you can
| think of?
| snowpid wrote:
| Thiel recently called Greta Thunberg the anti - christ. Thiel
| is maybe crazy as Musk. at least he is not an authorative
| source.
|
| Besides the soure what does he mean with all of Europe:
| Berlin? London? Paris? Estonia? Sweden? The start up eco
| system is fragmented / decentralised. I doubt Thiel is a good
| overview and he argues probably not in good faith anyway.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| Zero to 1 was good.
|
| But I generally have a hard time thinking any person's
| opinion is some sort of fact.
|
| However, it kind of tracks with my understanding.
| alibarber wrote:
| How much of the stuff that is under control of the US cloud
| companies has any need for being in an 'AI' datacentre?
|
| Does a store of healthcare records need AI? The state portal
| for renewing passports? The tax administration?
|
| I seemed to be able to use all of these things online before
| the latest boom in AI came along.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| AI will be involved in all processing of data. Everything
| that is human work today will be done by AI tomorrow.
|
| So if Europe will rely on US AI infrastructure, nothing is
| won by moving the old CPU bound processes off of US cloud
| infrastructure.
| alibarber wrote:
| Two out of three of these things are effectively fully
| automated already in my experience.
|
| And I'm afraid I do not share your belief that the work
| done by a healthcare professional today will be done by AI
| tomorrow.
| 627467 wrote:
| People tend to fixate about cutting edge technology, but my
| naive intuition says the problem in Europe is not in lack of
| some secret sauce: it is hidden in plain sight lack of energy
| to run the DC - and worse - lack of long term desire to make
| the tough choices to get that energy
| 202508042147 wrote:
| I would also add lack of technical competence at C level. In
| my previous job, I have dealt with quite a few European CEOs
| whos only background was an MBA. Unlike the US where a lot of
| CEOs have a deep technical background...
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| Of course. One only has to take a look at Microsoft, Apple,
| or Google, to notice that they're run by CEOs with a "deep"
| technical background. No MBA whatsoever...
| christophilus wrote:
| Google and (and more debatably Microsoft and Apple) were
| run by technical founders during the timeframe that they
| were achieving critical mass. The MBAs came later to run
| the machine and optimize the business. But, the machine
| was built and grown by technical leadership first.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I read years ago that Hetzner placed data centers near
| inexpensive power, but I understand that the EU's energy
| situation has deteriorated. So you are correct, they have the
| larger energy problem to contend with.
| ear7h wrote:
| Wow you're so right, you did such a good job asking computer
| mommy to confirm your priors!
|
| But actually, that's not the goal here. AI, at least the kind
| of products that need dedicated datacenters ie. generative,
| isn't critical infrastructure. The focus is on documents,
| collaboration tools, file servers, single-sign on, databases
| etc. that are seemingly monopolized by US providers.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Also to be honest, suppose EU uses kimi model which is open
| source. They can literally swap out one word from the
| provider and move from say American datacenter companies to
| European.
|
| Quite frankly, there is literally 0 moat and its great to see
| EU focus on the real moat/lock-in issues.
| 627467 wrote:
| > documents, collaboration tools, file servers, single-sign
| on, databases
|
| All being (or soon to be) fed through LLM agents running on
| fibers and datacenters controlled by NOT European entieties.
| And if you build DC you'll be powering them with energy
| imports.
|
| Software being built on library repositories also under
| foreign jurisdictions. Network infrastructure built on
| imported tech running whatever backdoors "partners" see fit.
|
| Its like you didn't notice the snowden revelations, the shift
| from dependence on Russian Gas to US gas, nordstream
| sabotage, stuxnet, etc
| tliltocatl wrote:
| Do Europe need AI datacenters to survive? AI is immature
| technology that is not yet critical to anything.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| Define 'survive'.
|
| Given Europe's productivity gap with the US, they appear they
| are becoming even further a vassal. They will survive, but
| they further lose their leverage with each year. We see this
| in international politics as the US pivots away from Europe
| and towards Asia. (Although Russia's decline has also made it
| less necessary too)
|
| If you want Europe to rejoin 'great powers', as 'survival',
| yes they need AI.
| tliltocatl wrote:
| Productivity in producing slop? Because that's the only
| thing LLMs are good for so far. And by the time this change
| the GPUs installed today will become obsolete.
| simgt wrote:
| > That means it is dependent on Taiwan for wafers and the USA
| for GPU design.
|
| Both being dependant on ASML, that we're crippling to please
| our bully, the USA. We probably have more leverage that we want
| to admit, but that requires a lot of politic will and...
| planning the economy.
| devsda wrote:
| Is there a use case for AI that open models can't solve ?
|
| Are there really any customers who are demanding AI and
| threatening to leave if those AI features are missing in every
| tech adjacent product ?
|
| I think the make or break situation of integrating cutting edge
| AI for any business is just the hype and fomo at leadership
| level.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| If they wait a year or so, the new AI chips being used now in
| China will probably be available for LLM inference in Europe.
| It seems unfortunate for small and medium size countries, and
| also for the EU to be dependent on any IT infrastructure only
| from China or the USA, but perhaps being flexible enough to be
| able to switch venders or use both is safer?
| convolvatron wrote:
| exactly. in HPC we all understood that it was a tradeoff
| between money and time, and that the curve was exponential.
| if you wanted to race ahead of todays capabilities, you
| could, but you couldn't go very far without burning alot of
| cash.
|
| because of the investment story about being first and
| building a moat, we have companies torching 100s of billions
| of dollars to see who can climb that exponential the
| furthest.
|
| we have so much work to do, in infrastructure, and
| distributed computation models, and programmability,
| quantization, and information theory...just relax a little.
| you dont have to compete with OpenAI. OpenAI is just a giant
| waste of money. take your incremental gains and invest in
| research and I assure you we can get there without directing
| our entire economic output into buying the latest highest
| margin parts from Nvidia only to use them at 30%, if you're
| being generous.
| bborud wrote:
| This kind of reminds me of an old paper:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9912202
|
| Of course, we are no longer in the clock speed doubling
| era, but computer does get faster still.
| convolvatron wrote:
| It's true that the progress on clock speeds has slowed.
| Now we have to address the parallelism problem in order
| to keep moving forward. And we haven't done a very good
| job. Progress on that front will get us back on the
| acceleration curve. Saedfly, the current framing of 'who
| buys the most hardware', while I providing a nice
| marketing story, isn't netting us that much progress
| except what Nvidia spends internally.
| vinyl7 wrote:
| AI is as far away from useful and necessary as bitcoin and NFTs
| were. I'm sure society can survive without it
| ninkendo wrote:
| Strange to say it's not useful, I personally get a lot of use
| out of it. It's mostly replaced search engines for me, which
| is no small thing.
|
| Agree that society can survive without it though, but seems a
| weird thing to just claim as useless.
| pu_pe wrote:
| Yes, this is a core issue. Most datacenter investments in
| Europe come from American big tech. If AI is going to be half
| as huge as predicted (kind of a big if), then Europe would
| depend even more on the US for compute. The highest energy
| prices in the world coupled with conservative investment
| mentality means Europe is practically out of the AI race.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I see this differently.
|
| For European citizens and companies the safest option will always
| be to have their data in the USA or anywhere where European
| rulers cannot touch it.
|
| The same for Americans, their data should be safest far away from
| their government.
| purkka wrote:
| The Europeans have already cooperated with Americans so that
| each could read each other's citizens' private messaging which
| would be illegal for the locals.
|
| Keeping the data overseas by design would just make this
| easier.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield
| rvnx wrote:
| Finally, this is the comment I was looking for.
|
| If you are in France you may benefit from having your data
| outside of France unless it's really safe stuff (e.g. a website
| about your dog) and no user-generated content.
|
| Because, if they seize your server for a case A, and they see
| evidence for case B, they can charge you for B, C, D, E...
|
| Of course the government, public policy, police and
| intelligence folks are going to tell you:
| "yes yes don't worry, bring your data here, it'll be safer with
| us. Don't put it in countries like Russia or China where they
| do not cooperate."
|
| We talk about the country (France!) which already _requires_
| you to give your ID card or take a selfie of your face to be
| permitted to look at porn sites.
|
| In a few months you _will_ have to give your ID to access
| Discord, Meta, X, etc, and in September 2026 giving ID will be
| mandatory to subscribe to VPNs.
|
| (and yes technically these services can't be blocked, but once
| they'll threaten you or the operators of such services with
| jail and big fines it will be difficult to resist).
|
| If your server is in Russia or China, well, good luck, so many
| traps during the procedure that unless it is really important,
| the French authorities are going to give up.
|
| Russia doesn't care about non-Russian stuff, China the same, if
| you own a small clone of X for example, you are much safer
| there, and it is easier to operate.
|
| The only thing is that you have to make more frequent backups,
| as the things are less reliable there, so you can move
| somewhere else.
| 202508042147 wrote:
| As a European, I am glad that this is finally discussed in the
| open! I have made multiple comments in the last weeks that one of
| the most important things, for me, is an alternative to the
| Visa/Mastercard duopoly. And yes, I can use an app to pay, but
| whenever I rent a car or purchase something online, I still use
| one of these two American companies. Why isn't the European
| Commission mandating these app payments in different EU countries
| to connect with each other? Wouldn't that go faster than the
| digital euro, that is set to come no earlier than 2029?
| bluecalm wrote:
| >>As a European, I am glad that this is finally discussed in
| the open! I have made multiple comments in the last weeks that
| one of the most important things, for me, is an alternative to
| the Visa/Mastercard duopoly.
|
| The main reason we don't have an alternative to Visa/Mastercard
| duopoly is protectionism of EU countries. There are local
| alternatives that do pretty well (BLIK in Poland, Revolut Pay
| in countries where it's popular) but entering more markets is
| like pulling teeth because EU throws regulatory obstacles at
| every step.
|
| >> Why isn't the European Commission mandating these app
| payments in different EU countries to connect with each other?
| Wouldn't that go faster than the digital euro, that is set to
| come no earlier than 2029?
|
| It would but then their non-local alternative could win which
| they really don't want to happen.
| yoavm wrote:
| > The main reason we don't have an alternative to
| Visa/Mastercard duopoly is protectionism of EU countries.
| There are local alternatives that do pretty well (BLIK in
| Poland, Revolut Pay in countries where it's popular) but
| entering more markets is like pulling teeth because EU throws
| regulatory obstacles at every step.
|
| That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense? How did Visa &
| Mastercard manage to go through the "protectionism of EU
| countries" then?
| bell-cot wrote:
| > How did Visa & Mastercard manage...
|
| I'd bet a combination of:
|
| - Got through before the red tape ramparts were nearly as
| thick as today
|
| - Ungentle arm-twisting by the US Gov't... at Visa &
| Mastercard's behest
|
| - Amply greased palms... which can't be traced to Visa or
| Mastercard. At least not in any jurisdiction which would do
| anything about it.
| yobbo wrote:
| > because EU throws regulatory obstacles at every step.
|
| No, the gatekeeping is done by local banks and governments to
| protect their oligopolies/cartels.
|
| There are many instant-pay apps across Europe and they are
| intentionally not interoperable outside of local markets.
| Each local banking oligopoly is trying to fence off
| competition. The main fear is from smaller neo-banks.
| bluecalm wrote:
| >>No, the gatekeeping is done by local banks and
| governments to protect their oligopolies/cartels.
|
| If you are pointing the distinction between gatekeeping at
| the EU level and country level I am not contesting that.
| It's clear though that the gatekeeping is the problem here
| (and in many other industries in EU).
| deanc wrote:
| Well, there is good news on that front [1]. It seems it's being
| planned.
|
| [1] https://thepaypers.com/payments/news/eu-considers-
| developing...
| _tk_ wrote:
| Take a look here: https://wero-wallet.eu/
| 202508042147 wrote:
| Looking forward having this in the country where I live and
| in the countries I mostly travel to! Well, actually all over
| EU.
|
| What is unclear to me atm, is it possible to rent a car using
| wero? Also, can I pay online with it?
| tmtvl wrote:
| > _yes, I can use an app to pay_
|
| So you move the power from two American companies (Visa and
| Mastercard) to two American companies (Apple and Google)?
| What's that supposed to solve?
|
| Also, fuck apps. I had to set up an app for my mother to
| recharge her new hybrid car and I am not joking: at one point I
| had to create a log in for her and was greeted by a screen with
| two options: Log In (blue button, white text), and Log In
| (white button, blue text). I would rather use cash than an app
| (and I'm in Belgium, carrying around cash is like herding sheep
| through coyote territory).
| 202508042147 wrote:
| > So you move the power from two American companies (Visa and
| Mastercard) to two American companies (Apple and Google)?
| What's that supposed to solve?
|
| Unsure what you mean, but for context I use an app developed
| by a consortium of local banks and it works by scanning a QR
| code. Indeed, I use an Android phone but my next one will be
| a de-googled one like a Fairphone with /e/OS. Hopefully the
| same app will work there...
| severino wrote:
| > Hopefully the same app will work there...
|
| That's the problem: currently many of those banking apps in
| the EU require having a phone with Google Play services and
| other "security" stuff that makes you reliant on American
| companies, like the post you're replying to claims.
| 202508042147 wrote:
| Now that the cat is out of the bag, I am confident that
| those banking apps will (eventually) work without the
| likes of Google Play Services. Additionally, what i
| really want is an alternative to Visa/Mastercard, meaning
| I can use it for renting a car or paying online.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| We have UPI in India and it's pretty Robust.
|
| My brother actually was part of deal in talks to have UPI
| pilots as a project within London as a project within his
| college and I remember him talking about how UPI (India) is in
| talks with other European countries too.
|
| With the mother of all deals recently signed between EU and
| India. I sincerely hope that UPI can have access within EU
| markets too.
|
| If you ever come to India, you can witness the astronomical
| rise of UPI. From street vendors to literally everybody now has
| UPI and it has 0 fees and is really great/one of the best.
|
| As for our brazillian friends, I have heard that pix is great
| too and I have respect to pix as well plus its open source as
| well. Both Pix and UPI are really great.
| 202508042147 wrote:
| Yes, there are local alternatives like Pix here as well, but
| they only work in the same country. I need something that
| works across EU countries, like wero. I also need something
| that works on every site when I buy online and I can also use
| it when renting a car. So a real Visa/Mastercard alternative.
| buckwheatmilk wrote:
| It just plainly makes sense for central bank to offer a digital
| payments solution. Right now if I want to pay for something
| without 3rd party taking a cut is to mail the money in an
| envelope as if EU Central Bank denies existence of digital
| economy.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| they're working on it, but it'll take time: https://www.ecb.e
| uropa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
| yeahwhatever10 wrote:
| Europe almost had in once ...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard
| 202508042147 wrote:
| Last week I migrated our db away from AWS RDS to a European cloud
| provider. Everything runs fine and we also have it cheaper!
|
| One of our domains is due for renewal in a couple of months. I'm
| setting up the transfer to a EU registrar for it next week.
|
| This all takes time and it's not the most important thing for the
| bottom line, but on the long run I'm sure I'll look back and say
| it was a great investment.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > to a EU registrar
|
| Which one? I've been using DNSimple for so long, been trying to
| find something equally developer friendly who is based in
| Europe but haven't had much success. Used to use Gandi before
| DNSimple but it's obviously down the drain today.
| new23d wrote:
| netim.com has been reliable over the years for me
| 202508042147 wrote:
| Best would be to research a local one where you live. Support
| your community while you're at it!
