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

theregister.com

411–420 of 729 posts

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

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except nobody considers 200k employees a small company.

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

#412

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…

I wonder if we can tariff digital services. EU is behind partially because US eats all investment. Protectionism is an option.

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

#413
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.

True but obv. Only lunatics would use a Russian cloud service. The interesting part is whether and what extent China is different. Also, why Europe should start treating us like Russians.

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

#414
post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting Google Docs to be a Word alternative was an order of magnitude easier than getting GCP to be an AWS competitor. Now that AWS has two serious competitors (and some non serious ones), privately funding another one just seems impossible to me. Who is gonna chip in tens of billions of dollars to fund "that, but European, and 15 years from now"? I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is some combinati…

> I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is some combination of Just mandate EU countries' public administration to rely exclusively on EU cloud solutions. That doesn't need to be done at once. This would create enough of a captive market to start the homegrown industry. > Europeans have to use lower-level infra and do a lot more ops in-house To be honest, every large enough company would benefit from do…

> Just mandate EU countries' public administration to rely exclusively on EU cloud solutions.

This happens already in some areas and it is not cheaper or better. The EU funds national clouds where public institutions use them. What does it mean? VMware with Tanzu or OpenStack. And then some services thrown in to offer some S3 like buckets and that's it. The rest has to be built by the beneficiaries. Servers? Brand names like Lenovo/HP/Dell. Storage? Brand names like NetApp, HP, Dell, Lenovo, 3Par, IBM and the list goes on. Networking? Cisco (mostly), HP/Juniper. Firewalls? Cisco/Fortinet/PaloAlto/CheckPoint/etc.

Basically an enterprise setup masquerading as a cloud offering.

And even if there would be EU wide offerings for such cloud, there's too much money at stake to let institutions from one country buy services from another.

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

#415

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.

And a replicated postgres with backups

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

#416
When SaaS was emerging I was always advocating for not putting all our eggs into one basket, everyone always suggested was suggesting I was just paranoid. It's just a basic tenet of resilient systems to diversify depenendencies and not outsource all basic knowhow and abilities, even if its more costly. The reason is that institutional knowledge is difficult to build and easy to throw away. Its for the same reason I was hesitant about supporting all those big free trade agreements, for which I was actually called a "national communist" a few times, lol. Funnily enough nowadays I'm the one more open to those free trade blocks in my social circles and everyone has always been against it. I wonder what the consensus will be twenty years from now.

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

#417

First, Europeans must change their mindset and be really willing to become free.

Done, thanks. Eagerly waiting the next 20 years.

You need a doctor's note to get a gym membership in Italy. In the Netherlands, you need a prescription to get contact lens solution. The rot of regulation is deep within the European psyche.

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

#418
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.

[dead]

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

#419
post #412

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…

I wonder if we can tariff digital services. EU is behind partially because US eats all investment. Protectionism is an option.

I wouldn't go this way, at least not now. But the European Commission should mandate the usage of EU based software for every public institution in the EU, at all levels. That means from the European Parliament all the way down to municipalities. So no more Windows, Office, Azure, AWS etc. in public institutions all across the EU.

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

#420
post #396

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…

Offers such as Scaleway should be sufficient "feature-wise" for startups. Even if they don't have feature parity with AWS (I mean AWS is huge) it has, kubernets and serverless deployment options (functions, containers), S3 compatible object storage, managed databases, queues, llm hosted models, terraform provider. Those should most of what startups need for deployment; at least what I've seen working with many over t…

We've been using Scaleway's compute, RDS and S3 offerings for Ente[1]'s cloud offering for over 5 years now.

RDS backups and retrivals from cold storage[2] are both a lot slower than AWS. The "high-availablity" instances for RDS are in the same DC, so the feature is cosmetic. Ignoring these, our experience has been pretty good. Quality of support is great.

--

While linking to [2] I realised that Scaleway's own website is behind Cloudflare, which is disappointing given they have their own DDoS protection[3].

[1]: https://github.com/ente-io/ente

[2]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/glacier-cold-storage/

[3]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/ddos-protection/

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