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

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

#371

Post by pyrale »

nixpulvis wrote: post #249
kioku wrote: 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.

Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own. We used to live in a world converging toward maximal international trade, when in fact it was exploiting underdeveloped nations. As we progress globally, and as the development gap shrinks, we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way. So now what? How do w…

> How do we preserve a lot of the efficiencies of the past, while strengthening the resilience and redundancy.

Open source with clear international governance and maintainer/contributor base, in such a way that a geopolitical rift leaves both sides with working software.

That works for tech and the infrastructure, of course, but not for the corporations built upon them.

> more international lawyers

I don't see that as a significant source of safety in our current world.

> isolationism is a death sentence.

The current US admin isn't isolationist, it's merely reverting back to 19th century imperialism.

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

#372

Post by lelanthran »

thatwasunusual wrote: post #331
ody4242 wrote: post #319

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.

> But managers wants to _buy_ these services, not be directly responsible for them. That's where the problem lies, as I see it.

Why won't they be able to buy them from EU providers?

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

#374

Post by gottorf »

nixpulvis wrote: post #336
dmix wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way The clearest example is a dependency on a single wealthy nation for military and world policing. It's a good thing for individual countries to be able to project their own foreign policy goals like containing Russia without having to rely on the whims of another country's politics. Even here in Canada we should be able to defend their…

Well said. One of the USA's greatest exports is intelligence and higher education, and what has been happening with that and the general anti-intellectual atmosphere is to me the most concerning as an american. Ironically, public education in america has been pretty bad for a while. But I'm going to start rambling here... way too many problems, and no damn leadership.

[flagged]

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

#375

Post by ndr42 »

barnacs wrote: post #166
ndr42 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you are right and everything is the same regarding surveillance and regulation: there are other important aspects that make the move to move european data out of the US worthwhile.

> other important aspects like what?

I will just provide 2 examples, but you can find a lot more.

If your data is in the hands of a nation that uses this to block you from your data you should do something about it. [1]

If your data is in the hands of a nation whose representatives are threatening your territorial integrity (greenland) you should find alternatives.

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Criminal-Court-Microsoft-s-emai...

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

#376

Post by lelanthran »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #255
armcat wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer That's true right now, yes. But things are changing rapidly, e.g. there is evroc [1], Mimer [2] and others are popping up too. it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard be…

> I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard benchmark My point was that even with Google's money, they're still not on par with MS even if the Office files format has been standardized for a number of years. And if you extrapolate that to any other technology, you will find out very fast that it is very expensive to come up with a replacement solut…

> My point was that even with Google's money, they're still not on par with MS even if the Office files format has been standardized for a number of years.

The counterpoint is that they don't need to be on par :-/ The problem is that individual procurement decision-makers are incentivised to go with the Microsoft suite, not that the alternatives aren't a good enough replacement.

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

#377

Post by snowpid »

margorczynski wrote: post #98
ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #47

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…

Well it is like Thiel said in a recent interview - European companies and investors are very risk-averse and will never be a vanguard like the ones in the US. You'll never get here that kind of cash for any risky project, it usually is low risk + low margin.

Thiel recently called Greta Thunberg the anti - christ. Thiel is maybe crazy as Musk. at least he is not an authorative source.

Besides the soure what does he mean with all of Europe: Berlin? London? Paris? Estonia? Sweden? The start up eco system is fragmented / decentralised. I doubt Thiel is a good overview and he argues probably not in good faith anyway.

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

#378

Post by Nextgrid »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #358
Nextgrid wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

If you’re going to go multi-region and take the latency hit may as well go multi-provider no?

Multi-region within the same provider won’t shield you against unknown shared dependencies on a single point of failure (AWS console auth still relies on credentials being checked in a single region if I remember right).

And yes fully agreed that maintaining consistency between active-active regions (whether cloud or bare-metal) is super hard and not worth it for most deployments. Active-standby with point-in-time-recovery and an acceptable data loss window is much easier - when one region is confirmed down, someone throws a switch and the standby becomes active.

> no sane provider is willing to cover your losses

Agreed, but thats why all those who justify the 10-90x premium of the cloud over bare-metal are full of it - that premium is not actually worth it.

> it's not a secret this is not happening

Maybe for you it’s not a secret? Literally every thread tries to justify cloud reliability and their resulting markups. Well if it’s that reliable they’d put their money where their mouth is.

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

#379

Post by christkv »

There are certain things that would be a pain to do as the platforms we use gives us so much more than just hosting. It means a lot more operational work in our case and loss of certain functionality that has to be reimplemented using some other stack. I don't see it as feasible in the short term, nor cost effective.
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