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I live in a town with 10K other folks, I feel like I'd know
| if there was a local DNS registrar here :)
|
| But maybe I should be the change I wanna see!
| lillecarl wrote:
| I use Scaleway as my registrar, I don't know if i can
| automate domain registration but I don't have to. They have
| APIs for managing records if you choose to host DNS there
| too.
| hk__2 wrote:
| What about OVH?
| procaryote wrote:
| OVH is awful. The UI is slow and buggy, operations often
| fail and you need slow contact with support.
|
| Worse, closing an OVH account is very hard. Every domain
| you host there they sign you up to several services, and
| you need to manually disable each one before they let you
| close the account. This then often gets stuck, because of
| the broken UI, and you end up needing to badger support
| over and over until they'll fix it
|
| Never again
| rendaw wrote:
| They have Fido 2FA too!
|
| But their web UI looks and feels like it was pieced
| together by hamsters. It doesn't leave me feeling confident
| in their technical abilities in any way.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I've been using DNSimple for ages and I'm looking to switch;
| not because of geopolitical reasons (I'm American), but
| they're just damn expensive for the simple dns and domain
| management stuff I use them for.
| manmal wrote:
| Are there other good ones with such a nice API?
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Good question! Ironically I want to use their API to
| migrate somewhere else, but it'd need to have a good API
| to complete the migration :P
| rookonaut wrote:
| Can you disclose which European cloud provider you chose?
| 202508042147 wrote:
| We went with Hetzner as we already had good experiences with
| their VPSes. For this particular db migration, a resonably
| sized VPS with volumes does the job for us. We don't have
| planet scale operations so the lowish IOPS is not an issue
| atm. Also, with this experience at hand, I am confident that
| we'll manage another migration if need be.
| gregman1 wrote:
| Afaik Hetzner has a couple of server locations in the USA.
| Is it correct to say that Hetzner has to comply to US CLOUD
| Act and therefore give away any data requested?
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| Depends on which data center you're hosted.
|
| The one under US jurisdiction operated by Hetzner US LLC
| must comply, while the German ones are operating under
| the GDPR, which has extraterritorial clauses can can deny
| or challenge the request.
| rvnx wrote:
| It's not that guaranteed.
|
| The reality is that if you have any interest, company or
| employees in the US you can be coerced to do anything the
| US government wants.
|
| Either legally through courts, or through business
| influence, or through harassment (e.g. hardcore checks
| from the IRS).
|
| Sorry, Stripe rejects you now because you are high-risk
| (you have to explain why you refuse to help in criminal
| cases, though there is a court requesting you).
|
| You don't like to comply to US requests and protect
| terrorists ?
|
| https://support.stripe.com/questions/how-to-resolve-
| blocks-o...
|
| Still don't comply ?
|
| You are added to sanctions list, end of the game.
|
| https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0185
|
| Even Microsoft acknowledges that these cross-border
| requests cannot be avoided.
|
| https://www.convotis.com/es/en/news/microsoft-access-eu-
| data
|
| The same way that EU can force fetching data from the US
| entity.
|
| Now on the EU side:
|
| GDPR fine of 4% of your worldwide income. Well, too bad,
| your US entity refused, we will have to punish your EU
| entity very strongly.
|
| If small provider, oh right you refuse ? Well, we will
| notify your bank that you do not respect the court
| orders, etc.
|
| The law is one of the way of enforcement, but there are
| multiple stages of pressure.
|
| Still refuse ? Well, let's come to you at 6am then.
|
| https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2020/07/10
| /57...
| kaveh_h wrote:
| Any company opting for building digital sovereign systems
| should build a redundant and decentralized organization
| so that in worst case the company can split up its
| operations geographically to avoid being in the
| crosshairs of any host countries government.
| rvnx wrote:
| Absolutely, but imagine, Zuckerberg creates a new
| company: "Storm" -> "the European end
| to end encrypted privacy-conscious messenger app"
|
| Now, an US court, requests data from that project to
| protect an imminent attack where people are going to die.
|
| He refuses, his company refuses, everybody refuses.
|
| Do you think he can evade US justice even if the company
| is incorporated in the EU ?
|
| Collaborating is the path of least resistance, and as
| long as you can claim somewhat "we didn't have any
| choice, we were coerced" then you are fine. This is also
| why Apple, Google, Meta, NordVPN, etc, are all
| collaborating with the infamous FBI DITU group.
| mk89 wrote:
| There are EU alternatives to Stripe.
|
| I know what you meant, but I think that there are
| alternatives, even if they are maybe not as good as the
| ones made in US.
|
| Also, if the goal is to go all in on data sovereignty, so
| be it - put the companies in the sanctions list. It will
| only grow.
| esskay wrote:
| Did the exact same thing for a client who's ops we managed
| on AWS. I was pretty against ditching RDS and a load
| balanced setup for hetzners load balancer and 3 instances
| (2 web, 1 db) but honestly, it's been pretty smooth
| sailing. The sites faster, and costs dropped massively,
| saving the client approx EUR900/mo for a better service.
| mvelbaum wrote:
| do you use FDE on your hetzner instances? I couldn't find a
| guarantee that they properly dispose of block storage so I
| ended up developing a utility for this
| https://github.com/mvelbaum/hetzner-fde-toolkit
| dopidopHN2 wrote:
| OVH in my case
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Last week I migrated our db away from AWS RDS to a European
| cloud provider. Everything runs fine and we also have it
| cheaper!
|
| If I may ask, why didn't you choose the cheaper option before?
| What do you think you're trading off, if anything?
| 202508042147 wrote:
| Going with the default, we were already using other services
| from them.
| np_tedious wrote:
| So you still have other stuff with AWS?
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| I think they meant it the other way around. They mostly
| used AWS and had already some stuff on Hetzner, which
| made switching over to Hetzner easier.
| fdgfikgfv wrote:
| This is happening in the US firms too. Yesterday, our CTO asked
| us to look into multi-cloud solutions. We know it is
| politically motivated decision with no cost savings or benefit.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| It's called the Cloud Act. If your business wants to keep its
| production secrets and personal data safe, think again. This has
| nothing to do with Trump.
|
| Don't fall for the trick of using an AWS EU sovereignty cloud.
| Amazon is US-based and falls under the Cloud Act. Don't be
| tricked.
| antirez wrote:
| To really understand how complicated is this matter, put into the
| mix that _before AI_ in Europe there was no shortage of knowledge
| to have all our cloud services (to the point that a decent part
| of key infrastructure software is developed in Europe or mainly
| by Europeans), social networks, ..., but yet it was never
| strongly wanted. To reach this point, something is really odd
| with the current US-EU tensions.
| llmthrow0827 wrote:
| EU countries are just vassal states of the USA in practice,
| anyway. If Uncle Sam wants that data, he's getting it, either by
| asking politely or by taking it. And the EU countries can't and
| won't retaliate.
| alansaber wrote:
| can't wait for my european incorporated company to run on my
| european cloud servers so I can run my european language models
| (which will run inference on european english)
| hunglee2 wrote:
| The time for Great Firewall of Europe was 2005, when Friendster,
| Skype, Xing were still a thing. Probably too late now but effort
| still needs to be made. One upside of a sovereign European
| Internet is an ecosystem which may sustain thousands of well
| paying jobs
| hagbard_c wrote:
| Great Firewall? Is that where you think we - Europeans,
| Americans, anyone living in what used to be called the 'free
| world' - should go, just follow the Chinese and North Korean
| and similar regimes in restricting access to whatever those in
| control deem to be appropriate? Do you even realise what you're
| proposing here?
|
| We in what used to be called the 'free world' used to revel in
| our freedom of movement, our freedom of thought, freedom on
| conscience, religion and more. We used to look at places where
| such freedoms were not a given like they were and to a large
| extent still are here. The Chinese 'Great Firewall' was seen in
| the same light as the Berlin Wall: a means to keep an
| oppressive regime in power, to keep the citizenry of China
| unaware of anything the regime did not want them to know about
| so they could mow them down at Tienanmen Square without people
| outside of the area learning about it. Now there's some HN user
| claiming that Europe should also build one - why exactly? What
| is it that we Europeans should not be allowed to access? Why
| should the European Commission - maybe I should start calling
| them the European Commissars - have such power over Europeans?
|
| I say no to any such proposal and will, just like the Chinese,
| find a way around any such tool of oppression.
| niemandhier wrote:
| For most medium sized business or government agencies, the main
| reason for cloud providers is that you don't need the in-house
| skill.
|
| You can replicate most of their offerings for that target group
| with open source stuff easy enough, but you will need people to
| maintain that and those are more expensive.
| gregman1 wrote:
| I'd start with govs. Governments are mostly running Microsoft.
| Like your and your friends and family's health, tax, ownership,
| pension and other data.
| oellegaard wrote:
| This! I'm Danish and everything in the government is Microsoft.
| USA is trying to make a hostile takeover of Greenland, a part
| of the Danish Kingdom, and meanwhile the parliament is
| migrating to Azure. I hope someone in the government wakes up
| soon before it's too late.
| retinaros wrote:
| europe is doing well enough to hinders freedom. we don't need
| america for that. just at the moment in france they voted law to
| restrict social media from teenagers. that will require ID for
| loging onto websites. one can already guess whats the next step.
| the minister in charge of this already mentionned trying to ban
| VPN like in north korea.
|
| European governements WILL take your data from "sovereign" clouds
| ptero wrote:
| A much better goal would be to ditch dependence on a single
| company and become, as much as possible, cloud provider agnostic.
| Not that I mind giving US big tech grief -- they earned it in
| spades.
|
| But if you wrestle your technology chains from one evil master,
| do not willingly give it to another, even if he looks more
| benevolent today. My 2c.
| oellegaard wrote:
| We recently moved two companies from AWS to Scaleway which is the
| closest to AWS you find in EU AFAIK. It's like AWS 5-10 years
| ago, eg much fewer managed services and you don't have as much
| tooling, but it works great and it is also cheaper. You do get
| managed kubernetes, Postgres and Redis plug and play though.
| vasco wrote:
| And move to the Lidl cloud?
