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Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

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Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#311

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

Hokusai wrote: post #219
pmontra wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe when we (re)create our own electronics industry. Even China has problems with sourcing components (the TSMC/USA licenses case). It also doesn't help to be a collection of small countries that can be played one against the other by USA, China and Russia and possibly others.

> Maybe when we (re)create our own electronics industry. It works the other way around. We cannot have an European industry meanwhile USA government backed-up companies are competing with our startups. > collection of small countries Europe is bigger than the USA. And the division within the USA is as big or bigger than Europe. And, we cannot talk about China.

At least Airbus worked (somewhat). So there is that.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#312

Post by Frost1x »

syshum wrote: post #274
Kinrany wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there yet an open-source alternative to GCP? Can you buy bare metal and just have your own cloud?

OpenStack is probably the closest but it will not have everything GCP or AWS has

It's probably enough for most organizations, though.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#314

Post by webmaven »

marcusjt wrote: post #305
hulitu wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could still host it in a country with a less bad track record of industrial espionage. Good luck finding one. The world is divided in 3 spheres of influence: US, China and Russia. To make business you must obey one of them.

Plus the EU, surely?

> Plus the EU, surely?

For most practical purposes, the EU is nested within the US sphere of influence.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#315

Post by throwaway894345 »

Kinrany wrote: post #268
ornornor wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company self hosts everything. They’re so bad at it. Something is always down and we waste so much time with our shorty tooling. We even had this amazing idea that we could implement our own version of GCP from scratch. The result is dismal, we dread using it because it’s very unreliable, and it costs double or triple what GCP costs. We’re not a small company, we have about 1k employees and our business is softwar…

Is there yet an open-source alternative to GCP? Can you buy bare metal and just have your own cloud?

Presumably Kubernetes is the answer here, but you need to run a lot of things yourself that come for free with GKE. Also “just buy bare metal” ignores the massive effort involved in operating a data center.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#316

Post by SamuelAdams »

wrkronmiller wrote: post #309

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_triangle_(US_politics) Amazon likes government contracts. Amazon probably wants this guy on-board to help them get more contracts.

Well yeah. Government contracts have insane margins for virtually all private sector companies that can get their hands on them. I used to work at a manufacturing company that made car parts and military equipment. The military contracts had margins that were easily 2-3 times what the car parts made. And they required the same amount of labor, work, and time.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#317

Post by rat9988 »

marcusjt wrote: post #305
hulitu wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could still host it in a country with a less bad track record of industrial espionage. Good luck finding one. The world is divided in 3 spheres of influence: US, China and Russia. To make business you must obey one of them.

Plus the EU, surely?

US sphere of influence.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#318

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

cb504 wrote: post #172
hobofan wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bigger worry would be continued data access. So even if the data is in Germany, access to it is still controlled by an US entity, which can be forced by the US government to shut off access. Given that the current administration seems to enact embargos on a whim, this doesn't seem too unlikely.

In my limited experience, Germans are more sensitive to personal privacy than other Europeans, even the rest of the world. To non-Germans they might seem paranoid. Maybe we can all learn from their historical mistake. The problem I see with the DIY-attitude is that security is easy to get wrong and is moving target. The other opinion here is "keep it in the country". If someone really wants your data, the locale won'…

Hmm, mumble mumble mirrored switch port in the exchange mumble mumble mumble...

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#319

Post by Frost1x »

phkahler wrote: post #281
postpawl wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re really overestimating the ability of most small tech companies to self-host reliably and securely.

What do you think they did before the cloud?

This is what amazes me. I suspect there's an entire generation of developers and technologists that don't realize we used to manage infrastructure and deploy applications ontop of it.

It's like as if somehow, in many eyes, that's impossible now. Depending on your scale, it may be impractical given external hosting options but it's certainly not impossible. Lots of data centers rose and started automated processes of shared hosting and co-locating hardware which was a step forward. I remember working with Rackspace, Equinix, The Planet, etc. which further automated quicker server deployment, had applications for UPS resets/interrupts, etc. The more you moved towards a specific business's automation services, the less portable your infrastructure was outside that environment.

That continued on until you now have more sophisticated hosting like what AWS and GC provide. Now, abstractions exist for about everything in a data center and the trade off is that you now have to manage all that complexity through proprietary APIs, consoles, and so forth.

In addition, the tradeoff here is the more complex the infrastructure, the less easy it is to shift it to another provider. That may be fine for you, it may also not be. It's all definitely possible though.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#320

Post by raverbashing »

agustif wrote: post #279
joelhaasnoot wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Postman has gotten dirty. Why the hell should a REST client/testing tool transmit everything to the cloud?

Postwoman might be enough for you if looking for a replacement and it's FOSS

Depending on what you're doing, just use curl
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