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Moving away from US cloud services

martijnhols.nl

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Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#321

Post by pjc50 »

bamboozled wrote: post #319
cutemonster wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, plus for example helping out with surveillance, finding and stopping dissidents. Fascism tends to be (I read/learned recently) friendly to big corporations, as long as they are loyal to the regime.

Doesn't this just start to go from productive efforts to stupid ones? Why aren't we all flying on Russian made planes and using Russian cloud products?

I don't get what you're saying? There was a brief fad for using the other Chinese short video service, Rednote (Xiaohongshu) for about five minutes while TikTok was banned in the US, but mostly this discussion is about data sovereignty for Europeans who want to use European products for better legal protection.

(people have long since moved away from the Russian-bought social network, Livejournal; it's very occasionally useful to look something up on Yandex if you think it may have been delisted)

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#322

Post by mrweasel »

chgs wrote: post #163
n3storm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO Aws is designed for totally embracing their philosophy and language. You don't understand two Aws Devs talking to each other. Even organizations are internally structured for Aws operations. This create something even stronger than a dependency.

Making yourself a subsided of Amazon was never wise. You exist as long as Amazon allows you to. It’s modern feudalism.

> Making yourself a subsided of Amazon was never wise

True, but the AWS pricing doesn't make sense otherwise. If you're not using the managed services, then the value proposition is no longer there. Using those services is what allows you to build massive systems for relatively cheap, with much less staff. We had a project that was to be moved from on-prem to Azure (same deal), it went from thousands of Euros per month to fitting into the a free-tier, but only because we could use managed services. Spinning up the same VMs would cost more than hosting it ourselves.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#323

Post by attendant3446 »

jb1991 wrote: post #251
McDyver wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For encrypted mail, there is also tuta.com (previously Tutanota), Germany based

Do you know anything about another popular German mail provider, mailbox.org?

mailbox.org were good, but they decided to become more than just a mail provider and forced users into other, more expensive plans, adding office and cloud storage.

There is also posteo.de. It doesn't support custom domains, but I use it in combination with simplelogin.io (I think French, but now owned by Proton).

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#324

Post by attendant3446 »

jb1991 wrote: post #250
pzo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m curious about mailbox.org, which markets themselves as “privacy made in Germany“

I used mailbox.org for several years until they forced everyone into more expensive plans by adding irrelevant features like office and cloud storage. This kind of behaviour from them was disappointing.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#326

Post by attendant3446 »

hovering_nox wrote: post #133
CER10TY wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://tuta.com/

It's an alternative to Proton because it doesn't support open standards (like IMAP), but it has the same problem - vendor lock-in.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#327

Post by adamc »

justmarc wrote: post #129

Very well written and justified. At the end almost everything in life is about interests. It's clearly in the best interests of one country, or union of countries, to do their thing and reduce reliance on others.

It's striking how little discussion there is of the underlying risks that now make the US cloud less attractive. Trump is doing a lot of damage to the US as a services provider.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#328

Post by fhd2 »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #48
fhd2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I have the same attitude and regularly find (sales) people not understanding why I'm doing this. They are pathologically looking for my angle. But there's none.

I totally have an angle, I consider our reputation to be our most important asset. There's a lot of devs and agencies out there. It's a whole lot harder to find good _and_ trustworthy ones. Being that is my angle. We got close to 100 % of our business from recommendations, and I like that. Wouldn't really want to spam strangers for finding gigs.

Of course, a lot of agencies do just that. And I've also seen more than one situation where an agency held their client hostage, not giving them access to their own code, hosting environment and what not.

Sure, it's not 100 % angle. It's also to a large degree professional ethics. But I can easily rationalise it into business value, and am probably not far off.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#329

Post by Foobar8568 »

hnlmorg wrote: post #207
Foobar8568 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but nobody competes with AWS, Azure or GCP, everything else is easy. And most likely, most of the services/saas you mentionned relies on "US" cloud infrastructure.

OVH and Scaleaway? If not used the latter but the former was excellent back when I used to use them. They were a little more focused on traditional compute and lacks the general breadth of services that the likes of AWS offer. But if you’re in a position where you’re able to choose a cloud platform provider based on the location of their HQ, then the chances are you’re requirements from said cloud provider are pretty…

True, I missed out what scaleway have done over the years, but after being literally burnt by OVH, and hearing that scaleway was operating in similar fashion, I gave up looking at their offering.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#330

Post by flurdy »

oakesm9 wrote: post #192
CER10TY wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fastmail[0] is what I use for my personal email. They support all the standards, but are also pushing things forward with standardising the JMAP protocol[1] which is much better suited to mobile clients than IMAP. They only have email and calendaring though, no equivalent of Drive/Docs/Sheets. [0] https://www.fastmail.com [1] https://jmap.io

I am very very happy with Fastmail. I know they have some presence in the US but I think they scaled that down and are entirely an Australian company.

Their integration with 1password and masking email aliases is also very useful [0].

If however you want to host your own emails, I did once write an extensive guide [1].

[0] https://www.fastmail.com/features/masked-email/

[1] https://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/

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