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| If China can and will do it, it is naive to assume other
| superpowers with their own interests, especially when they have
| convenient access to your data, would not do the same. More
| likely in country when business is so tightly interconnected with
| politics.
| lucasRW wrote:
| Why EU-native rather than nation-native ? If you are French, your
| sensitive stuff must be French-native, just like Switzerland
| does, not "EU-native whatever that means".
|
| There is no EU, each country has very strong different interests,
| on some topics, some will decide to stay close to the US, on some
| other topics, some will seek proximity with the BRICS, etc, etc.
| Constantly being in an in-between is what has destroyed Europe.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > There is no EU
|
| > what has destroyed Europe.
|
| Hyperbole much?
|
| I think you completely misunderstand what the EU is, the
| position of its member states, etc.
|
| It's hard to take any point you tried to make seriously given
| that.
| jmyeet wrote:
| IMHO Europe has one choice, and it may already be too late, and
| that is to adopt the China model or to descend into fascism and
| neoliberal economic collapse.
|
| Europe needs to be responsible for its own security and needs its
| own versions of all the big American tech companies. This
| administration has done more to destroy American soft power than
| any other in history and it's not even close. The US has shown
| itself to be an unreliable partner.
|
| China now has a record of decades of long-term planning and
| choosing the interests of its populace over corporate interests.
| It's not problem free by any means but the food is cheap and
| plentiful, the priority for housing is availability rather than
| treating it purely as an investment vehicle, infrastructure such
| as robust public transit is a priority and from the beginning of
| the Internet age, China has decided not to be beholden to
| American tech companies so there are Chinese versions of
| everything.
|
| One may question Europe's ability to innovate in tech given the
| comparative lack of unicorns produced (vs the US) but that's
| irrelevant here, for two reasons:
|
| 1. Europe doesn't need to innovate. It just needs to copy; and
|
| 2. Forcing EU governments and companies to use European platforms
| will create a captive market.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud
| operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer. And if you are a
| start-up and you want to grow, the situation is even more dire.
|
| And without a few hundreds of billions of EUR invested _today_
| there will still be at least a decade until basic infrastructure
| will be somewhat on par with current day hyperscalers from the
| US.
|
| And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of pouring
| money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.
|
| Today, if for political reasons some EU companies will switch to
| whatever Europe has to offer in terms of cloud computing, they
| will need to spend a significant amount of money to retool their
| day to day pipelines and invest into developing or replacing
| cloud services with alternatives from the new provider or self-
| host if there is no native offering.
|
| There's a chance that the current situation will start to resolve
| itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however that might
| look.
| vachina wrote:
| The consumers are domestic EU so you don't really need the
| reach and availability of the big 3.
| albert_e wrote:
| It's not just geographic regions around the globe.
|
| It is also the wide array of services -- well integrated into
| their primitives of security, authentication, governance,
| monitoring and logging, etc
|
| Is there a EU cloud provider that provides -- even if limited
| to EU geography -- the equivalent of Blob Storage + Azure
| Data Lake Storage + Azure Data Factory or Fabric + Microsoft
| Foundry with native access to OpenAI and Anthropic models?
| the_real_cher wrote:
| You can get all of that in the EU via scaleway, Ionos etc.
| for example.
|
| I don't know what you mean by native access to frontier
| models. Who has native access to these frontier models?
| thibaut_barrere wrote:
| Having used both worlds: a lot of the provided features
| come with strong vendor lock-in, and in most cases that
| not, with slightly stronger "local" engineering you can
| reach the same targets and needs locally.
|
| The more I work (started coding 40 years ago, and data
| engineering 25 years ago), the more I favor designs that
| are less coupled to cloud features.
|
| If you do so, the offering in the EU just as it is now is
| well enough to scale.
|
| In short: more computer science, less delegating to cloud
| operators, stronger designs.
| rm30 wrote:
| The irony is that EU education is still broader and more
| grounded in fundamentals, compared to US one that has
| become increasingly skills-oriented.
|
| I also prefer to design solutions that are portable and
| platform independent, cloud providers simplify and hide
| something to you, it has a cost (not just money) that you
| cannot quantify on long term and that's clear for who has
| experience in both worlds.
| albert_e wrote:
| This is sane advice but maintaining strong internal
| engineering and IT teams is not everone's cup of tea;
| even organizations gthat intend and try to do this cannot
| achieve it -- and furthermore the big cloud operators
| have spent millions of dollars spreading the gospel that
| the only correct way to survive and build is to migrate
| to cloud and use their lego building blocks.
|
| A lot of the justification for moving away from own
| datacenters and heavy in-house engineering teams actually
| makes sense to organizations of many shapes and sizes. If
| the core business is not technology -- it is hard to stay
| invested in a in-house cloud-agnostic engineeringc
| capability.
|
| The world has more or less accepted this reality and
| adopted the services like S3 and managed databases, and
| tight integration with the likes of Microsoft
| Entra/Purview/Sharepoint/O365 etc for ready-to-use
| business integrations. Prying organizations away from
| taht convenience is going to be hard. But the current
| environment cretaed due to lack of trust in US could the
| strongest motivator ever to push businesses and nations
| in that direction. I reckon it will be a long and painful
| process though.
| pjmlp wrote:
| You don't need to tick all boxes from a cloud vendor.
|
| Boring technology goes a long way.
| 2III7 wrote:
| How about not limiting yourself to specific services? If
| you've built your product around specific cloud providers
| services then that is the problem not the fact that there
| aren't alternatives to those seevices.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| Until two years ago, I did not need Google Dataflow as a
| very specific example. But then new business requirements
| came in and there were two options:
|
| - develop something internally and support it
|
| - use a cloud provider offering, fire it up and forget
| about it
|
| The choice was pretty straightforward.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Availability ain't worth shit unless the compensation for
| missing said availability is anywhere near the business
| losses caused by it. "Credit on your bill" doesn't count (and
| you're not even likely to get that since they can just lie on
| their status page and pretend everything is fine).
|
| Cloud is convenient but don't expect any kind of availability
| you can actually rely on. If you actually need that, you're
| gonna have to go multi-cloud or self-managed bare-metal at
| multiple providers anyway.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| You go multi-region. Multi-cloud is extremely expensive,
| both in terms of data and functional equivalence.
|
| Bare metal is pretty much the same story: you can host it
| at different providers, but scaling that and maintaining
| coherence between data centers is not an easy feat as it
| might sound.
|
| And seriously now, no sane provider is willing to cover
| your losses if they go do down. On the other hand, it's not
| a secret this is not happening and you can take this into
| account in your risk management strategy.
|
| After years and years, Amazon now has an offering to shield
| you from when us-east-1 goes down. Funny, no?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| If you're going to go multi-region and take the latency
| hit may as well go multi-provider no?
|
| Multi-region within the same provider won't shield you
| against unknown shared dependencies on a single point of
| failure (AWS console auth still relies on credentials
| being checked in a single region if I remember right).
|
| And yes fully agreed that maintaining consistency between
| active-active regions (whether cloud or bare-metal) is
| super hard and not worth it for most deployments. Active-
| standby with point-in-time-recovery and an acceptable
| data loss window is much easier - when one region is
| confirmed down, someone throws a switch and the standby
| becomes active.
|
| > no sane provider is willing to cover your losses
|
| Agreed, but thats why all those who justify the 10-90x
| premium of the cloud over bare-metal are full of it -
| that premium is not actually worth it.
|
| > it's not a secret this is not happening
|
| Maybe for you it's not a secret? Literally every thread
| tries to justify cloud reliability and their resulting
| markups. Well if it's that reliable they'd put their
| money where their mouth is.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| > If you're going to go multi-region and take the latency
| hit may as well go multi-provider no?
|
| No. If you go multi-region, you use the same tooling,
| same terraform modules and logic and so on. There's
| little plumbing needed to make it work. And latency wise
| this is not an issue in most cases, since most of the
| requests are covered by the CDN anyway. And you don't
| have to duplicate everything.
|
| If you go multi-cloud you need to learn a whole new set
| of systems. And that is expensive. Both in terms of
| operating and people - because you will need more.
|
| > Agreed, but thats why all those who justify the 10-90x
| premium of the cloud over bare-metal are full of it -
| that premium is not actually worth it.
|
| You get charged a premium for convenience. And a high
| enough chance you don't have downtime.
|
| > Maybe for you it's not a secret? Literally every thread
| tries to justify cloud reliability and their resulting
| markups.
|
| Cloud is reliable if you are willing to spend some money
| to benefit from that reliability and convenience.
|
| ---
|
| Besides this, another thing where cloud saves you money
| is compliance. They have all the right attestations in
| place to make your audits go easy. If you self-host on
| bare metal, you're going to spend a lot of time to be
| compliant with various regulations. Maybe if you're a
| small company, you don't have that much compliance you
| need to do. But once you grow a little, those immutable
| Stackdriver logs are a godsend when you're asked to prove
| logs have not been tampered with.
| vovavili wrote:
| >And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of
| pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS
| offering.
|
| And yet they _still_ don't have a desktop client for hotkey-
| driven and very fast-paced workflows, meaning that any serious
| professional spreadsheet work is still a Microsoft monopoly. If
| even the US market with all its favorable conditions can't
| deliver a competing product after years of trying, a
| fragmented, brain-drained, overregulated and high-tax continent
| attempting the same is just hopes and dreams.
| blauditore wrote:
| What hotkey-driven and fast-paced workflows are you referring
| to? I used to be an Office user, now G Docs, and I hardly
| miss anything. Hotkeys do exist, and more complex stuff can
| be automated quite well with AppsScript.
|
| Maybe I'm not enough of a power user, but these things often
| sound to me like the 0.1% productivity boosts that are nice
| to have, but often hardly relevant in the grand scheme of
| things.
| throwway1922 wrote:
| Wrong point. Nothing wrong with browser based clients. Even
| if they build some desktop client, by the time google (or
| anyone) does that compatibility Microsoft will change their
| formats. MS even removed their apps from ChromeOS to make it
| so. The issue is you can't fix MS. regulators are just too
| rich to care.
|
| It is even the same as Office for Mac is not 100% compatible
| with office for windows (or so called CoPilot AI whatever)
| dopidopHN2 wrote:
| I've seen US citizen swich in mass to cryptpad and protondoc
| over ICE being in their town and then wanting to deliver
| grocery to their neighbors.
|
| Proton seems to have stick. It's far less feature full than
| google doc but I started to receive link to proton doc
| outside of a immigration context.
|
| Also, I do spreadsheet for a living and my last two job were
| not providing a office licence ( no need )
| input_sh wrote:
| I still can't write a Word document in Markdown, but I can do
| so using Google Docs.
|
| The difference between us is that I know I'm within 0,1% of
| people that actually cases about this specific use case.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| Theres tons of good cloud providers in the EU.
| esskay wrote:
| Name some. Some that match those kinds of services mentioned
| that people need from AWS.
| s_dev wrote:
| https://european-alternatives.eu/
|
| Based on your comment you probably aren't gonna discuss in
| good faith but move the goalposts each time.
| esskay wrote:
| What makes you think I'll move the goalpost - the
| original question was pretty clear; EU cloud providers
| who offer services like AWS does.
|
| What you've linked to is a broad scope site listing a
| multitude of EU based products and services, making it
| look like you cant even list ONE let alone a few .
|
| Don't pull the 'moving the goalpost' nonsense, the
| original post you replied to made it very clear they were
| talking about an AWS comparison, and a cursory glance at
| the 'cloud providers' section of that site shows a bunch
| of EU hosting providers offering general VPS hosting,
| which isn't remotely close to being the same kind of
| thing.
| dijit wrote:
| "you offer managed databases, but _RDS_ supports _x_ ".
|
| I can see it coming already, no point in extending this
| thread
| esskay wrote:
| Ok let me try this, because I can assure you my intent is
| not to throw some sort of "gotcha" in here. I'm thinking
| about this purely from my own personal usecase, and right
| now as far as I'm aware theres no AWS alternative in the
| EU that can do all this for me. Nothing I am using here
| relies on some sort of obscure feature of each service at
| all.
|
| My usecase is:
|
| - MySQL (using Aurora but really dont need to), hands off
| like it is on RDS so yeah a managed service would be
| preferred.
|
| - 2x VM instances with internal networking and an EFS
| drive connecting the two (The efs drive is critical for a
| ton of applications)
|
| - Load balancer
|
| - S3 + Cloudfront for CDN
|
| And a few more bits I appreciate are very niche to my
| usecase but would be nice to keep under the same vpc:
|
| - SQS queue workers (can switch to something redis based
| if needed)
|
| - SES mail service (again can switch to another 3rd party
| as i doubt many people offer this)
|
| - Lambda for some app specific background processing
|
| Hopefully this kinda explains my position. Yes, I can
| split a lot of this out into multiple individual
| providers who specialise in just that one thing. And
| perhaps that's the way to go. But I dont think you can
| deny it's a heck of a lot more convenient to have all of
| it in one place.
| dijit wrote:
| Scaleway has all of that except EFS which should be
| solved another way anyway realistically, and the CDN.
|
| Object Storage as a replacement for EFS, or CIFS if its a
| legacy server app, or if you hate yourself: NFS.
|
| Theres options here, but thats the only real snag.
|
| For the CDN, I'd go with Bunny, its not in the same suite
| but its actually better than AWS CDN anyway.
| input_sh wrote:
| Yeah this is just circular reasoning. You don't go from
| zero to AWS the same way AWS didn't go from zero to what
| it is today. They started with a few basic features and
| built up from there. There are plenty of EU alternatives
| that have those same basic features AWS had a while ago,
| but until it makes economic sense to replicate all of it,
| no EU company is going to do so.
|
| Whether you can switch from AWS to an EU alternative
| depends solely on how deep down the rabbit hole you are.
| If you're just looking for basics to host your stuff, you
| can. If you want to never have to touch Linux but to rely
| solely on proprietary abstractions on top of Linux, you
| can't.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| scaleway, ionos, hechner, ovcloud.
|
| They may not have every single thing that AWS has but you
| can build solid infrastructure on top of those.
| cuu508 wrote:
| If you use AWS virtual machines https://european-
| alternatives.eu/category/vps-virtual-privat... (some of
| these also do managed load balancers, managed databases)
|
| If you use AWS for object storage: https://european-
| alternatives.eu/category/object-storage-pro...
|
| If you use SES: https://european-
| alternatives.eu/category/transactional-emai... (but hosting
| your own is also a viable option)
|
| CDNs: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cdn-
| content-delive...
|
| There isn't any single provider that can match each and
| every AWS service. But for subsets of services there are
| options.
|
| If there's a specific AWS service that you cannot get
| anywhere else but do absolutely need, that's vendor lock-
| in. Would it be fair to blame EU companies for your bad
| decisions?
