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Moving away from US cloud services

martijnhols.nl

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Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#21

Post by fhd2 »

m00dy wrote: post #11

I wonder if shifting to cloud providers in the EU will lead to the rise of giant European cloud companies in both technology and infrastructure, or if this is just a short-term trend.

I'd like that. Personally, I prefer to self host all my stuff.

But I can't do that to our clients. I want to provide them with something that makes them independent from us, something they can just hire any random agency or freelancer to work on. That leaves AWS and Azure as strong options.

There's a number of European cloud providers (https://www.stackit.de looks especially interesting), but I'm looking for too-big-to-fail options. Hetzner sure is that, but you don't get managed relational databases, object storage and a couple of other things that typical web apps rely on.

I know I can host stuff like Postgres and MinIO myself on Hetzner cloud instances. But when it comes to _managed_ services for this stuff, from a too-big-too-fail provider, I'm drawing a blank when it comes to European providers right now.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#22

Post by perks_12 »

m00dy wrote: post #11

I wonder if shifting to cloud providers in the EU will lead to the rise of giant European cloud companies in both technology and infrastructure, or if this is just a short-term trend.

There was enough computing demand from Europe before this 'shift' (it's one tech enthusiast here). Large US cloud just opened DCs in Europe. No European cloud provider wanted to step up and provide the level of service US giants offer.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#24

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

thisdougb wrote: post #2

I moved from GitHub to self-hosted gitolite. I use a (standard) Makefile in each repo, which my deploy job runs (make test, make build, etc). I use githooks to do various automation. It's really not that much different to GH Actions, and not more work. But it's much faster, and easier to work with. If you're working in a team, then PRs are hard to replace.

On my first team in 2011 we used Phabricator before the company sprung for github enterprise. Phabricator was fine; you could even just copy/paste the output of `git diff` into a form on the UI as an alternative to pushing to a monitored branch.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#26

Post by mrweasel »

m00dy wrote: post #11

I wonder if shifting to cloud providers in the EU will lead to the rise of giant European cloud companies in both technology and infrastructure, or if this is just a short-term trend.

Honestly I doubt it. For now, the really big users, companies and large organisations are waiting it out. If they can sort of get by for the next four years, then they aren't going to make the switch, and frankly neither would I.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#27

Post by perks_12 »

m00dy wrote: post #16
drstewart wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't even a short-term trend. We saw posts like this a few years ago (in the blog post even admits he tried this before) and they went nowhere, just like this "movement" will.

I mean, let’s divide it into before and after the Trump era. Will we see the same trend once the new sheriff in town steps down for peace?

From a tech standpoint, nothing changed with Trump. The NSA had all the backdoors before Trump.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#28

Post by dijit »

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 (…

For me it's not even about privacy, it's pretty clear that no matter where I host things, if I don't have control of the hardware and the TLS termination then there's no privacy I can guarantee.

However there's still a case to be made for some form of digital sovereignty.

It's no longer considered a complete paranoid delusion that the US could snap its fingers and put tariffs/sanctions on digital goods served from US companies or consider the EU to be proscribed and cut access entirely.

I used to allow myself to think of the consequences of such a situation, after all the US very famously stated that they have no such thing as allies, only temporary allegiances, and as a brit: that is a sobering thought, because we cosy up to them a lot - even going so far as to join them in an illegal war.

However, if you consider the economic harm that would be caused by microsoft just cutting access to Office365, disabling the licenses used or even cutting access to EntraID and managed sharepoints and/or Teams. Most of the EU would not lose billions in lost productivity, they would lose trillions.

What a crazy economic risk, and that's just one product. Nearly all digital services in the EU depend nearly entirely on Azure/AWS & GCP.

Even the ones that don't depend on hosting, still depend on Google Workspace or Office365; both of which depend heavily upon online services which may not always be online during heavy tensions.

I know this is difficult to reason about, but we really have our heads in the alligators mouth when it comes to our digital capability- it will be hard to remove it, and many people are enjoying the echo and will actively fight against attempts for change.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#29

Post by Dzidas »

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.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#30

Post by fbn79 »

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.

Legally Proton is not based in European Union nor European Economic Area. Switzerland is extra EU just like USA, China or Russia
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