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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

#181

Post by torginus »

benced wrote: post #97
iLoveOncall wrote: post #85

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…

Also hyperscaling is a bit of a lie. You have a trillion invisible limits built into your account, you have to talk to support to raise, if you try starting up instances by the hundreds, you'll be throttled. There's zero transparency on what types of instances are available and how in-demand they are, meaning trying to scale up capacity 'on demand' is a fool's errand.

Yes, I'm speaking from experience.

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

#182

Post by openplatypus »

FTA:

> The lack of home-grown cloud providers in Europe

Not accurate. OVH (France), IONOS (Germany), Scaleway (Sweden) are few examples thar had been serving customers for years/decades.

On lower end there even more competitors like Servers.com and Hetzner.

The reason AWS is such prevalent is not lack of options. It is VCs pushing "free" credits on their portfolio companies till it became synonymous with cloud for some engineers and founders.

Most are already carbon neutral (nuclear) or renewable powered.

OVH even has patented highly efficient water cooling used on large scale.

Rather than announcing US cloud rivalry, we should make community aware of better, cheaper solution at "home".

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

#183

Post by daneel_w »

openplatypus wrote: post #182

FTA: > The lack of home-grown cloud providers in Europe Not accurate. OVH (France), IONOS (Germany), Scaleway (Sweden) are few examples thar had been serving customers for years/decades. On lower end there even more competitors like Servers.com and Hetzner. The reason AWS is such prevalent is not lack of options. It is VCs pushing "free" credits on their portfolio companies till it became synonymous with cloud for so…

Scaleway is a French venture.

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

#184

Post by torginus »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #178
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…

We sorely need some disruption. I rent cloud VPSes at Hetzner that cost me $27/month for 10000 Geekbench. The most efficient in house option are small nettop computers with 13700H processors that get you 13000 geekbench for $500, 50 watts of power and less than 1 liter of real estate. That same computing power would cost me north of $1000/month at AWS or Azure, and about $300 at smaller cloud providers. Which means b…

I never understood the value proposition of Xeon, Epyc-s and other 'enterprise-grade' hardware, considering the strong push towards horizontal scaling, failover reliablity, microservices, etc. Are they more reliable, are they bigger? They are certainly are more pricey.

I have ratty-ass computers running at home with weeks worth of uptime. More is not really needed, ironically my home stuff usually has much longer uptimes than the prod infrastructure that I work on, that has constant restarts due to upgrades, configuration, etc.

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

#186

Post by carlosjobim »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #165
carlosjobim wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Health care costs shouldn't be of too much concern for young professionals (those more likely to move). Eating well and exercise should come first, because even if healthcare is free or cheap - who wants to be sick in the first place?

Your well being doesn't always depend on your diet and exercise. Viruses like Coivd or other bugs you can get from a simple surgical procedure like a root canal, preexisting and congenital conditions that hit you later in life, accidents, are a thing for many people despite balanced lifestyles.

Certainly. But if we compare how much Americans are happily paying for health insurance and Europeans are happily paying in taxes, with the cost and effort of a healthy life style, the healthy life style is much cheaper. And accessible all over the world.

I'm kidding about the "happily" of course.

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

#187

Post by openplatypus »

daneel_w wrote: post #183
openplatypus wrote: post #182

FTA: > The lack of home-grown cloud providers in Europe Not accurate. OVH (France), IONOS (Germany), Scaleway (Sweden) are few examples thar had been serving customers for years/decades. On lower end there even more competitors like Servers.com and Hetzner. The reason AWS is such prevalent is not lack of options. It is VCs pushing "free" credits on their portfolio companies till it became synonymous with cloud for so…

Scaleway is a French venture.

Ah, sorry, mixed it something else. Thanks for correction.

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

#188

Post by afandian »

lelag wrote: post #151
iLoveOncall wrote: post #47

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.

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 sh…

OVH may have sequestered a lot of carbon, but it was unexpectedly released.

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

#189

Post by re-thc »

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.

> they should just go the route China did - it hosts its own version of AWS that's pretty walled off, from what I know

Wouldn't count that as the route China did. China forces all companies to have local ownership. It has nothing to do with the data. At least it wasn't the intent.

They have actual local clouds that are popular from Alibaba, Tencent, JD and many other big names.

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

#190

Post by looofooo »

boulos wrote: post #66
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 h…

How does this work? Will it be forbidden to drive there for work or delivery by gasoline cars?
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