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Moving away from US cloud services

martijnhols.nl

171–180 of 383 posts

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 homel…

You remember Lavabit?

We also have Mullvad.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#172
The formatting actively prevented me from processing more than half the article's content but I agree with the premise as far as I was able to get it: if you're a EU-based company or individual it's a good idea to move away from US cloud services unless you're a subsidiary/employee of a US company.

The legal concern for EU businesses should be self-evident given that EU-US data sharing provisions have been struck down again and again with every replacement inheriting the exact same issues of the one before it. There simply is no way for US-based companies to comply with EU data protection laws while still complying with US laws granting law enforcement and federal agencies warrantless surveillance powers - they'd actively have to break US laws to comply with the EU laws.

That said, this is much more difficult for some things than others.

If you're building on AWS, there's simply no drop-in replacement. Yes, there are EU equivalents in the same category but it's very different from "simply" switching between AWS, GCP and Azure.

For package registries like NPM, moving away also means abandoning the standard ecosystem. For private packages this may be an option but for public packages at some point you will likely need to involve a US service. GitHub is kinda in the same boat - although alternatives to GitHub exist functionally, GitHub is also a platform for discoverability and ease of access. These platforms act somewhat as monopolies for these purposes simply through the network effect of so many people using them.

Even Microsoft 365 (or Google Workspace) can be somewhat difficult to avoid given that so many things simply integrate easily with it compared to whatever company-wide "productivity suite" alternative you might want to use. That's without even getting into the quality and compatibility of the tools themselves.

What seems far easier and often overlooked are the infinite number of dime-a-dozen SaaS providers: emails, monitoring, realtime, messaging, payments, etc etc. These provide an easy first step for most companies and by adopting these incrementally you can also more easily wean yourself off bulk service offerings like AWS. Of course this comes with the cost of a diverse stack: you can't simply hire an AWS certified devops guy and expect him to know how every single service works, on the contrary none of your folks might know how a given new service they need to add works.

Another consideration that's becoming increasingly relevant is the (un-?)intentional vendor lock-in imposed by AI assistants: the LLM your devs or management is using might be able to generate a SOA app built on AWS or Azure but it will likely be less helpful integrating with a EU-based specialized service provider with a fraction of the userbase. Not to mention the AI assistant itself probably runs on US-owned infrastructure and is likely provided by a US-based company.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#173
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! I run Firefox on Linux and I constantly get captcha'd everywhere (by that typical cloudflare loading page) because I'm not part of the 95% that runs Windows or Mac. Cloudflare is an awful thing for the internet.

I run Firefox on Linux and I rarely encounter Cloudflare captchas.

cloudflare seethes at firefox users that have strict tracking protections enabled. OTOH it's still much less violent than hCaptcha or google. Especially if you install their PoW pass extension.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#174

> 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…

The "easy" stuff was easy as the external face is a custom domain. This should be understood as a lesson for future choices.

Generic / not heavily propriety services which are pointed to by something you own (i.e. a domain name) can be migrated to new services. Web hosting, s3 hosting, email hosting etc.

Migrating from @gmail is not possible without scrapping an identity and starting over.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#175
post #29

The biggest elephants in the room are cloud providers, but I didn't find an easy alternative yet (hetzner, ovhcloud). ATM, the idea to the business is sold, that data resides somewhere near by in a datacenter, EU proximity. However, the EU businesses are realising that, well, whole region is at a mercy of one person.

Hetzner is great value, but their networking has a few issues:

1) Networking is mostly limited to 1Gbps. Even private networking. You can request a 10Gbps NIC, but it has to be housed in the correct data center and adds a $48 monthly fee.

2) Private networking is IPv4 only so dual-stack private networking isn't possible. Also each public IPv6 address is /64. Would be nice to get a /56 to setup dual-stack IPv6.

3) Can't specify a subnet to assign a server to when using hcloud API/Terraform. You have to specify the required IP on the subnet explicitly.

4) As I understand it, the private network traffic isn't truly secure between tenants, so needs to be encrypted between nodes anyway.

Still, I'm betting they'll fix these issues as their offering grows.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#176

> 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…

Not to mention that Proton relies exclusively on US-based companies for payment management (Strip, PayPal, ...).

Transitive dependencies are always a worse problem than direct dependencies, because they are out of your view and control.

But good thinking to get started with moving towards more autarky.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#177
post #106

> 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) DN…

This is a great list, thanks. Slowly going to be following suit.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#178
post #72

> 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…

> Git repos (it's too difficult) Sourcehut > Startpage uses Google's index. If they have enough users/make enough money, they'll make their own. Ecosia and Qwant (both european search engines) are working together to make their own index. In any case, even if a european is a proxy for an american service, you need to prove that there is a market for an european equivalent for change to happen.

> Sourcehut

Is it there yet?

> Notice: sr.ht is currently in alpha, and the quality of the service may reflect that. As such, payment is currently optional for most features, and only encouraged for users who want to support the ongoing development of the site. For a summary of the guarantees and limitations that the alpha entails, see this reference.

https://sourcehut.org/pricing

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#179
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3. ProtonVPN: Good on paper, totally untrusted and blocked by the internet. I can't navigate without filling 10 captchas or just be outright blocked. Even residential IPs are being blocked nowadays, we have Cloudflare to thank for that.

Yes! I run Firefox on Linux and I constantly get captcha'd everywhere (by that typical cloudflare loading page) because I'm not part of the 95% that runs Windows or Mac. Cloudflare is an awful thing for the internet.

We're clearly in the non-Chrome, non-Windows/macOS minority that Big Tech can pretty much safely ignore.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#180

About Bitwarden, i have a setting to use European server when I connect to and register a new account. Wouldn’t it have been easier to just migrate from Bitwarden us server to European server ? Proton pass free tier lack feature compared to Bitwarden. Beside id argue that no cloud is better than European cloud. There is keepass for instance, with syncthing it works pretty well.

You can run vault warden just fine.

Open source

Beats

Closed source

Beats

Managed service from Europe

Beats

Managed service from America

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