Live data from Hacker News

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

sifted.eu

151–160 of 228 posts

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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well we already have Hetzner and OVH which are European so just being European does not give them a selling point over others.

Neither are even remotely close to competing with AWS, GCP or Azure in terms of features though, they are more server providers than anything else. And OVH is a dumpster fire.

But they might be one of the greenest. OVH had to make some trade-off compared to other providers to remain as cheap as they are and while it certainly has an impact on their reliability and security levels, a lot of them are actually positive as far a sustainability goes (use of recycled containers, the use of wood in the DC which was decried when their DC burned down etc).

To put it another way: a DC in a wooden shack connected to a low carbon grid (France) surely has bad security but a low environmental footprint too.

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

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well we already have Hetzner and OVH which are European so just being European does not give them a selling point over others.

Neither are even remotely close to competing with AWS, GCP or Azure in terms of features though, they are more server providers than anything else. And OVH is a dumpster fire.

> Neither are even remotely close to competing with AWS, GCP or Azure in terms of features though

And this Swedish startup is?

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

#153
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not at all a selling point. You can do the same on AWS, get an EC2 and install everything there, that's it. The thing is that when you will need to leverage the other services of AWS, they will be there, while you will need to migrate if you're on one of those server providers.

I never understood the complaints of complexity about AWS. You can easily just use EC2 and maybe S3 and ignore the other 100 icons. I think, in practice, what folks are complaining about is that AWS has the worst UI known to man. In which case, you can use GCP for their nice UI and still get the benefits of a hyperscaler. I don’t mean to say that the simpler services have no place in the market but it’s pretty narrow…

Unless I actually need one of the services that's not available on a tier 2 provider, I would personally never want to use any of the hyperscaler services if all you need are covered by the services offered by the tier 2 providers.

And this is mostly for security reasons: I'm not familiar with Azure but AWS and GCP setup is very complex and it's very easy to make a mistake that would impact the security of your infrastructure. Tier 2 providers like DO, Scaleway, Linode before Akamai, etc generally offer products whose setup you can fully understand and that helps a lot in giving you the confidence that you didn't mess up and shot yourself in the foot without knowing it.

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

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can give out stock? Being taken for a ride is being taken for a ride.

Basal capitalistic view. What's the most beautiful city you've ever visited and why?

Fun fact: There are 17 European countries that rank higher than the US in the Index of Economic Freedom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom

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

#155
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not at all a selling point. You can do the same on AWS, get an EC2 and install everything there, that's it. The thing is that when you will need to leverage the other services of AWS, they will be there, while you will need to migrate if you're on one of those server providers.

I never understood the complaints of complexity about AWS. You can easily just use EC2 and maybe S3 and ignore the other 100 icons. I think, in practice, what folks are complaining about is that AWS has the worst UI known to man. In which case, you can use GCP for their nice UI and still get the benefits of a hyperscaler. I don’t mean to say that the simpler services have no place in the market but it’s pretty narrow…

I think the networking layer is unnecessarily complex for the vast majority of situations and it bleeds into a lot of the other services.

I use AWS daily and have for the past 5 years, but despite all that I wheep

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

#156
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither are even remotely close to competing with AWS, GCP or Azure in terms of features though, they are more server providers than anything else. And OVH is a dumpster fire.

Which in itself is a massive selling feature. Deploying a simple app on AWS is about as straight forward as deploying Active Directory in the early 2000s. It is so bad Amazon even launched the Lightsail product line to address the problem. AWS now is basically "you don't know how to run a database, or a KV store, or a network, etc. so here it all is as an API with a markup." Some companies still have talent that know…

> AWS now is basically

It’s literally in the name… web services.

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

#157
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…

All companies have these pledges, but they are mostly marketing. These companies know they don't really need to reach those targets, and unless we see massive investment from them to achieve this goal, it just won't happen.

"In an evaluation of some of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters, the investor engagement group Climate Action 100+ found no company has fully disclosed how it plans to reach net-zero."

"Some of the boldest pledges rely on carbon removal technologies that don’t even exist yet, or at least not at the scale required. Many more are heavily reliant on carbon offsets, which allow companies to invest in “nature-based” programs like tree planting or forest protection to counteract their own emissions. Offset projects, however, have been plagued by allegations of flawed accounting, greenwash and sometimes even of actively fueling climate change."

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/26/climate-...

That is, they say they'll do something, but they don't even know how, or at least won't tell for some reason... meaning that there's no way to check if they're doing the necessary work or mostly fugding with the numbers (some high profile cases where companied just patently fabricated numbers regarding their progress have already been revealed in the news).

I believe there's zero indication that companies are serious... emissions in 2023 are set to be the highest ever recorded (and this is not because of higher emissions in developing countries, the developed world is still leading the shameless business-as-usual route)... that's in the middle of a global economical crisis... imagine if the economy had been doing really well!

Until actual emissions start to fall dramatically, don't believe in these companies empty promises.

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

#159
post #5

Would never use a cloud service simply because "its European", it's got to be better and cheaper than AWS.

A lot of european companies would. You’d be surprised how often saas clients told me to _never_ allow client data to get anywhere near a us company. People around europe are very privacy aware.

Yep, some banks already make it mandatory that you do not store whatever data you may have from them outside of Europe.

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't this already exist in the form of Digital Ocean, Linode/Akamai, OVH, etc.?

also hetzner

Hetzner is great for servers and storage, but it's not a "proper cloud" like AWS/GCP/Azure/Oracle/IBM.
Post reply on HN