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Moving away from US cloud services

martijnhols.nl

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Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#101

Post by wkat4242 »

INTPenis wrote: post #20

One relatively simple thing we're missing on the Swedish cloud market is someone offering OIDC SSO, Chat, Video meetings, e-mail, calendar and file sharing. I can't even say which European company offers this, Proton maybe? Being a long time open source advocate I think it can be done, but system integration would never be as good as MS or Google. But this simple platform would get a lot of SMB's to migrate.

Proton is nowhere near M365 capability set unfortunately. M365 really caters for the big enterprise. Data Loss Protection, integrated security, it has a lot of that stuff in the backend. Not to mention all the gaps in user-facing apps like chat, video, office suite.

Perhaps they will get there but they're nowhere near there right now. You could use it together with MS Office standalone but then you're still dependent on Microsoft.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#102

Post by marpar20 »

weatherlite wrote: post #85

Looks unrealistic to me. Sure, for one guy with lots of energy and know how its possible. Try migrating academia, industry, entire government branches etc. That's not gonna be easy.

I agree, but on the other hand: it's just software. We just need to build easy few-clicks transitions for the most popular usages. Like Azure, didn't catch up with AWS on day one. They first added the most used features. The US software moat is large, but I bet the most used features of the most used services are easier to replicate.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#103

Post by cbg0 »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #90
cbg0 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is less of an issue than people actually think - if it gets to the point where this becomes a real problem, individual EU countries can force the datacenter owners like Google/MS to change ownership structure for these datacenters to EU-based subsidiaries or completely new companies if they want to continue to operate.

Virtually all foreign companies that set-up shop in Europe (or anywhere else) do so by setting up local subsidiaries. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, etc. When you deal with all of these guys in Europe you deal with their local subsidiary(ies), not the US mothership.

I'm aware of their use of subsidiaries, but is this true for ownership of the buildings and hardware, or just something done for tax purposes?

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#104

Post by systemf_omega »

nickslaughter02 wrote: post #88
systemf_omega wrote: post #42

Privacy rights in the EU are being eroded as we speak. Unless people there get off their high horse, they'll succumb to the same level of authoritarianism and surveillance as in the states. Also, sorry, but the idea that EU countries are in any position to build a serious hyperscaler is pure fiction. Growth, funding, risk, innovation - those are alien concepts to European entrepreneurs.

> Privacy rights in the EU are being eroded as we speak. Unless people there get off their high horse, they'll succumb to the same level of authoritarianism and surveillance as in the states. Last time I checked not even the US is proposing to install AI agents on everybody's phone to surveil your encrypted messages (look up chat control, last meeting not even 2 months ago). Soon people will start looking for non-EU…

> Disagree, some of the EU clouds are already well on their way.

Feel free to drop a few links. Digital EU projects tend to be absolute disasters run by bureaucrats. They always result in some 100 page long document, talking about planning a plan for creating a planning framework. Also throw in the words sovereign and digital transformation, for maximum corpo-political bullshit.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#105

Post by piokoch »

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #19
datadeft wrote: post #6

My problem is that I do not want to replace one centralilzed service with another. I do not see any difference between the US and the EU (or Australia) in handling privacy. Most politicians are super keen on destroying privacy for people, for the "good cause". There are so many examples of this I lost count. We need strong encryption and true peer-to-peer networks where the connection is going through random routes (…

Perfect is the enemy of good. The EU has it's flaws, but if you can't see the difference between the US privacy climate and the EU privacy climate then you need a reality check.

Yup, in the USA you can still have VPN server that is not storing logs, something that is simply illegal in European Union countries.

In the USA you can purchase prepaid SIM card in Wallmart with cash, put it in your phone and you have anonymous phone number, again, this is illegal in Europe in a typical stupid European way, as any criminal who needs an anonymous card would pull in to the retailer some drunk or homeless person and get that SIM anyway. But "normals" can forget about privacy, unless they want to play with something like silent.link.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#106

Post by pzo »

frereubu wrote: post #58

> Wrapping up - Migrating away from US cloud services was easier than I expected. This is absolutely not the main takeaway and I find it difficult to see how he could write this - there are gaping holes. Git repos (it's too difficult). NPM (ditto). Startpage uses Google's index. The only meaningful switch he mentions is Proton, but as other comments have pointed out they have vendor lock-in problems. The real takeawa…

he mentioned also Quad9 - Cloudflare DNS replacement. I didn't know about and will probably switch to it. My other picks:

SEARCH: qwant (france)

LLM: mistral (france), librechat.ai, openwebui

VPN: mullvad (sweden), protonVPN (swiss)

AUTH: OpenID (sadly seems like not many sevices implement it)

CLOUD: Hetzner (germany), OVHCloud (france)

MAPS: here wego, openstreetmap

EMAIL: protonMail (swiss), fastmail (australia)

DNS: mullvad (sweden), quand9 (swiss), nextDNS

TRANSLATE: DeepL (germany)

BROWSER: zen-browser, vivaldi (norway)

SOCIAL: nostr, mastadon (germany)

IM: elements (uk), matrix (uk)

EDIT: correction that fastmail is australian

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#107

Post by mrtksn »

I'm not sure how all this is going to play out but sooner than later local solutions will be enforced politically.

>Migrating away from US cloud services was easier than I expected.

So if the AI hype is worth its salt, the transition should at some point become trivial.

"Hi Mistral, can you please build a OneDrive replacement? I will host in on my Linux server at OVH. Here is the documentation for OneDrive, make sure that the software works as described in the documentation. Then install it into my server using these credentials and put the client side apps in my Apps folder"

I can't keep myself but thinking, what will happen when the mighty US tech companies that used to serve the planet get limited to 340M people in the half of the North American continent.

So far it was just convenient to have your tech thingies in the USA even if you are just providing a niche service somewhere in south Italy from Montenegro.

For years this created a positive feedback loop that fed into the centralization of capital and talent in USA, particularly in the Silicon Valley. It wasn't that Americans were writing better for loops than Europeans, it was that the global nature of the tech positioned itself at the place with least resistance and largest resources.

Unfortunately this is coming to an end as a political choice by the USA itself, so what's next then?

The moat of social networks and financial networks can indeed be broken by force if politicians choose to. This brings so much opportunity to non-Americans, it is sad for those who feel like global citizen and integrated with the whole humanity and its pretty much the dream of ant-globalists.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#108

Post by wkat4242 »

zaggynl wrote: post #49

Regarding Startpage: https://www.startpage.com/privacy-please/startpage-articles/... https://web.archive.org/web/20210729190016/https://support.s... The original link is dead for some reason: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic... TL;DR: Startpage appears owned by an ad company? https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.bizjournals.com/losa... Could someone explain to me how an ad company and a…

Searx is great (I use SearXNG personally) but be aware that it's something that lifts along on the main search engines. It's not a search engine, just a meta one. It still depends on the big US ones for its results. Just like Kagi for that matter (though they do have a small crawler themselves, their main results are metasourced from various large engines)

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#109

Post by MartijnHols »

frereubu wrote: post #58

> Wrapping up - Migrating away from US cloud services was easier than I expected. This is absolutely not the main takeaway and I find it difficult to see how he could write this - there are gaping holes. Git repos (it's too difficult). NPM (ditto). Startpage uses Google's index. The only meaningful switch he mentions is Proton, but as other comments have pointed out they have vendor lock-in problems. The real takeawa…

I expected it to be much harder to move away from these services I heavily relied on like Microsoft 365. Before I started migrating it figured I was so entangled in their web, that switching to an alternative would be a tremendous task. After actually migrating these services, I managed to migrate 90% within a few hours per service. This is nowhere near the amount of effort I expected it needed. Because of that, I'm also optimistic about migrating Git and NPM. While I don't think NPM will be any different, I suppose my optimism about Git might be misguided because of the amount of customization that goes into setting up CI/CD. Still, since only one out of all of the services might be hard - one that doesn't handle any PII - I stand by saying the overall effort was easier than expected.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#110

Post by CER10TY »

noirscape wrote: post #45

A shame that OP recommends Proton. The fact they don't support open email protocols like IMAP/SMTP without an extremely frustrating proxy setup is what ultimately turned me away from their service. Being able to "just" use a native mail client is pretty much a must. The vendor lock-in from something like Proton feels way worse as a result. Can't speak to Proton Pass, but it strikes me as a replacement that seems unne…

What's a good alternative to Proton? Still haven't migrated my business away from Google Workspace, and I was thinking Proton would be a good alternative, but apparently not if they don't even support IMAP/SMTP.
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