141–150 of 729 posts
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.
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.
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I thought I heard that hetzner was pretty cheap, haven't looked myself though...
Price is probably not the only factor in competitiveness.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, Collabora office looks really great too.
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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.
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 ot…
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.
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.
Keeping the data overseas by design would just make this easier.
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.
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 Te…
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.
Quite frankly, there is literally 0 moat and its great to see EU focus on the real moat/lock-in issues.
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> 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 t…
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.