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

theregister.com

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

#361

Post by lnxg33k1 »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #169

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…

At my company we use scaleway, and while it doesn't have yet all the products offered by AWS etc. it still has almost everything we need, and can be managed by terraform. I think it has already a nice offering, and is much closer to AWS etc. than 15 years

I mean, once you have managed SQL, managed k8s, serverless, object storage, private networks, kafka, sqs, sns, glacier, and IaC support, you can already be happy as a startup

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

#362

Post by Throaway3126 »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #260
generic92034 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s a chance that the current situation will start to resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however that might look. There is almost no chance for that, as lost trust does not return instantly.

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.

This isn't politicking though. This is national security. In matters of national security, you take no chances. There's no going back to the relationship the world had with the USA.

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

#363

Post by convolvatron »

bborud wrote: post #323
convolvatron wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

exactly. in HPC we all understood that it was a tradeoff between money and time, and that the curve was exponential. if you wanted to race ahead of todays capabilities, you could, but you couldn't go very far without burning alot of cash. because of the investment story about being first and building a moat, we have companies torching 100s of billions of dollars to see who can climb that exponential the furthest. we…

This kind of reminds me of an old paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9912202 Of course, we are no longer in the clock speed doubling era, but computer does get faster still.

It's true that the progress on clock speeds has slowed. Now we have to address the parallelism problem in order to keep moving forward. And we haven't done a very good job. Progress on that front will get us back on the acceleration curve. Saedfly, the current framing of 'who buys the most hardware', while I providing a nice marketing story, isn't netting us that much progress except what Nvidia spends internally.

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

#364

Post by ExoticPearTree »

Nextgrid wrote: post #315
ExoticPearTree wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What more do you need exactly? That's essentially all I would use from the incumbent cloud providers anyway. Pub/Sub, Dataflow, CDN, GLB to name a few. I could go on with the list of services currently used by the people that pay to push buttons. Not to sound offensive, but others have more than a Django app that they need to run.

> I could go on with the list of services currently used by the people that pay to push buttons I too can build an engineering playground where every ingress byte traverses as many AWS services as I can find. But if you're building a business application, how many of these do you actually need? Once you have the basic primitives you can fill in the gaps yourself if needed. But in the list you provided, Pub/Sub, CDN a…

> I too can build an engineering playground where every ingress byte traverses as many AWS services as I can find. But if you're building a business application, how many of these do you actually need?

I gave a real list, and all of them have real reasons for being used. I don't know from where you got the idea that apps are built just by chaining cloud services aimlessly.

A company has more than one application or need.

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

#365

Post by smarx007 »

arter45 wrote: post #334
smarx007 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/dear-hosting-providers-you...

Not sure I follow. It's one thing to say that a lot of AWS/Azure/Google users take advantage of many managed services. But saying something is not a cloud provider because they don't provide a specific SaaS is kinda weird, especially if you read the NIST definition of cloud computing or when you consider that not every AWS user is using more than a handful of services (does that make AWS a cloud provider only for mor…

> because they don't provide a specific SaaS is kinda weird

I think for most business stakeholders it's not about the number of services but rather the coverage of business-critical needs. When you have access to Azure Entra, you know that you can cover 90%+ of your auth needs with that service. If you have access to AWS S3, you know that your various storage needs would be possible to cover with that. If a managed Postgres is available, you know that most of the IT systems you run would be able to take advantage of that. You look at Azure their IAM/audit/observability offerings and it's the same.

When you look at Hetzner as a business stakeholder, all you see are bare servers and and one object storage service that you are not sure of how battle-tested it is. And then you start thinking: "okay, I will need to run k8s or some other workload orchestration approach, my IT systems need Postgres/MySQL/SQL Server etc, I need auth, I need audit, I will need to build, operate, maintain all of that in-house". I am not saying that this is a wrong path for everyone, but Hetzner essentially leaves you no choice. And many business stakeholders who have been operating their own own-prem infra or colocated or rented IaaS plus a large dev team for decades and have since switched to one of the hyperscalers and reduced their dev/IT headcount - may not want to go back to the old model.

> limiting yourself to a smaller portion of AWS/Azure/GCP services can facilitate migrations to other cloud platforms.

Yes, which is why you insist (where possible/reasonable) on Postgres-compatible DBMS offerings, IdP solutions based on OIDC, observability on OpenTelemetry.

> Sure, smaller cloud providers don't usually have all those services, but this doesn't mean they are not cloud providers

Yes, it could mean that they are not cloud providers.

> but they can probably satisfy the needs of other users who are more than happy with a smaller feature set

Please see the linked article. This is essentially "users who are happy to build some of the furniture themselves".

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

#366

Post by anhner »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #355
pjmlp wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

and yet, there are obviously some companies that are better than others.

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

#367

Post by [deleted] »

Juliate wrote: post #258
crazygringo wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your customers want features that require compute and money, and your competitor offers them, then you don't really have a choice if you want to stay in business.

That's up to you (and the customers) to understand that the location where the compute/data is happening is as important a criteria to consider. As it is today.

[deleted]

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

#368

Post by lelanthran »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #169

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…

> And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.

WTF would it need to match? It only needs to be as good as Office 97, but online.

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

#369

Post by belorn »

9dev wrote: post #338
belorn wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listened to a story about a fairly large company that switched to cloud and then back to on-premise. When they went cloud they quickly found out that they needed employees to manage the cloud infrastructure. The employee costs were similar for both setup. Compliance and security testing does not go away just because you use cloud. The steps and questions will be different, but regulations like NIS and GDPR have exten…

> Compliance and security testing does not go away just because you use cloud. The steps and questions will be different, but regulations like NIS and GDPR have extensive requirements regardless if you implement it yourself or buy it from an external supplier. That’s a bit disingenuous. If I don’t operate a physical server rack, I also do not need to take care of physical access control, fire suppression policies, ca…

Go through a security review. It not as simple as just saying "we outsource that so we have no idea what they do or how they manage the data". It is disingenuous to claim that people can just outsource the whole problem and not care.

This would be part of the responsibility of the cloud managers, which need to be hired, paid and trained, on top of the cost of paying the cloud providers. There is no free lunch.

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