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Combell is a popular choice on my country ( small -
| Belgium) because it's actively managed
| 2III7 wrote:
| How about we start creating well optimized software again that
| doesn't need ridiculous amounts of compute and money?
| crazygringo wrote:
| If your customers want features that require compute and
| money, and your competitor offers them, then you don't really
| have a choice if you want to stay in business.
| Juliate wrote:
| That's up to you (and the customers) to understand that the
| location where the compute/data is happening is as
| important a criteria to consider. As it is today.
| crazygringo wrote:
| What if your customers disagree?
|
| Businesses generally shouldn't be trying to fight
| ideological battles, they should just be trying to meet
| their customers' needs. As long as they're not doing
| anything immoral/illegal like engaging in discrimination
| or dumping toxic waste.
| Juliate wrote:
| Totally.
|
| Risk = (probability of it happening) x (cost when it
| happens)
|
| That a man/administration decides to cut off, or take
| hostage, or tax, online services because they are hosted
| on their premises, but benefits to/operates for "once
| good friends but now very unfriendly, bad, incompetent,
| the worst people", this is definitely not a law of
| nature.
|
| But, that he/they decide to trigger absurd actions with
| long-lasting damaging consequences, while not a law of
| nature, that happened more often than not in the past 12
| months than in the whole century before. Or, granted,
| maybe not "absurd", but definitely "not in line with a
| century of rather predictable behaviour".
|
| So... you'd be rational to consider that the risk has
| moved from "low" to "med high" or "high" category in a
| lot of areas you do not control.
|
| If the customer disagrees, fine: their business, not
| mine. My duty stops at notifying and documenting the
| risk.
| convolvatron wrote:
| Ok, so the notion that one can spin up and down resources and
| be billed by the time unit without having to source components
| and provide power and cooling and hands on is an unqualified
| win.
|
| but the resulting 'hyperscaler' systems are built around lockin
| and loss of sovereignty. rather than bemoan the cost of
| replicating the US environment, wouldn't it make sense to come
| with a different spin? maybe one thats not so tightly
| integrated and siloed? isn't AWS just a mirror the the same US
| dominance that you're trying to avoid?
|
| for example, despite the amount of snark thrown towards the
| development of open standards, wouldn't it be really quite
| useful is there weren't 3-4 hyperscalers with different APIs
| for the same basic services? couldn't we design an EC2-lite
| that allowed for real commoditization and competition?
|
| ignoring that, consider the value of rethinking things a little
| bit so that the important part - easy and incremental access to
| compute are preserved and all the sleazy business practices
| aren't.
| armcat wrote:
| _there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS
| /GCP/Azure offer_
|
| That's true right now, yes. But things are changing rapidly,
| e.g. there is evroc [1], Mimer [2] and others are popping up
| too.
|
| _it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google
| Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering_
|
| I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but
| this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard benchmark,
| things in principle can be done much faster if you are smaller,
| nimbler and more focused. The solution to EUs problems is less
| paperwork and meetings, and more smaller bespoke companies that
| are laser focused on solving a specific sub-problem. Can they
| do it? Probably not if they try to create their Google or
| Microsoft.
|
| [1] https://evroc.com/ [2] https://mimer-ai.eu/
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| > I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different,
| but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard
| benchmark
|
| My point was that even with Google's money, they're still not
| on par with MS even if the Office files format has been
| standardized for a number of years. And if you extrapolate
| that to any other technology, you will find out very fast
| that it is very expensive to come up with a replacement
| solution that will actually be embraced by potential
| customers.
| Epa095 wrote:
| On the other hand, there is not much office work which
| could not have been done almost as effective in office 97.
|
| I don't think the right explanation of MS monopoly is
| technical superiority, but rather the natural forces of
| monopoly. They are extremely hard to break with free market
| competition, but can definitely be broken with legislation.
|
| I am convinced that 99% of office use can be replaced with
| competitors if needed, and it would work out OK.
| skywal_l wrote:
| Yes, we need a posix of productivity tool. You want to
| work with a EU government, you have to use this and that
| open standards. This is the way to break that particular
| monopoly.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > My point was that even with Google's money, they're still
| not on par with MS even if the Office files format has been
| standardized for a number of years.
|
| The counterpoint is that they don't _need_ to be on par :-
| / The problem is that individual procurement decision-
| makers are incentivised to go with the Microsoft suite, not
| that the alternatives aren't a good enough replacement.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| I'd say they are incentivized to go with the suite that
| offers the most compatibility with their clients and
| partners.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I'd say they are incentivized to go with the suite that
| offers the most compatibility with their clients and
| partners.
|
| If that were true, they'd have ditched Microsoft already.
| Since they didn't, I'm skeptical that that is their
| incentive.
| bjackman wrote:
| Getting Google Docs to be a Word alternative was an order of
| magnitude easier than getting GCP to be an AWS competitor.
|
| Now that AWS has two serious competitors (and some non
| serious ones), privately funding another one just seems
| impossible to me. Who is gonna chip in tens of billions of
| dollars to fund "that, but European, and 15 years from now"?
|
| I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is some
| combination of:
|
| 1. EU intervention (nasty regulations and expensive
| subsidies).
|
| 2. People using non-equivalent products (Europeans have to
| use lower-level infra and do a lot more ops in-house). This
| part would have its upsides anyway TBH.
| pyrale wrote:
| > I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is
| some combination of
|
| Just mandate EU countries' public administration to rely
| exclusively on EU cloud solutions. That doesn't need to be
| done at once.
|
| This would create enough of a captive market to start the
| homegrown industry.
|
| > Europeans have to use lower-level infra and do a lot more
| ops in-house
|
| To be honest, every large enough company would benefit from
| doing a little bit of that.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| > Just mandate EU countries' public administration to
| rely exclusively on EU cloud solutions.
|
| This happens already in some areas and it is not cheaper
| or better. The EU funds national clouds where public
| institutions use them. What does it mean? VMware with
| Tanzu or OpenStack. And then some services thrown in to
| offer some S3 like buckets and that's it. The rest has to
| be built by the beneficiaries. Servers? Brand names like
| Lenovo/HP/Dell. Storage? Brand names like NetApp, HP,
| Dell, Lenovo, 3Par, IBM and the list goes on. Networking?
| Cisco (mostly), HP/Juniper. Firewalls?
| Cisco/Fortinet/PaloAlto/CheckPoint/etc.
|
| Basically an enterprise setup masquerading as a cloud
| offering.
|
| And even if there would be EU wide offerings for such
| cloud, there's too much money at stake to let
| institutions from one country buy services from another.
| patall wrote:
| > Who is gonna chip in tens of billions of dollars to fund
| "that, but European, and 15 years from now"?
|
| Dieter Schwarz might. At least he has the money and is
| trying 'something' with stackit. But he probably won't see
| the result in 15 years.
| matt-p wrote:
| I think it depends, honestly. As a startup you could be using
| civo or katapult as clouds and be getting almost everything you
| need. I think the main issue is actually network effect; easy
| to hire people who know AWS, easy to explain AWS architecture
| to a auditor who's seen it 100x before and it's easy to explain
| to customers that you use AWS like them, so easy to do VPC
| peering, or BYOC with them if needed..
|
| If you just want dedicated servers/VPS the choice is much wider
| still and plenty of providers on comparison sites and so on.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Not everyone needs Web scale.
|
| As proven by Huawei, ingenuity can go a great way when
| friendships go sour.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| So is your solution that Europe only creates small companies?
| pjmlp wrote:
| My solution is that sustainable companies are more
| worthwhile to society, than late scale capitalism companies
| that always lay off employees when the exponential growth
| targets set by their C suites aren't met.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| The only reason companies exist is to make money for the
| founders and/or shareholders. Everything else is a pipe
| dream.
| anhner wrote:
| and yet, there are obviously some companies that are
| better than others.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Only in capitalist minds.
|
| Companies are nothing without their employees.
|
| Naturally shareholders would rather have robots.
| fsflover wrote:
| Some people do think so:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43156785
| Sargos wrote:
| You have to create small companies in order to build big
| ones
| swiftcoder wrote:
| If this is in reference to the parent's mention of Hauwei
| (200,000 employees, ~$120 billion annual revenue), then I'm
| not sure we all share your idea of a small company
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| Small company can mean different things to different
| people. Considering that some larger Chinese companies
| have north of 2 million employees, 200k is quite a small
| number actually. Go figure.
| 7thpower wrote:
| Except nobody considers 200k employees a small company.
| generic92034 wrote:
| > There's a chance that the current situation will start to
| resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however
| that might look.
|
| There is almost no chance for that, as lost trust does not
| return instantly.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| In politics things work differently: you have people that
| "spat on each other" today and tomorrow they'll act like they
| are brothers and the spitting never happened.
| generic92034 wrote:
| It is a bit more than "spitting on each other" which now is
| between the USA and its former allies. I seriously doubt
| that we will just go back to normal the moment there is a
| US president from the Democratic party. Possibly in some
| areas of politics and economy, in others (real) trust is
| more essential.
| ben_w wrote:
| I believe at the moment it's still in the "spitting on
| each other" phase. Had Trump actually invaded Greenland*
| (and likewise if he does so in the future), that's where
| the Rubicon gets crossed and there's no going back.
|
| I kinda do want it to have passed that point, but not as
| much as I'm glad he TACOed.
|
| * There's other metaphorical Rubicons available, this is
| just the one most in my mind given I live in the EU
| Throaway3126 wrote:
| Trump and his team repeatedly saying they have no
| problems using force against Greenland and Canada were
| the red lines and they have already been crossed.
| ben_w wrote:
| I want those actions to have been the red line, and wish
| my representatives to treat it so if they are not yet. It
| is important to keep separate what I want to be and what
| is.
| Throaway3126 wrote:
| They are the red lines. There is no going back. The USA
| is too dangerous to rely on, that's quite clear.
|
| People don't quite realize how big a deal "invading"
| Greenland would have been. That's literally an act of
| war! What's next, occupying France? Saying that it's at
| all a possibility is far beyond any red line that the EU
| thought it would have to deal with.
|
| Not only would the rest of the world ditch the USA, but
| the Democrats themselves would take the opportunity to
| publically announce that they do not recognize Donald
| Trump's government.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| I'll bite.
|
| Nothing would have come of it. Ehe EU would have been
| upset for 3-6 months, then it would have got onboard with
| the idea that Greenland is now a US territory and that's
| that.
|
| France has a too good of a cuisine to be invaded. I think
| Germany would be next, they are running their mouth more
| than they should and they suck at food.
|
| Unless the mid-terms change the political majority in the
| US, the Democrats can wine all they want and recognize or
| not recognize whoever they want as president. It will not
| change the actual situation.
| Throaway3126 wrote:
| Sorry but you're just wrong. This isn't a situation to be
| upset about. Its war. There's no universe where the USA
| invasion of Greenland doesn't end in disaster for Trump.
|
| There's already been articles in Politico where USA
| lawmakers admit that there would have been a War Measures
| Act passed if Trump invaded Greenland. Unlike Venezuela.
|
| It would definitely change the political situation if the
| state governments of California, New York et al stopped
| recognizing the federal government.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| This is some top notch r/ShitAmericansSay material,
| especially Germany "running their mouth" and having bad
| food. Add in democrats "wining" and I'm pretty sure this
| post belongs on a Confederate cooking blog rather than
| HN.
| ben_w wrote:
| Mm.
|
| One of the criticisms I hear of Merz is that he's not
| tough enough on Trump; therefore the choice to target
| Germany at this time, matches a pattern of the target
| being painted on whoever wants to play nice.
| ben_w wrote:
| All of that is why I want Europe to take it seriously,
| even though I think they might be cooling off now that
| Trump has backed off.
|
| We (both of my "we"s given I'm a British citizen but live
| in the EU) sent in tripwire forces to defend Greenland.
| Their purpose is that getting shot is a casus belli for
| us to go to war with the USA.
|
| Also remember: NATO has two other nuclear powers besides
| the USA, and the biggest flaw with one of those nuclear
| arsenals is how when the UK test-fired the missiles it
| bought from the USA, they went the wrong way or didn't
| launch properly at all.
|
| I don't know what the order of events would have been
| given how heavily tied together EU and US (and UK)
| economies are, but essentially the EU banning the
| purchase of new US treasuries by itself would cause
| something in the order of US inflation going to 10% for
| several years; this, plus any economic departure (I'm
| thinking emigration more than internment camps like
| Japanese-Americans in WW2, much worse if that) from all
| the European migrants on visas (and some or all of the
| naturalised ones, but that number will be less... unless
| Trump also strips that like he's been suggesting), the US
| could loose 2-5 million people's worth of useful economic
| labour from the workforce. (Even if they're put in work
| camps, they're not getting good work out of them).
|
| In the other direction, if the US cuts off cloud
| computing _today_ , the EU is almost immediately screwed.
| Hence article.
|
| But if the EU's screwed, then we don't have the money to
| buy the US treasuries, so screwing us also screws the US.
| That 10% inflation I mentioned, that's _just_ from not
| buying T-bills; screwing the EU like this would also mean
| no more trade with the EU, which basically doubles the US
| unemployment rate on top of that, budget deficit goes to
| $3T /year, and costs the US 5% GDP relative to the
| baseline (i.e. what it would have been without invading)
| forever. Without a shot fired. But France has enough
| nukes that even if the USA's anti-missile defences can
| stop 80% of them, it could by itself destroy every US
| state capital and still have several left over.
|
| And if you're worried about Russia taking over Greenland,
| oh boy you should worry about what they do to a
| catastrophically weakened Europe that isn't just a hard-
| to-mine sheet of ice supporting a population that
| wouldn't even half-fill these seats: https://en.wikipedia
| .org/wiki/File:Narendra_Modi_Stadium_vie...
