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A Swedish startup’s bid to build a green rival to AWS

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Re: A Swedish startup’s bid to build a green rival to AWS

#61

Post by kixiQu »

Gwypaas wrote: post #54
cheriot wrote: post #30

> “Amazon, Google and Microsoft are really good, but US authorities have the right to see the data stored on non-American citizens. That means that many companies and authorities in Europe cannot put sensitive data on the American cloud and instead store it on servers in the cellar,” Åström says. Isn't this FUD? US authorities can't subpoena data on a server in the EU even if it's owned by a US company

Let me introduce you to the CLOUD act, which multiple times have been ruled to be fundamentally incompatible with GDPR. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

Curious to see whether pessimism about big-$$$ companies getting to shape US law to their will could win versus pessimism about the seemingly inevitable creep of the security state, if Europe actually forces tech companies' hands here... one can kind of imagine it being possible to repeal the CLOUD act if enough lobbyist dollars were spent.

Re: A Swedish startup’s bid to build a green rival to AWS

#62

Post by belval »

vladf wrote: post #59
Bang2Bay wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

offset is what its name suggests. sometimes its ok if a company innovates or pays money to others to innovate.

Sure, but the reasons offsets are dodgy is because they actually aren't fungible in the way you're hoping for. Say a paper maker is about to cut down a forest in the US. It buys up the rights to do so for $1M. Then, instead, it sells $1M worth of carbon credits to Amazon (maybe for a premium) for its data center greenwashing and doesn't end up cutting the US forest. But then, secretly, or through some shell company m…

Doesn't have to be that complicated to be dodgy. A bunch of carbon offset works on optimistic to downright stupid metrics for carbon capture.

For example they buy a plot of land and then raze it, then they will plant 10k saplings and take that figure at face value even if most of those won't take and actually become trees.

Then they will estimate the CO2 captured by averaging it over the entire life of the tree (say 30 years) and count year 1 as if it captured 1/30 of the CO2 even though the carbon capture potential of tree is not constant throughout its life.

Beyond that they will double count the carbon credits of the plot of land by selling them twice.

Finally after all the above, they will sell the plots after ~5 years to buy some other plots and it will be razed anyway. No one actually checks that the carbon capture forest will be there in 10 years, let alone 30.

Re: A Swedish startup’s bid to build a green rival to AWS

#64

Post by eptcyka »

poisonborz wrote: post #39

> When the sun is shining in Spain, then we move the data there, and when the wind is blowing in the Netherlands then we move it there. I'm sure this sounds great for the laymen and politicians, but does it really make sense technically?

No. Nothing beats a truck full of drives for bandwidth, nothing beats fiber for latency, they need both.

Re: A Swedish startup’s bid to build a green rival to AWS

#66

Post by boulos »

belval wrote: post #18

Corporate fluff aside, AWS is on track to run on 100% renewables by 2025[1] so the selling is mostly "European cloud" since the green part will be mostly expected by the time they actually ramp up. Competition is always good though. > Studies by 451 Research have shown that AWS’ infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median of U.S. enterprise data centers surveyed and up to five times more energy…

Disclosure: I used to work on GCE.

"Renewable" is a broad set of terms. Importantly from your first link on GCP it says:

> Google is carbon neutral for our operations today, but aiming higher: our goal is to run on carbon-free energy, 24/7, at all of our data centers by 2030.

Carbon-free, 24x7, is a stronger commitment than carbon-neutral which would include using renewable power offsets. Amazon's methodology is at https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/renewable-energy-meth... which makes this clear as well.

Re: A Swedish startup’s bid to build a green rival to AWS

#67

Post by mr90210 »

A lot of “US vs Europe” in the comments. The focus ought to be to provide great services rather than just “it’s built here and not there”.

I use Hetzner over other providers because it’s dead simple to create and delete VMs and the prices are competitive … and yes it’s a European company.

The EU flag alone is not enough - Stable services, great UX and second to none support is the alternative that the market has been longing.

Re: A Swedish startup’s bid to build a green rival to AWS

#68

Post by niederman »

JohnMakin wrote: post #9

If the concern mentioned in this article of "Americans can view sensitive data on European citizens," they should just go the route China did - it hosts its own version of AWS that's pretty walled off, from what I know.

Well, yeah, that's what evroc is aiming to be.
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