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

theregister.com

451–460 of 729 posts

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

#451
post #445

Isn’t the more fundamental question why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to creating startups and how can you lower them and preserve the enviable European social model? Solve that and you’ll solve the problem of a native cloud.

I am just speculating, but Europe has let itself be very dependent on USA for many things - military/defence, technology etc. "We don't need weapons, USA builds them for us". There has been no need to try and compete.

This is changing now. So maybe the incentives will now appear more clearly.

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

#452

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.

[deleted]

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

#453
post #445

Isn’t the more fundamental question why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to creating startups and how can you lower them and preserve the enviable European social model? Solve that and you’ll solve the problem of a native cloud.

Brain drain to USA, lack of good VC / funding, Patents war / patents controlled by the USA, industry espionage, EU mentalities that don't favor innovation in the same direction than the USA, too diverse markets to serve, distributed controls / governments / decisions. The list can go on and on

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

#454
post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

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

#455
post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on what constitutes far-left political activism?

I don’t know if this counts as activism, but I was at my university’s Faculty Club and a faculty member walked over and immediately started bitching about Donald Trump without introducing themselves. Like, you’re supposed to be in the business of developing people. What a gigantic waste of time and money.

If they were instead lauding Trump would you also see that as a waste of time and money? If they aren’t doing this in the classroom I don’t see the issue.

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

#456
post #139

As a European, I am glad that this is finally discussed in the open! I have made multiple comments in the last weeks that one of the most important things, for me, is an alternative to the Visa/Mastercard duopoly. And yes, I can use an app to pay, but whenever I rent a car or purchase something online, I still use one of these two American companies. Why isn't the European Commission mandating these app payments in d…

Take a look here: https://wero-wallet.eu/

Looking forward having this in the country where I live and in the countries I mostly travel to! Well, actually all over EU.

What is unclear to me atm, is it possible to rent a car using wero? Also, can I pay online with it?

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

#457

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.

> I run on Hetzner and am saving big bucks compared to the ridiculously high priced AWS.

IMO even Americans should take a look at whether they need to be using the big cloud providers or not. They're so much more expensive compared to smaller hosts like Hetzner, Digital Ocean, Vultr, and so on. It depends on what you're doing, of course, but I'm American and moved off of Azure last year due to the price and the complexity it encourages.

Reposting my comment from another thread on the same topic a few days ago:

> This is why I moved off of Azure and over to Hetzner's US VPS's. For what I was deploying (a few dozen websites, some relatively complex .NET web apps, some automated scripts, etc.), the pricing on Azure just wasn't competitive. But worse for me was the complexity; I found that using Azure encouraged me to introduce more and more complex deployment pipelines, when all I really needed was Build the container -> SCP it into a blue/green deployment scheme on a VPS -> flip a switch after testing it.

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

#458
post #445

Isn’t the more fundamental question why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to creating startups and how can you lower them and preserve the enviable European social model? Solve that and you’ll solve the problem of a native cloud.

I am just speculating, but Europe has let itself be very dependent on USA for many things - military/defence, technology etc. "We don't need weapons, USA builds them for us". There has been no need to try and compete. This is changing now. So maybe the incentives will now appear more clearly.

You don’t have to, this ja the reason. There were multiple successful EU alternatives that were killed by the loads of money the US companies could muster to kill or hobble them. And Europe decided it was fine.

There isn’t even an European card brand that operates across the whole continent, the just accepted to use visa and Mastercard for everything. I hope they change it.

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

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are the red lines. There is no going back. The USA is too dangerous to rely on, that's quite clear. People don't quite realize how big a deal "invading" Greenland would have been. That's literally an act of war! What's next, occupying France? Saying that it's at all a possibility is far beyond any red line that the EU thought it would have to deal with. Not only would the rest of the world ditch the USA, but the…

I'll bite. Nothing would have come of it. Ehe EU would have been upset for 3-6 months, then it would have got onboard with the idea that Greenland is now a US territory and that's that. France has a too good of a cuisine to be invaded. I think Germany would be next, they are running their mouth more than they should and they suck at food. Unless the mid-terms change the political majority in the US, the Democrats can…

This is some top notch r/ShitAmericansSay material, especially Germany "running their mouth" and having bad food. Add in democrats "wining" and I'm pretty sure this post belongs on a Confederate cooking blog rather than HN.

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

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are the red lines. There is no going back. The USA is too dangerous to rely on, that's quite clear. People don't quite realize how big a deal "invading" Greenland would have been. That's literally an act of war! What's next, occupying France? Saying that it's at all a possibility is far beyond any red line that the EU thought it would have to deal with. Not only would the rest of the world ditch the USA, but the…

I'll bite. Nothing would have come of it. Ehe EU would have been upset for 3-6 months, then it would have got onboard with the idea that Greenland is now a US territory and that's that. France has a too good of a cuisine to be invaded. I think Germany would be next, they are running their mouth more than they should and they suck at food. Unless the mid-terms change the political majority in the US, the Democrats can…

All of that is why I want Europe to take it seriously, even though I think they might be cooling off now that Trump has backed off.

We (both of my "we"s given I'm a British citizen but live in the EU) sent in tripwire forces to defend Greenland. Their purpose is that getting shot is a casus belli for us to go to war with the USA.

Also remember: NATO has two other nuclear powers besides the USA, and the biggest flaw with one of those nuclear arsenals is how when the UK test-fired the missiles it bought from the USA, they went the wrong way or didn't launch properly at all.

I don't know what the order of events would have been given how heavily tied together EU and US (and UK) economies are, but essentially the EU banning the purchase of new US treasuries by itself would cause something in the order of US inflation going to 10% for several years; this, plus any economic departure (I'm thinking emigration more than internment camps like Japanese-Americans in WW2, much worse if that) from all the European migrants on visas (and some or all of the naturalised ones, but that number will be less… unless Trump also strips that like he's been suggesting), the US could loose 2-5 million people's worth of useful economic labour from the workforce. (Even if they're put in work camps, they're not getting good work out of them).

In the other direction, if the US cuts off cloud computing today, the EU is almost immediately screwed. Hence article.

But if the EU's screwed, then we don't have the money to buy the US treasuries, so screwing us also screws the US. That 10% inflation I mentioned, that's just from not buying T-bills; screwing the EU like this would also mean no more trade with the EU, which basically doubles the US unemployment rate on top of that, budget deficit goes to $3T/year, and costs the US 5% GDP relative to the baseline (i.e. what it would have been without invading) forever. Without a shot fired. But France has enough nukes that even if the USA's anti-missile defences can stop 80% of them, it could by itself destroy every US state capital and still have several left over.

And if you're worried about Russia taking over Greenland, oh boy you should worry about what they do to a catastrophically weakened Europe that isn't just a hard-to-mine sheet of ice supporting a population that wouldn't even half-fill these seats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Narendra_Modi_Stadium_vie...

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