| ben_w wrote:
| > People don't quite realize how big a deal "invading"
| Greenland would have been. That's literally an act of
| war! What's next, occupying France? Saying that it's at
| all a possibility is far beyond any red line that the EU
| thought it would have to deal with.
|
| Yes, absolutely, I agree.
|
| Thing is, in the end he backed off, so the result was all
| talk. He TACOed.
|
| For everyone's sake (including Americans'), I absolutely
| 100% want the EU to disentangle as much as possible and
| as fast as possible from the US so that we don't even
| feel the need to be polite to Trump in the future: he
| obviously sees the world as only predators to be scared
| of and prey to consume, so it's better for us (everyone,
| not just the EU) to become big and scary really fast so
| he doesn't even try anything.
|
| If he were to invade (anywhere, not just Greenland), that
| place and their allies basically have two options: fight
| or die.
|
| > Not only would the rest of the world ditch the USA, but
| the Democrats themselves would take the opportunity to
| publically announce that they do not recognize Donald
| Trump's government.
|
| I wish, but humans aren't like that.
|
| The Democrat leadership keep pulling defeat from the jaws
| of victory, and people are the same everywhere so an
| external threat is more likely to pull everyone together
| than to split them apart (same for everyone else is why
| the EU and Canada are warming, or at least thawing, their
| relationships with the rest of the world).
|
| What might have happened _before_ an invasion was enough
| Republicans finally kicking him out (with Democrat
| support), or a US military coup (I 'd say 50% if it got
| that far, but with high uncertainty).
|
| A military coup would also be a crossed Rubicon.
|
| But the military don't like traitors, and betraying an
| ally by invading it is an act of treachery.
| palata wrote:
| > Thing is, in the end he backed off, so the result was
| all talk. He TACOed.
|
| But for a few days (and probably still now), many people
| considered it was a real possibility.
|
| I don't think it matters whether the US meant it or not.
| What matters is whether the Europeans believed it or not.
| Trust is about belief.
| ben_w wrote:
| I agree.
|
| I think I'm being misunderstood here.
|
| All the stuff you said, that's why I want to make sure we
| (Europeans) *don't* go "phew!"
|
| I think some of us might be doing that, which I think is
| bad for us.
| throaway54 wrote:
| No, the Democrats would do it precisely because of
| cynical human interest (they are like that). Donald Trump
| Republicans invading a Western nation plays right into
| their hands. They may as well just hand Gavin Newsom the
| next election. The overwhelming majority of US citizens
| do not approve of USA invading Greenland.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > and tomorrow they'll act like they are brothers
|
| That's mostly how it was during the last US presidential
| term. The president even said that "America is back" (1)
|
| The fact is, it didn't last. America going away was not a
| one-off. It happened a second time, worse. The lesson that
| the USA just is a country that does this from time to time.
| People in the rest of the world who learn that lesson will
| prepare for the next time.
|
| As another US president accurately said: "Fool me once,
| shame on you, fool me twice ... you can't get fooled
| again."
|
| 1) https://www.war.gov/News/News-
| Stories/Article/Article/250909...
| Throaway3126 wrote:
| This isn't politicking though. This is national security.
| In matters of national security, you take no chances.
| There's no going back to the relationship the world had
| with the USA.
| tzs wrote:
| What's different this time is that the US has an extensive
| system of checks and balances that nearly everyone thought
| would make the current situation impossible, and now we are
| learning that they aren't nearly as effective as we
| thought.
|
| No matter how reasonable the next few administrations are
| it is hard to see anyone else trusting the US nearly as
| much as they did before 2024.
| christophilus wrote:
| This has been creeping up on us for some time. For my
| entire life, the US executive branch has done nothing but
| accumulate powers and slowly undermine constitutional
| checks and balances. It's all fun and games while your
| guy does it, but it's inevitable that you'll get someone
| in power who you don't want. That's the entire point of
| the checks and balances, but few seemed to care until
| now. Even if we get a "normal" president after this, I'd
| bet a lot of money that he/she won't do anything to
| reduce the power of the executive.
| javier2 wrote:
| It is not that bleak, but yeah. Current solutions leave a lot
| be desired especially int terms of scalability and redundancy
| design.
| BadBadJellyBean wrote:
| I dislike the idea that if a cloud provider can not provide
| every service it's not even worth considering. Where is the
| problem solving. Maybe don't lock yourself into a single vendor
| and shop around for solutions. Apart from that the cloud
| offerings of companies like OVH and Scaleway are constantly
| expanding.
| Juliate wrote:
| > I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european
| cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer.
|
| But there is also no requirement for... most of their specific
| offering to start an online business.
|
| Some people seem to miss this in the picture: you _can_ build
| without them, outside of them, and fund equivalent technology
| development while staying outside of them.
|
| It's a matter of strategy and of choice.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| It's also a matter of "how easy is to find people that are
| good with X, Y, Z" where X, Y, Z are some niche technologies
| or offerings compared to the more wildly used ones.
|
| You can start a business in your laundry room if you know how
| to set up servers and get internet and stuff. But that's
| gonna be you and maybe a few "hobbyists" that might want to
| join on that endeavor, but the rest of developers or admins
| will want to stay far away from that.
|
| Optimizing your business for how is easy is to find talent is
| also a matter of strategy.
| Juliate wrote:
| I definitely hire talent that can grow the business, and
| grow with it.
|
| And that means knowing your 0's and 1's better than knowing
| how to operate the latest trendy calculator: it's easier to
| understand the calculator, when you know what it's made of;
| harder to work your way backwards, although doable.
|
| Yes, finding people that master PostgreSQL clustering (and
| SLA/RTO tradeoffs) is harder than finding AWS-certified
| folks, but that deeper knowledge definitely pays off: you
| understand the tradeoffs why, before you migrate, not
| after. When you know the fundamentals, you learn their
| implementation way faster.
|
| The "wildly used", locked-in services are more often than
| not, built with/over the "niche", no-strings-attached ones.
| znnajdla wrote:
| My theory is that 80% of workloads on AWS/GCP/Azure are pure
| waste. They sell complexity-as-a-service. 80% of startups and
| enterprises could run on a single beefy baremetal server (or
| two). AWS/GCP/Azure are the result of hype bubbles and VC-
| funded waste culture, it's not necessary for Europe to recreate
| that to compete.
| naiv wrote:
| The truth no one wants to hear
| Juliate wrote:
| And most (not all) of these workloads are custom software
| that try to fully reproduce/plumb functionalities that
| already mostly exist in Unix tools, with worse performance,
| instead of using/plugging into them.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Thank you. The AWS spaghetti is a trap of unnecessary
| complexity for most cases. You'd be shocked how far you can
| scale with a few good baremetal servers running something
| like Rails and Postgres.
| mkl95 wrote:
| This is an uncomfortable truth on this site, because many of
| us work for a FAANG company or FAANG partner. If the cloud
| hadn't grown that much in the last decade or so, the software
| industry would be relatively unpretentious.
| thunfischtoast wrote:
| I once had a working program, running on a 4 GB RAM virtual
| server with MongoDB. Everything was fast and testing and
| deploying a new version took me some minutes usually.
| Existing users were happy as far as I could tell.
|
| But then some corporate IT guy mandated everything had to be
| using managed AWS services in some three tier dev-test-
| production setup, despite having no prior experience with
| that on either side. Cost went up at least 25-fold, the
| development sucked, new deployments took 30? minutes minimum
| (because now everything has to run through some build-system
| I did not control and I had to manually copy keys around
| every time). I left the company, but I think the product
| exists to this day with less than 1000 customers. Nothing my
| 4 GB VS could handle...
| pimlottc wrote:
| AWS is often unnecessary but I do hope you had some kind of
| pre-prod environment in your original setup
| phtrivier wrote:
| > Cost went up at least 25-fold,
|
| I would love to write an email that start with "I can
| reduce cost 25 times by doing thing X" (the tricky part is
| hiding the fact that "X" is what you were doing before.)
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| Standard Hardware became so powerful over the last 10-15
| years, even hightraffic sites from 2010 can be served today
| with one/two beefy machines.
| 202508042147 wrote:
| MS advantage over Google docs was exactly what US cloud
| providers have over everyone else: lock-in.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| I mentioned MS because OOXML is now an open standard, albeit
| a 6000 pages one, but still open. And a similar sized
| competitor - Google, is still trying to deliver the same
| functionality.
|
| The point I'm trying to make is that going from zero to hero,
| even with basically "infinite" money like Google has is very
| very very hard.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| I'm not sure it's necessary. Office is bloated with
| features that very few people use on rare occasion. A much
| simpler word processor would do, and the next Google Docs
| doesn't need to invent a lot of this stuff from scratch.
|
| The tricky part is how many organizations have an enormous
| amount of business logic programmed into excel sheets.
| dudeinhawaii wrote:
| I think you're underestimating the features used within
| Office. Offices isn't bloated because they wanted to add
| fluff. It's bloated because of the large number of
| customers that have differing but overlapping needs.
|
| The Engineers: Word processor with basic features is fine
|
| Management and Execs: Comments, Review, Multi-user
| editing, History, Tables, change tracking.
|
| Marketing: Image placement and alignment, layers,
| embedding, templates, shapes
|
| Research/Doc Writers: Table of contents, page numbering,
| cross-referencing, formula insertion, citations, figure
| tables, export to pdf
|
| All customers (at some point): Layout, margins, padding,
| spellcheck
|
| As engineers we tend to think "just deliver a simple word
| processor". For who?
| varispeed wrote:
| online.net is quite close.
| swordbeta wrote:
| Why not just say Scaleway?
| varispeed wrote:
| Thanks. I meant to say, but it's always been online.net for
| me. Can't get used to Scaleway.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure
| offer
|
| I guess we must be living on different planets. I have recently
| deployed a Django application for a client of mine on Scaleway
| (due to an existing partnership we preferred using them over
| other infrastructure). Scaleway _right now_ (you can signup and
| check it out) offers:
|
| * container registry - build an push your containers there
|
| * ECS/Fargate equivalent - tell it to run N instances of your
| aforementioned container
|
| * Managed Postgres & Redis with failover/replication
|
| * VPC - put your managed DBs and containers there so they can
| talk over a private network
|
| * S3-compatible object storage
|
| What more do you need exactly? That's essentially all I would
| use from the incumbent cloud providers anyway.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| > What more do you need exactly? That's essentially all I
| would use from the incumbent cloud providers anyway.
|
| Pub/Sub, Dataflow, CDN, GLB to name a few. I could go on with
| the list of services currently used by the people that pay to
| push buttons.
|
| Not to sound offensive, but others have more than a Django
| app that they need to run.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > I could go on with the list of services currently used by
| the people that pay to push buttons
|
| I too can build an engineering playground where every
| ingress byte traverses as many AWS services as I can find.
| But if you're building a business application, how many of
| these do you _actually_ need?
|
| Once you have the basic primitives you can fill in the gaps
| yourself if needed. But in the list you provided, Pub/Sub,
| CDN and GLB is already covered actually.
|
| I'm sure in due time other services will be covered if
| there's enough demand, but to claim there is no EU
| alternative while the basics (app server + DB + S3, aka the
| most difficult to scale/operate yourself) are covered is a
| bit misleading I think.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| > I too can build an engineering playground where every
| ingress byte traverses as many AWS services as I can
| find. But if you're building a business application, how
| many of these do you actually need?
|
| I gave a real list, and all of them have real reasons for
| being used. I don't know from where you got the idea that
| apps are built just by chaining cloud services aimlessly.
|
| A company has more than one application or need.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| My point is that you can go very far and solve real-world
| problems with the basic primitives alone.
|
| While I'm sure there are legitimate uses for the services
| you mentioned, I've also witnessed plenty of engineering
| playgrounds where complexity was a feature and services
| were used for the sake of it rather than due to a
| specific need.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Having to roll each of those by your lonesome is _still_
| preferable over having some asshole cut you off from the
| services that you pay for on a whim. And that sort of thing
| is definitely on the table. Trump came within a hair of
| starting a shooting war with Europe, that sort of thing
| tends to cause people to re-evaluate their relationships.
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| I bet 90% of AWS customers could be served by something
| like 10% of their services.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Yes, some of us have been sighing as companies lock themselves
| into aws etc.
|
| We now have a generation of people who have no idea how to use
| computers, just how to operate aws.
| 202508042147 wrote:
| > And if you are a start-up and you want to grow, the situation
| is even more dire.
|
| I worked for/with several European startups. They really didn't
| need nor aim for planet scale operations.
|
| There are also quite a lot of articles about how startups (in
| any country) focus needlesly on large scalability when they
| only really have a few customers. It's exactly the same false
| issue here.
| thunfischtoast wrote:
| > There are also quite a lot of articles about how startups
| (in any country) focus needlesly on large scalability when
| they only really have a few customers. It's exactly the same
| false issue here.
|
| Large companies do that as well
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| > They really didn't need nor aim for planet scale
| operations.
|
| It depends on the market they're operating in. Planet scale
| operations can mean have the site load as fast as possible in
| every country on the planet, because this is how we make
| money.
|
| Working within a smaller geography I guess you can "host"
| your services anywhere in Europe and be pretty snappy.
|
| I could mention the fact that EU based startups don't dream
| big and this is costing them a lot of revenue from markets
| they don't wish to operate in because they think Europe is
| big enough. But we're gonna start a discussion not meant for
| this thread.
| ody4242 wrote:
| You don't need hundreds of services. Give me virtual machines,
| reliable block storage, file storage and object storage,
| networking, dns, managed kubernetes, and it will cover the
| majority of workloads in Europe that run on Openshift or
| Openstack today.
