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I moved my digital stack to Europe

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Re: I moved my digital stack to Europe

#361

Post by OhMeadhbh »

AllanSavageDev wrote: post #224
cryo32 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From our perspective I'm not sure the cloud abstraction is better or we even want it to be done like that locally. Look at S3 as an API for example. It's absolutely dire. I'd rather use NFS (!). And stuff like Lambda and Cloud Functions are just cat turds. On the DB side, I can't say too much as we're a pretty obviously identifiable AWS customer if I give out any details. I will only say that nothing fits our size an…

Lambda is awesome .. until you actually try to use it for realsies. Cat turd is an apt description. Just being able to get the damn logs for debugging is itself a hassle. Terraform helps a ton in all this and I rarely find myself using the AWS UI anymore. Still Lambda is a great idea that just doesn't deliver for any use case more than responding to some S3 upload action or Event Bridge operation. Don't even get me s…

I saw you post "lambda is awesome" and was going to reply with "only in certain circumstances." But you beat me to it.

After about a year of poking lambda to see how it actually worked (versus how it was documented) and building a cloud formation replacement (TF eventually did what I wanted, but not before I made a simple PROLOG based replacement for it). But I finally made it work after MUCH struggle.

So... +1.

I put this in our code several years ago: "WARNING: Do not look at Lambda stack with remaining eye."

Re: I moved my digital stack to Europe

#362

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

sevenzero wrote: post #33
schnitzelstoat wrote: post #13

While I agree with him that the US is becoming more unpredictable, I don't think the EU is much better, especially with regards to digital things where they can be worse in some ways. For example, they are discussing restricting VPN access for 'child protection'[1] [1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_AT...

Most digital things in Europe are in fact much better. Lots of laws allow people to protect themselves from digital exploitation. I agree that there is a ton of bullshit as well though. Gotta dox myself with imprints for example, so I cant share my work with people without also doxing myself. Also as a hobbyist you pretty much need all the business documents as well, like a privacy policy even if its just a small pub…

> Most digital things in Europe are in fact much better.

I'm see a lot of "worse" in your comment and not seeing any "better". Can you give some examples of that?

Re: I moved my digital stack to Europe

#363

Post by sevenzero »

9dev wrote: post #337
sevenzero wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most digital things in Europe are in fact much better. Lots of laws allow people to protect themselves from digital exploitation. I agree that there is a ton of bullshit as well though. Gotta dox myself with imprints for example, so I cant share my work with people without also doxing myself. Also as a hobbyist you pretty much need all the business documents as well, like a privacy policy even if its just a small pub…

Well, as a German consumer, I gotta say it's pretty darn great to be able to pinpoint a website to an actual business. It's a good way to judge how legitimate an online shop is before ordering, for example; and if anything goes wrong, I know there is someone I can hold accountable.

Yea from a consumers perspective its neat. From a hobbyist dev perspective not so much.

Re: I moved my digital stack to Europe

#364

Post by vga1 »

patrickmcnamara wrote: post #238
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely there would have been mumblings in certain sectors of the EU since the first Trump administration? It’s just that they started to execute now?

Trump 2 is worse than Trump 1 by far from EU perspective. And it also proved that it wasn't a once-off that Americans will vote in someone who threatens to dismantle NATO, invade Greenland, or start trade wars with allies for no reason.

Also Trump 2 proves without a doubt that at least half of the american voters are absolutely insane or incredibly stupid. For 1 there used to be some doubt.

We in Europe are enjoying roughly 15-20% insane/stupid ratings at this point, which is not great but still a bit better.

Re: I moved my digital stack to Europe

#365

Post by riccardomc »

weberer wrote: post #347
embedding-shape wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Definitely a change, because it is not something I can recall being important just a couple of years ago. I work as a consultant and freelancer across a bunch of companies, some American but mostly European ones. Last ~8 months or so, the sentiment about "Hosting our data in EU or even our own country" has drastically changed, I don't think I've seen such a clear shift in public opinion so fast before. The amount o…

>I don't think I've seen such a clear shift in public opinion so fast before Its not about public opinion, but rather data sovereignty requirements. Certain types of data must be processed within servers located in the EU, regardless of where the company's HQ is. That's why you see most SaaS platforms nowadays offer a EU-only version.

It is definitely also about public opinion and it is going to be translated into laws soon enough (i.e. governments mandate data sovereignty).

