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Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

theregister.com

351–360 of 729 posts

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#352

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…

AI is as far away from useful and necessary as bitcoin and NFTs were. I'm sure society can survive without it

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is your solution that Europe only creates small companies?

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

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.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#354

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…

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.

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.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#355
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is your solution that Europe only creates small companies?

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.

The only reason companies exist is to make money for the founders and/or shareholders. Everything else is a pipe dream.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#357
post #43

> 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.

Russian and China are already getting rid of Microsoft.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consumers are domestic EU so you don’t really need the reach and availability of the big 3.

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 hav…

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?

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#360

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…

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.

The same chomsky who claimed that Epstein is a "highly valued friend and regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation"?
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