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| > Give me virtual machines, reliable block storage, file
| storage and object storage, networking, dns, managed
| kubernetes, [...]
|
| But managers wants to _buy_ these services, not be directly
| responsible for them. That's where the problem lies, as I see
| it.
| Sayrus wrote:
| Marketplace offers can go a long way to fill these void in
| official managed services.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| They don't want to necessarily buy it, but they want to
| hedge their options from "my $guy can do everything" to "on
| which cloud platform can I find a competent operator
| tomorrow".
| ben_w wrote:
| If those managers currently sold on The Cloud, can instead
| be sold on how much money they'd save not being on The
| Cloud, then corporate can do what it does best and change
| policy hard enough to give the staff whiplash.
|
| I don't know what managers have been reading/hearing, but
| for the last decade or so as a developer what I've mostly
| been hearing is that the only people who actually benefit
| from Big Data architectures are FAANG, that it's much
| cheaper to run on a single small self-hosted system that's
| done right, that the complexity of managing the cloud is
| even higher than a local solution.
|
| This matches my own experience of what people needed to
| serve millions of users 20 years ago. If you can't handle a
| chat system or a simple sales system with 100k-1M customers
| on a server made out of one single modern mobile phone,
| you're either just not trying hard enough or have too many
| layers of abstraction between business logic and bare
| metal. Even for something a bit more challenging than that,
| you should still be thinking thousands of users on a phone
| and 10k-100k on a single device that's actually meant to
| work as a server.
| Zigurd wrote:
| > _If those managers currently sold on The Cloud, can
| instead be sold on how much money they 'd save not being
| on The Cloud..._
|
| This is more than a theory, it's a trend that is already
| underway. The cloud remains supremely capital efficient
| for startups, but pricing has crept up and some customers
| are falling off the other side of the table.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > But managers wants to _buy_ these services, not be
| directly responsible for them. That's where the problem
| lies, as I see it.
|
| Why won't they be able to buy them from EU providers?
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| > Give me
|
| Companies have this risk adversity when it comes to trusting
| all their infrastructure to a person that knows it all and
| can do it on three physical servers.
|
| I am old enough to have set up services on bare metal servers
| with what was virtualization or containerization back then
| (vserver), but today no one wants to know how to tweak
| Postfix because some emails are not coming through or
| whatnot.
| pyrale wrote:
| > Companies have this risk adversity when it comes to
| trusting all their infrastructure to a person that knows it
| all and can do it on three physical servers.
|
| A person that knows it all and can do it all on AWS, on the
| other hand...
| convolvatron wrote:
| Note that once you have virtual machines, those other things
| can be provided using that same virtual machine interface.
| Layering and standards are really useful. Spin up your own
| storage cluster? if you want...pay a managed service from a
| third party on the same cloud? whatever makes sense to you. I
| find it appalling that because money was so cheap, people got
| used to just throwing it at the hyperscalers 'rich
| offerings', and now we have multiple generations of people
| that think RDS is some magic box that would take billions in
| investment to replicate.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| We didn't do it because money was cheap we did it because
| there are tons of benefits to not having to inventory your
| own compute. Everything from elastic scaling to financial
| engineering was improved via the hyper scalar options and
| it's ridiculous to act like those options aren't valuable
| post hoc because Europe doesn't have a native one.
|
| I think the Heztners and their ilk are coming along nicely
| and probably can support a lot of Europes cloud computing
| needs, but they aren't in the same league as the hyper
| scalars when it comes to capabilities currently. It would
| be great if they got there for everyone though.
| messh wrote:
| This matches my experience. I run a pay-per-use VM service
| (shellbox.dev) entirely on Hetzner auction servers with
| Firecracker microVMs. Sub-second boot, full Linux
| environment, SSH-only interface. The entire "cloud" layer
| is Firecracker + Btrfs reflinks for instant copy-on-write
| cloning. No managed Kubernetes, no proprietary
| orchestrators.
|
| The total cost of that stack is remarkably low -- cheap
| enough to offer VMs at $0.02/hr running and $0.50/mo
| stopped, which undercuts most hyperscalers for bursty
| workloads. The "billions in investment" framing is exactly
| the problem. Most of what hyperscalers sell is convenience
| wrappers around commodity compute, and the lock-in is the
| product.
|
| Wrote up the economics here if anyone's curious:
| https://shellbox.dev/blog/race-to-the-bottom.html
| zinodaur wrote:
| And a replicated postgres with backups
| tetha wrote:
| When we designed the (by now largely self-hosted) stack for
| our production enviroment, we had that discussion. And
| honestly, on the persistence side, most people agreed that
| PostgreSQL, S3 and a file system for some special services is
| plenty. Maybe add some async queueing as well. Add some
| container scheduling, the usual TLS/Edge loadbalancing, some
| monitoring and you have a fairly narrow stack that can run a
| lot of applications with different purposes and customers..
|
| We (10 people) run this + CI on just a VM + storage provider,
| mostly VSphere from our sister team of 6 (and yes it hurts,
| and we have no time to move it), Hetzner and some legacy
| things on AWS.
|
| Though that's currently the problem -- there is a somewhat
| steep minimal invest of time into this. But that's good,
| because this means there could be value for European cloud
| providers to build up this narrow stack managed and get paid
| for it. We will see.
| vanschelven wrote:
| Europe managed the first ~60 years of computing without the
| cloud just fine, and (as per greybeard HN-style comment) one
| can in fact wonder how much of the past 15 years of innovation
| has actually brought us for "your average org".
|
| Also: there may be _a_ chance that the situation will improve,
| but as the Dutch say "Trust Arrives on Foot, but Leaves on
| Horseback" and your even given your "even if" the trust thrown
| away in the past year will take literal decades to repair.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| At my company we use scaleway, and while it doesn't have yet
| all the products offered by AWS etc. it still has almost
| everything we need, and can be managed by terraform. I think it
| has already a nice offering, and is much closer to AWS etc.
| than 15 years
|
| I mean, once you have managed SQL, managed k8s, serverless,
| object storage, private networks, kafka, sqs, sns, glacier, and
| IaC support, you can already be happy as a startup
| lelanthran wrote:
| > And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of
| pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS
| offering.
|
| WTF would it need to match? It only needs to be as good as
| Office 97, but online.
| mhitza wrote:
| Offers such as Scaleway should be sufficient "feature-wise" for
| startups. Even if they don't have feature parity with AWS (I
| mean AWS is huge) it has, kubernets and serverless deployment
| options (functions, containers), S3 compatible object storage,
| managed databases, queues, llm hosted models, terraform
| provider.
|
| Those should most of what startups need for deployment; at
| least what I've seen working with many over the last few years.
|
| For those with pragmatic Linux Ops experience on the team,
| nothing will beat self-hosted on Hetzner dedicated servers, at
| a great price.
|
| P.S. can't vouch for all Scaleway services, used it for a
| couple of VMs and hosted LLMs only. Happy to hear the
| experience of other users, no matter how few of those are here.
|
| Free credits for startups are a different aspect of incentive,
| which is not negligible.
| vishnukvmd wrote:
| We've been using Scaleway's compute, RDS and S3 offerings for
| Ente[1]'s cloud offering for over 5 years now.
|
| RDS backups and retrivals from cold storage[2] are both a lot
| slower than AWS. The "high-availablity" instances for RDS are
| in the same DC, so the feature is cosmetic. Ignoring these,
| our experience has been pretty good. Quality of support is
| great.
|
| --
|
| While linking to [2] I realised that Scaleway's own website
| is behind Cloudflare, which is disappointing given they have
| their own DDoS protection[3].
|
| [1]: https://github.com/ente-io/ente
|
| [2]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/glacier-cold-storage/
|
| [3]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/ddos-protection/
| nw05678 wrote:
| The real issue with Scaleway seems to be the lack of
| governance. I am more familiar with Azure and features like
| Entra and polices seems to be missing.
| koe123 wrote:
| I wonder if we can tariff digital services. EU is behind
| partially because US eats all investment. Protectionism is an
| option.
| 202508042147 wrote:
| I wouldn't go this way, at least not now. But the European
| Commission should mandate the usage of EU based software for
| every public institution in the EU, at all levels. That means
| from the European Parliament all the way down to
| municipalities. So no more Windows, Office, Azure, AWS etc.
| in public institutions all across the EU.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| And in education, please. Very important in the long term.
| throw_a_grenade wrote:
| > [...] but there is no european cloud operator able to offer
| what AWS/GCP/Azure offer.
|
| This is FUD, 1990s Micro$oft style. I guess nothing particular
| changed on this front.
| zinodaur wrote:
| > There's a chance that the current situation will start to
| resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however
| that might look.
|
| I don't think it can - dependence on US digital infrastructure
| grew at a time where American stability was taken as ground
| truth.
|
| How can an EU leader sit across the negotiating table from a
| country that can delete (if not read/alter) all of their data,
| and a willingness to exercise that access?
|
| Even if Trumpism goes away, to know for a certainty that
| Americans won't do it again one election cycle seems like it
| will take a long time to establish.
| nottimbo wrote:
| > And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of
| pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS
| offering.
|
| AJAX did so much heavy lifting here.
| constantcrying wrote:
| People do not realize how dire the current economic situation
| is. Many of the large traditional businesses are on the verge
| of becoming unprofitable.
|
| The monumental task of ripping out the IT systems they have
| built up over the last few decades, to move away from the US
| will actively threaten the existence of some of these
| companies.
|
| People are living in a fantasy land where e.g. Germany has an
| enormous automotive industry which can be arbitrarily regulated
| and still be profitable enough to keep the German economy
| afloat. This is non longer the case and many EU companies are
| currently struggling for their existence.
| cteiosanu wrote:
| It didn't make sense to have a Tier 1 cloud providers. EU using
| US tech and services was the social contract for the ally level
| cooperation. The moment this relationship goes towards the
| adversary level Tier 1 cloud and the rest of dependencies (and
| defense/ will be developed in house, no matter if the future
| administration is a Dems one. The point to take away is the
| change of direction in the EU as slow and as costly as that
| might be. Now it's a security issue.
| amunozo wrote:
| I am no expert but making an office suite seems like a joke
| compared to getting the hardware to replicate the cloud
| providers, which should be imo the first priority.
| dethos wrote:
| > I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european
| cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer.
|
| You don't need all of that. You can go a long way with the
| basics, and those are well covered.
| mihaaly wrote:
| > it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google
| Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering
|
| Jesus Crist and all the saints!
|
| How bad it was before getting in par with MS then?!
|
| If it is now as bad as MS?
| albert_e wrote:
| AWS seems to have seen the writing on the wall and has already
| launched a European Soverign Cloud -- a separate partition like
| they have for GovCloud and China.
|
| I am guessing other hyperscalers must be doing the same?
|
| Are we seeing a strong aversion among EU companies to use these
| offerings from US firms (AWS, Google, Microsoft) and viable
| competition emerging from Europe?
|
| The selling point of many offerings from current market leaders
| is that they have the widest array of services especially easy to
| expand into say datalake, BI or AI/ML experiments and production
| workloads starting from a core IaaS only setup one might have
| after migrating off own datacenter. I wonder if there are lesser
| known players positioning themselves in this space -- with
| managed services in platform/application space. Curious to know
| some examples.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Can any AWS data center really be immune from US national
| security letters?
| polski-g wrote:
| Nope. They'd have to spin up the infra and sell the entire
| enterprise.
| deaux wrote:
| Everyone talking about rules and regulations being a blocker to
| EU software sovereignty is completely clueless. Unfortunately a
| lot of these people are actually European but they've drank the
| decades of US koolaid.
|
| There are about 200 countries in this world. 195 of them are as
| of today reliant on foreign-controlled software to a similar
| degree, which is "completely and utterly in every facet, across
| consumer, business and government levels".
|
| Let's talk about the other 4 then (excluding the US), with
| varying degrees. One of them has magnitudes more government
| interference than the EU. Another one also has both more
| government interference _and_ stricter rules and regulations,
| both in terms of labor laws and things like data privacy - even
| stricter than GDPR. The third one has less of this, but still
| much more of it than the US, and has the lowest sovereignty level
| out of the four.
|
| I've talked about three, that leaves the fourth. The fourth one
| is Russia.
| dbuxton wrote:
| I played this in my head a few times and don't get it.
|
| I assume we are talking
|
| - China - maybe South Korea? - US (or is US not one of the 4?)
| - Russia (ok this is explicit)
|
| I think there might be an interesting idea in here but there is
| some confusion that's stopping it coming out
|
| Can someone enlighten me?
| deaux wrote:
| You're completely right, I mistakenly left out the US so I'm
| going to edit it in. If you include the US, it's five. The
| first two are of course trivially correct. I'm leaving them
| unnamed in the hope that those who write all-knowingly about
| this topic yet can't instantly name them might realize they
| don't know much about software sovereignty in the first
| place.
|
| The third one is definitely a notch lower than the others, as
| I noted. But still IMO noticeably higher than the other 196.
| The point still stands if you don't count them.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| That was a good article, I don't usually read The Register.
|
| Even as a US citizen, I say: good for Europe!
|
| The world is simply a better place when countries have
| independence and can be as self reliant as possible.
|
| In the US media there is an ongoing rhetoric that everything in
| the US is wonderful and everything in the rest of the world is
| much worse. I am privileged to have travelled widely so I know
| what a mostly wonderful and friendly world we live in.
|
| I just use a few EU tech products (Hetzner, Proton, Mistral) but
| they seem good enough to me.
| christophilus wrote:
| > The world is simply a better place when countries have
| independence and can be as self reliant as possible.
|
| I would tend to agree, but to take the other side: This also
| gives rise to massive wars. You don't tend to go to war when
| your economy is so intertwined that war is the economic
| equivalent of a mass casualty event.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I can also agree with the 'other side' viewpoint as well.
| There are things to do to mitigate war though besides
| interlocking infrastructure: young people studying abroad,
| travel, friendships with people in other countries. Not too
| far off topic: a US war planner during world war 2 took
| Yokohama off the list of Japanese cities to be annihilated
| with bombing because he and his wife visited that city and
| loved it. Anything that fights against dehumanizing people in
| other countries during times of conflict is a good thing.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > You don't tend to go to war when your economy is so
| intertwined that war is the economic equivalent of a mass
| casualty event.
|
| That is after all the core motivation[1] behind what
| became[2] the European Union:
|
| _The solidarity in production thus established will make it
| plain that any war between France and Germany becomes, not
| merely unthinkable, but materially impossible._
|
| [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230516193200/http://aei.pi
| tt.e...