Recent erratic policies are having a profound effect on perception of US companies.

It has been brewing for a while.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/02/27/is-overreliance-on-...

Re: I moved my digital stack to Europe

#366

Post by throwaway2037 »

andruby wrote: post #179
throwaway2037 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that has never happened to any European company, right? (I'm looking at you ASML.) By your logic, does that mean that most European nations are "no longer the safety many assumed before"?

The example you mention is a tricky one, ASML is about as European as it is American. It is heavily subject to US export controls because its machines include US components, US software and US IP. They operate multiple R&D centers and factories in the US and employ a lot of US employees (~20%)

    > The example you mention is a tricky one...
Let me generalise: Does your tech company use CPUs from Intel, AMD or Qualcomm, or NVidia GPUs or memory from SK Hynix, Samsung, or Micron, or harddrives/SSDs from Western Digital, Hitachi, IBM, Toshiba, etc., or motherboards from (any Taiwan manuf.)? Or anything produced by Samsung or TSMC? If yes (1000% of tech companies), then you are potentially subject to the magic wand of US sanctions and soverign interference. To be clear, do not read that last paragraph as a support of this soverign interference, only an acknowledgement of it.

The first time I heard that the US was "requesting" (surely a gun-to-head moment) that the Dutch Gov't restrict ASML exports to China, personally, I was stunned. Sure, the Netherlands and US have incredibly strong political, economic, security, and historical bonds, but I never expected US to interfere so deep into the Netherlands. And yet, the Netherlands capitulated. (Please don't read this as a criticism of NL -- they are ultimately "Real Politik" due to their population size.) If NL can fall, then so can any other nation in Europe (or Northeast Asia: JP/KR/TW), except Belarus and Russia.

Re: I moved my digital stack to Europe

#367

Post by riccardomc »

blululu wrote: post #278
embedding-shape wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Definitely a change, because it is not something I can recall being important just a couple of years ago. I work as a consultant and freelancer across a bunch of companies, some American but mostly European ones. Last ~8 months or so, the sentiment about "Hosting our data in EU or even our own country" has drastically changed, I don't think I've seen such a clear shift in public opinion so fast before. The amount o…

Out of curiosity how much of this is a manifestation of the utility of LLMs? I get the current political impetus right now but also the barrier for swapping out an infra stack was also much higher 2 years ago. From my own projects major swaps are now relatively trivial which means that vendor lock in is weak.

zero.

It is a manifestation of the commoditization of Cloud Computing Interfaces.

Every provider offers a blob storage, kubernetes clusters, queues and what not.

I'd argue that covers 90% of SaaS needs.

Re: I moved my digital stack to Europe

#368

Post by Alacart »

frumplestlatz wrote: post #355
embedding-shape wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trump 2 is about dismantling democracy Seems strange to me that not everyone, including republicans, aren't aware of this, when he's pretty outspoken about not wanting any more elections, and how "if you vote for me this time, it'll be the last time you have to vote". If a presidential candidate anywhere else was openly talking about wanting to remove elections and democracy in the country (not to mention triggered…

Sources for those quotes would be very helpful for anyone interested in this, because I’ve certainly never heard this before. We’re two years into his term and democracy does not appear to be dismantled, or even remotely at risk of being dismantled. I also expect the same or similar accusations to be leveled at the next Republican candidate, who if elected, will also not “dismantle democracy”.

Here is a video of him saying it:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bTm0du4kUH0

Re: I moved my digital stack to Europe

#369

Post by MartijnHols »

esistgut wrote: post #120
IAmFledge wrote: post #96

I started the process of this back in January and now, at least in terms of product hosting; fully migrated into European infrastructure ( https://bannermedia.ltd ). It didn't come without a bit of pain, but glad I've done it - and to come with this I've ended up building a whole terraform setup for cross provider / cross region high availability within Europe. So far my key mappings included: - Cloudflare -> Bunny C…

Waiting for your writeup, especially the Bunny part. We moved away from AWS but Cloudflare remains a point of failure, we are going to remove it as soon as we have some spare time to do the required research.

What are you looking for? I use Bunny CDN along with Bunny Shield, and together they're better than Cloudflare for me. It's $10/month, but I can afford it for the privacy of my users. Bunny's aggressive bot blocking without bothering the vast majority of users with regular challenge pages provides a much better UX.
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