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Co
| mmun...
| jonplackett wrote:
| Even if we get the data and an EU cloud we still need chips,
| operating system, devices.
|
| Unless we're all going to use. Raspberry Pi I'm not sure how this
| works.
| abdelhousni wrote:
| First, Europeans must change their mindset and be really willing
| to become free.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Done, thanks. Eagerly waiting the next 20 years.
| polski-g wrote:
| You need a doctor's note to get a gym membership in Italy. In
| the Netherlands, you need a prescription to get contact lens
| solution. The rot of regulation is deep within the European
| psyche.
| aenis wrote:
| I am in the middle of this - my audit committee just told me we
| need an exit plan "just in case".
|
| I don't think this is practically possible. The governments are
| currently focusing on enabling sovereign clouds - there is real
| work in France and the Netherlands that I am familiar with.
|
| However, almost any company uses a lot of SaaS stuff - also for
| very core capabilities such as IdP, employee productivity, not to
| mention the boring stuff - CRMs, ERPs, payment, etc.
|
| Some (all, maybe?) have non-US variants, but as anyone who ever
| worked through an ERP upgrade or a CRM replacement -
| theoretically trivial exercises - this will be hell on earth.
|
| And that does not begin to address the questions such as next gen
| productivity tools such as frontier models for coding. If
| Anthropic, Google and OpenAI decided to shut down the Europeans,
| we'd be screwed for a while.
|
| On the positive side, the absolute toxic stuff that tech
| companies brought to the world - shorts, social media networks -
| would for a while be inaccessible too, so there is that.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| Will they also need to separate from the banking systems? As I
| understand it, almost every banking transaction goes through a
| US-based network.
| znnajdla wrote:
| This is not just a sovereignty/security/privacy issue. I
| genuinely believe that ditching Big Tech will produce genuinely
| better technology for consumers. Once the monopolists lose their
| network effect advantage, startups should be forced to adopt more
| interoperable protocols and foster healthier competition. Big
| Tech is a cancer, same as any other monopoly.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| States need to sponsor open source to the tune of tens of
| billions.
|
| Ss the reg points out it's now national security in a
| deglobalization world.
|
| I got mocked on this site for suggesting it.
|
| But both the EU and the non aligned superpowers need open source
| hardware and software stacks.
|
| It's all there already. The people did 90% of the work. Llms are
| here to close feature gaps, identify security issues, port code.
| They are great at cloning and iterative improvement.
|
| You don't need some radical new idea. And stand up to American
| companies
|
| And oh jeez, you might get a functioning tech sector of
| companies. That would be horrible wouldn't it EU.
|
| Proprietary software and hardware/firmware is a weapon these
| days. This is a US issue as well.
|
| Open source is the key for the entire economic stack of
| fabrication of computing devices in a weaponized low trust
| deglobalized multipolar world.
|
| It enabled cooperation, export, multinational companies to make
| money worldwide
| csantini wrote:
| Aws Gcp Azure have overbuilt, you don't need most of those
| services to build scalable and reliable infra for large
| institutions
| deadbabe wrote:
| This is a pipe dream.
|
| Also, Europe loves to impose its draconian internet laws on the
| rest of the world, if mutual respect for sovereignty is what they
| want, then they can now learn to accept the constraints of
| another nation's cloud environment. Sucks doesn't it?
| siliconc0w wrote:
| American cloud companies will sell you a sovereign cloud solution
| but these are still pretty much make you a vassal state
| chaostheory wrote:
| Globalism is dying. Unfortunately, peace goes hand in hand with
| it.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Why now? Why shouldn't have the world reduced its reliance on US
| tech platforms and services 20 years ago. Or why shouldn't they
| wait 20 more years.
|
| What did happen?
| fnord77 wrote:
| I guess those million dollar bribes to the president's
| inauguration party were wasted
| christkv wrote:
| There are certain things that would be a pain to do as the
| platforms we use gives us so much more than just hosting. It
| means a lot more operational work in our case and loss of certain
| functionality that has to be reimplemented using some other
| stack. I don't see it as feasible in the short term, nor cost
| effective.
| lencastre wrote:
| what a strange game of chicken, why xan't amzn, msft, et al just
| contain their infra within euro borders and call it a day? after
| all the word multi in multinational does not oblige companies to
| stop selling in Europe, or?
| tracnar wrote:
| They do, but the US can still force them to hand over data
| that's in EU. (This was confirmed by Microsoft France
| officials.)
| polski-g wrote:
| Because that's not how US law works.
| kkfx wrote:
| As an European, I see no point in swapping one dictator for
| another, or one IT giant for another. What we need is to mandate
| FLOSS, push for an interconnected Desktop model rather than
| cloud+mobile, force ISPs to adopt IPv6 with a static global per
| host, and incentivize domain name purchases while promoting
| affordable home servers and declarative solutions that are
| accessible enough to most people so they can deploy their own
| services independently.
|
| It makes no sense whatsoever to switch from Company A to Company
| B, you're still just a customer at the vendor's mercy.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| incompetent people, making decisions they should have made a
| decade ago, that will take more than a decade to implement, and
| will by then probably be just as outdated as this decision is now
| user____name wrote:
| When SaaS was emerging I was always advocating for not putting
| all our eggs into one basket, everyone always suggested was
| suggesting I was just paranoid. It's just a basic tenet of
| resilient systems to diversify depenendencies and not outsource
| all basic knowhow and abilities, even if its more costly. The
| reason is that institutional knowledge is difficult to build and
| easy to throw away. Its for the same reason I was hesitant about
| supporting all those big free trade agreements, for which I was
| actually called a "national communist" a few times, lol. Funnily
| enough nowadays I'm the one more open to those free trade blocks
| in my social circles and everyone has always been against it. I
| wonder what the consensus will be twenty years from now.
| Gimpei wrote:
| Isn't the more fundamental question why Europe has not been as
| successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry
| despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to creating
| startups and how can you lower them and preserve the enviable
| European social model? Solve that and you'll solve the problem of
| a native cloud.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Well, at the early stages, yes. But at the point where
| incumbent tech firms have an insurmountable advantage, just
| adding more startups probably isn't going to save you.
| Entrenched providers can use their market power to buy
| up/outcompete/destroy any smaller competitors. You really need
| both a native market and a startup scene.
| duttish wrote:
| The divergence of being many smaller countries with different
| regulations, primary languages, currencies etc have been a
| blocker, but progress is being made[1] and it seems like people
| are aware of the problem. It just takes a while when every plan
| needs to be approved by all countries.
|
| 1. https://tech.eu/2026/01/20/the-european-commission-
| launches-...
| kaffekaka wrote:
| I am just speculating, but Europe has let itself be very
| dependent on USA for many things - military/defence, technology
| etc. "We don't need weapons, USA builds them for us". There has
| been no need to try and compete.
|
| This is changing now. So maybe the incentives will now appear
| more clearly.
| mlinhares wrote:
| You don't have to, this ja the reason. There were multiple
| successful EU alternatives that were killed by the loads of
| money the US companies could muster to kill or hobble them.
| And Europe decided it was fine.
|
| There isn't even an European card brand that operates across
| the whole continent, the just accepted to use visa and
| Mastercard for everything. I hope they change it.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Brain drain to USA, lack of good VC / funding, Patents war /
| patents controlled by the USA, industry espionage, EU
| mentalities that don't favor innovation in the same direction
| than the USA, too diverse markets to serve, distributed
| controls / governments / decisions. The list can go on and on
| Closi wrote:
| > Isn't the more fundamental question why Europe has not been
| as successful as the US or China in building a native tech
| industry despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to
| creating startups and how can you lower them and preserve the
| enviable European social model? Solve that and you'll solve the
| problem of a native cloud.
|
| IMO here in the UK we are good at _starting_ tech startups, we
| are just bad at not selling them to overseas investors early in
| their life, or having a tax framework that is advantageous to
| them growing in the UK.
|
| In the UK see Google Deepmind, ARM, Deliveroo... Elevenlabs
| being incorporated in the USA, Dyson moving to singapore etc -
| Even outside of the tech space, Cadburys, Sainsbury's, Jaguar
| Land Rover... If the UK kept hold of everything that the UK
| created, we would be great!
|
| Even our infrastructure we sell to the French, Chinese, Germans
| etc just for short-term gain, despite that we are cutting our
| nose off if we look forward 10 years.
| Archelaos wrote:
| In global economies, it is a general rule that different
| regions of the world specialise in their respective sectors. In
| the IT industry, we generally observe that early innovators can
| extend their advantage by binding customers to their technology
| platform. One example of how this also applies to Europe in the
| IT sector is SAP. Founded in 1972, they were one of the first
| companies to offer ERP solutions. Their founders initially
| worked at a German branch of IBM and took over a software
| product that IBM was no longer interested in. SAP's leading
| position in this market has been so strong ever since that no
| US company has been able to pose a threat to SAP. Oracle, for
| example, has tried.
|
| You can see this mechanism at work in the USA itself. Microsoft
| tried to get into the mobil market, but gave up. Google tried
| to build its own social network, but gave up. All other cloud
| providers are stuggeling to catch up with AWS.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in
| building a native tech industry
|
| The EU _trusted_ the US so it made sense to leverage US
| innovation and leadership.
|
| But "Uncle Sam" is no longer an ally. Or a leader. And its
| recent _innovations_ are toxic to society and democracy.
| christophilus wrote:
| China has a huge population that mostly speaks Mandarin. The US
| has a smaller, but relatively wealthy population that mostly
| speaks English. Europe is a hodgepodge of languages, cultures,
| and regulatory environments. That's a beautiful thing, but it's
| not an efficient thing from a business perspective.
| Hrun0 wrote:
| > China has a huge population that mostly speaks Mandarin.
|
| It's about incentives. The Chinese had to come up with their
| own solutions because of their firewall.
|
| Maybe it's time for a European firewall?
| amunozo wrote:
| No need, it was much more comfortable to stay in known sectors
| such as banking, industry or tourism. Now there is a real need
| so I'm positive things will change.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Many European companies are already struggling financially,
| especially the large traditional businesses which form the
| backbone of the European economy at large.
|
| Now you demand that these companies should rip out decades of the
| IT systems they have built up, which form the backbone of their
| day to day operations and replace them with third rate
| alternatives, nowhere near in capability, support and coverage?
|
| Yes, I love open source and I wish to see it succeed, but this
| proposal is suicidal. Even _if_ a superior and less costly
| alternative did exist (and it does not, just to be clear), just
| the effort of switching over would ruin these companies.
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| Can't wait until any European vendor gets 400 POPs around the
| globe with tier1 backbone and the same time has an API, can issue
| top tier certificates and has some of the features that for
| example Cloudfront has.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Whats the best Euro S3 alternative?
| etyhhgfff wrote:
| Hetzner S3 i would say
| cmenge wrote:
| 1. Europe doesn't have comparable offerings. The amount of money
| invested is below what a single hyperscaler spends per quarter.
| (StackIT might be on track to change that looking at the pure
| numbers)
|
| 2. European politicians still seem to believe it's about renting
| compute and storage; they seem to have little understanding of
| what "a cloud offering" really is; the EU has less than 5% of
| GPUs, supposedly
|
| 3. For healthcare, they already forced you years ago. This led to
| hosting on Telekom Cloud which runs on OpenStack by Huawei. (EU
| commision wants to ban Huawei from 5G but it's ok to use their
| software? 'Is open source and can be inspected' seems largely
| theoretical given the reality of cybersecurity)
|
| 4. If push comes to shove, the EU is critically dependent on the
| US in so many aspects (defense, lng to name two very important
| ones) that eventually, they would falter if the US wants your
| data in a specific case anyway
|
| 5. As a private citizen, given the incarcerations in the UK and
| Germany, it seems one should worry more about the EU getting your
| data than the other way around
|
| That said, would be nice to have healthy competition, but after
| hearing this for 10++ years, it's getting really old. It might
| have been a good idea not to sleep on the AI trend, but, well...
| DarkNova6 wrote:
| True for the current situation, but something needs to happen
| before the thinking turns into acting. There's no better time
| than now, since most cloud services have become commodities.
| You don't need to be big-tech to have a competitive offering
| that. Naturally, the tech won't be as efficient and shiny as
| those of the big ones, but you have none of the corporate bloat
| and inefficiencies.
|
| And don't forget about legislation. If there are new laws that
| set a limit to egress costs you can say goodbye to the walled
| garden of cloud empires.
|
| After all, how many cloud services does the average company
| actually need? Most problems have been figured out by now, so
| such a project would be less like creating thought-leaders and
| more like a public infrastructure project. With exception of
| cutting-edge technologies, the cloud has become a commodity.
| hilios wrote:
| What incarcerations in Germany are you referring to?
| dundarious wrote:
| This is surely not what OP was referring to, but: arguably
| worse than incarcerations, I strongly condemn EU sanctions
| against EU citizens and residents, such as Huseyin Dogru,
| Jacques Baud, and Nathalie Yamb, merely for speech that is
| not aligned with EU foreign policy.
|
| Note that I don't consider it at all relevant whether one
| agrees/disagrees with the content of their speech.
| hilios wrote:
| If this isn't what OP was referring to, why bring it up? I
| don't see how this is relevant, to the security of data
| from European companies, stored in European clouds.
| locknitpicker wrote:
| > 1. Europe doesn't have comparable offerings.
|
| I think you should pause for a moment. There are plenty of
| European cloud providers that allow you to run VMs in multiple
| points of presence across the world. Some even offer managed
| Kubernetes clusters.
|
| It is true that most European cloud providers don't offer many
| high-level managed services such as function-as-a-service
| compute solutions, durable execution engines, etc. However,
| those are not exactly hard requirements. In fact, some cloud
| providers offer these services for reasons that are not in line
| with the customer's best interests, such as better hardware
| utilization and vendor lock-in.
|
| So think about it for a second: if you can put together a
| Kubernetes cluster, what high-level service do you absolutely
| need to be able to put together a working service?
|
| I can tell you right away: nothing.
|
| > 2. European politicians still seem to believe it's about
| renting compute and storage;
|
| I think you need to touch grass on this one. European companies
| require cloud services for the same reason any other company
| requires cloud services. If you take the time to learn about
| how cloud providers such as AWS market their services, you will
| learn that they firmly base their offering on the exact
| criteria you are arguing against: compute that scales, and
| reliability. To argue otherwise, you must argue against how US
| cloud providers market themselves, which would be baffling.
|
| > 4. If push comes to shove, the EU is critically dependent
| (...)
|
| There is no "if". We are already at that point. NATO is already
| running military exercises without the US, and since Trump took
| over support for Ukraine has been driven primarily by Europe.
| NATO has been very vocal in how France and the UK have been the
| primary providers of intelligence to Ukraine.
|
| > 5. As a private citizen, given the incarcerations in the UK
| and Germany, it seems one should worry more about the EU
| getting your data than the other way around
|
| You got to be joking. The US now demands access to your social
| media accounts as precondition to enter the country, and the US
| also outright disappears people out of the street.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dz0g2ykpeo
| cmenge wrote:
| > So think about it for a second: if you can put together a
| Kubernetes cluster, what high-level service do you absolutely
| need to be able to put together a working service?
|
| Agreed that K8s helps a lot. But let's say I want managed
| Redis or MongoDB Atlas, I can't get that, at least I couldn't
| when I last checked (I can them physically hosted in the EU
| of course, but on a hyperscaler)
|
| > that they firmly base their offering on the exact criteria
| you are arguing against: compute that scales, and reliability
|
| Sure these are central, but I can also get e.g. computer
| vision, distributed queues etc.; a lot of money has gone into
| the software, not just the hardware is my point.
| vga42 wrote:
| >OpenStack by Huawei
|
| If you mean to say that OpenStack is made by Huawei, that is
| not true. They are a major contributor and a platinum member of
| that open source project, though.
| jamesbelchamber wrote:
| OpenStack was created by NASA and Rackspace, both very
| American..
| cmenge wrote:
| I may be wrong, but here's how I got the idea: "liefert
| Huawei mit dem Cloud-Betriebssystem Huawei OpenStack
| Distribution" So it appears to be a Huawei _distribution_
| from https://www.open-telekom-
| cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sich...
|
| Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41350820
| Zenst wrote:
| The Huawei ban in the European Union (EU) has been a gradual,
| uneven process, shifting from voluntary guidelines in 2020 to
| increasingly mandatory, country-specific, and EU-wide
| restrictions by 2025-2026.
|
| Here is the timeline of Huawei's ban and restrictions in the EU
| and UK:
|
| Phase 1: Initial Restrictions and Voluntary Guidelines
| (2019-2020) May 2019: The United States places Huawei on a
| trade blacklist, restricting access to key technologies (Google
| Android, US chips), which triggers security reviews across
| Europe.
|
| January 2020: The European Commission launches its "5G Security
| Toolbox," encouraging EU member states to restrict or exclude
| "high-risk vendors" (HRV) like Huawei from critical core
| network infrastructure.
|
| July 2020 (UK): The UK government announces a total ban on
| buying new Huawei 5G equipment after December 31, 2020, and
| orders the removal of all existing Huawei 5G gear by 2027.
|
| October 2020 (Sweden): Sweden bans Huawei and ZTE from 5G
| networks and orders the removal of existing equipment by
| January 2025.
|
| Phase 2: Implementation Hurdles (2021-2023) 2021-2022: Many EU
| nations slow-walk the implementation of the 5G toolbox, with
| only a small number of countries actively banning Huawei from
| core networks due to costs and dependence on its technology.
|
| June 2023: EU officials express frustration that only one-third
| of EU countries have implemented restrictions on high-risk
| vendors.
|
| Phase 3: Hardening Stance and National Bans (2024-2025) July
| 2024 (Germany): After years of delays, Germany announces an
| agreement with major operators to remove Huawei and ZTE
| critical components from 5G core networks by the end of 2026,
| and from access/transport networks by 2029.
|
| August 2025 (Spain): Spain cancels a government contract with
| Telefonica involving Huawei equipment. November 2025 (EU-wide):
| The European Commission pushes for a binding, mandatory ban,
| threatening to make the 2020 voluntary guidelines legally
| required for all member states.
|
| Phase 4: Proposed Mandatory EU-Wide Ban (2026) January 20,
| 2026: The European Commission unveils a new proposal aimed at
| forcing EU member states to remove Huawei and ZTE from their
| networks within three years of adoption.
|
| January 2026: Reports indicate the EU may move to ban Huawei
| and ZTE from critical infrastructure, including fixed-line and
| fiber networks, not just 5G. Summary of Key Country Timelines
|
| UK: New equipment banned (Dec 2020), full removal by 2027.
| Sweden: Full 5G ban, removal by Jan 2025. Germany: Core removal
| by end of 2026, RAN removal by 2029. EU (General): Proposed
| 3-year mandatory phase-out starting from 2026
|
| Must say, tech that has held up for all that time, must be
| doing something right.
|
| So this cloud ride, the possibility of a whole new paradigm in
| computing could happen before we see EU cloud centricity.
| cteiosanu wrote:
| "5. As a private citizen, given the incarcerations in the UK
| and Germany, it seems one should worry more about the EU
| getting your data than the other way around"
|
| As a private citizen given the cold blood murders of US
| citizens by ICE, it seems EU citizens should really be worried
| of what such an administration is willing to do and can do to
| their long time allies.
| tartoran wrote:
| Europe doesn't have similar offerings because they never had a
| chance to or need to compete Silicon Valley. Now that the cats
| out of the bag, offerings can simply materialize out of the
| really high demand for homegrown solutions, EU have a large
| population after all. US Tech really went off the rails in the
| last year or last few years, it simply cannot be trusted
| anymore. Even if such offerings may lag a little behind, they
| still look like a better proposition. EU is in a similar
| situation with respect to self defense, they have to step up to
| the plate and start building their own.
| exe34 wrote:
| > given the incarcerations in the UK and Germany
|
| Could you say a few more words on this - it sounds quite
| concerning.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I don't actually see what's stopping European firms from
| figuring this out in terms of hardware infrastructure.
|
| Buildings full of computers aren't that difficult a problem to
| solve compared to things like semiconductor manufacturing or
| energy.
|
| Perhaps the issue is more on the software and architecture
| side. Getting sucked into weird cloud products that don't
| translate clean to other premises is perhaps the more difficult
| aspect of this for larger firms. I've made a very strong point
| to only use EC2, Route53, S3 and Azure AD. Moving between
| environments is a lot easier when you stick with the VM as the
| unit of deployment. Getting out of something like a MSSQL hyper
| scale instance is simply not possible without switching to a
| different SQL provider or accepting new operational risks.
| moltar wrote:
| Good luck rebuilding AWS. It's a massive undertaking if you want
| feature parity.
| vga42 wrote:
| Sure, but how many people/companies are perfectly served by
| serverless functions + queues + gateway + database + file
| service? I'd guess >90%. How much of that remaining 10% can be
| adequately patched by lauching virtual servers?
|
| Scaleway and OVHCloud both provide all of that. The problem is
| more about marketing and a modern variant of the good old
| "nobody got fired for buying IBM".
| fnoef wrote:
| I keep seeing over and over how Europe should be self sufficient.
| I'd be happy for Europe to be self sufficient.
|
| But the truth is that Europe does not have the infrastructure and
| offering to be self sufficient. Even looking at basic things like
| AWS SES, there is no European offering. Apart from scaleway,
| there are no competitions for big cloud providers. There are no
| alternative to office suites.
|
| And I'm not even talking about hardware. What's the point to
| build data centers if they run US made hardware.
|
| So, as the saying goes: talk is cheap, show me the software.
| thethimble wrote:
| Perhaps there should be an EU committee to draft a mandate for
| a working group tasked with identifying the necessary
| stakeholders for a preliminary report on digital
| infrastructure.
| tene80i wrote:
| Perhaps instead there should be a president enriching himself
| and insulting citizens executed by his goons.
| tonymet wrote:
| > I'm an eighth-generation American, and let me tell you, I
| wouldn't trust my data, secrets, or services to a US company
| these days for love or money. Under our current government, we're
| simply not trustworthy.
|
| Thank you Redditor, you must have forgotten about the Patriot Act
| and how every President since has only worsened Privacy at home
| and abroad (we could easily go back to the 60s, and beyond).
| Remember CableGate, Prism, FISA Courts, or 3 dozen other Privacy
| violating programs?
|
| Yes it all started with Trumpoldemort, lest we say his name.
| zkmon wrote:
| A story I read goes thus: A nicely dressed young man was waiting
| at a bus stop in a rural part of India. He need go to a nearby
| city. Suddenly clouds gathered and it started to pour down
| heavily. He took shelter in a chai (tea) shed beside the bus
| stop. The chaiwala (tea shop owner) announced that the bus is
| cancelled for the day as road was damaged due to the heavy rain.
| The young man looked worried and tried to go by walk in the rain.
| Chaiwala warned that rain would get only heavier. Young man
| returned and sat back. Other people ordered more chai. Due to
| more demand for chai, the chai jar (tea granules) got empty.
| Chaiwala commanded the worker boy to run to a shop that is half-
| mile away and get more chai packs. The boy sprinted out as if
| there was no rain. He came back in half hour, fully soaked,
| starry-eyed, with tea packs in his hand. Young man gets up and
| starts walking out. Chaiwala was shouting that winds and rain are
| going to persist the whole day. Young man didn't listen, and
| didn't feel the rain.
| cung wrote:
| I'm missing something. What is the point of this story?
| zkmon wrote:
| The point is, things are not that scary as the seller would
| like you to believe. Europe has or can build everything it
| needs,
| ta9000 wrote:
| Americans are absolutely not a fan of this administration and it
| will be severely neutered after the midterms. The Supreme Court
| is already doing some of that.
|
| Americans are not your enemy, Washington (state), California,
| Illinois, etc (AKA the states with real economic power and all
| the tech companies) did not vote for this. We still believe in
| the rule of law and our friendships with our allies.
| tj-teej wrote:
| After Snowden's leaks don't we know the levels of spying that's
| already happening today? That was a decade ago, what has changed?
| epolanski wrote:
| Most of my European clients fall in two categories:
|
| 1. Ain't nobody got time/care to move out of AWS/azure but we can
| consider alternatives on new stuff.
|
| 2. We moving all to European cloud vendors and gonna mail them to
| ditch US hardware as well.
|
| The first group is bigger than the second.
|
| One wish to say trump has done damage, but he was voted and he's
| doing exactly what he said he would do so it's hard to treat this
| as "it's just trump", it's not, it's Americans treating others
| like enemies.
| madhacker wrote:
| Good for the EU. This a a much needed wake-up call for data
| sovereignty.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| It's not practical IMHO to move out of US owned cloud companies
| at this point in time. It could become so over years.
|
| However what is mostly practical is to avoid building on their
| proprietary layers and stick to relatively portable tech. Just
| treat it like highly flexible servers / generic services
| provisioned through APIs. It's a battle to stop "cloud experts"
| from cargo culting "best practices" which invariably involve
| everything they can find at the extreme end of the proprietary
| stack.
| rm30 wrote:
| I've carefully read this interesting discussion: some political,
| mostly about full cloud services (AWS) vs partial EU providers,
| or lock-in vs indipendence.
|
| I think the problem is elsewhere. The real advantage of big cloud
| players isn't their individual services. It's seamless
| integration and simplicity. We need a service integration
| standard for infrastructure that enables:
|
| - Service discovery
|
| - Networking
|
| - Observability
|
| - Configuration
|
| This benefits everyone: EU companies, US startups, enterprises
| anywhere avoiding vendor lock-in. A standard letting services
| integrate regardless of who provides them.
|
| Not just container orchestration (Kubernetes), but something
| working across bare metal, VPS, containers, and remote machines.
| hoppp wrote:
| I really hope so.
|
| I am working on a high availability postgres self-hosting
| solution that works with hetzner ,just for the Eu market. Fingers
| crossed, lots of work ahead.
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