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Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

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Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#401

Post by severino »

202508042147 wrote: post #278
tmtvl wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> yes, I can use an app to pay So you move the power from two American companies (Visa and Mastercard) to two American companies (Apple and Google)? What's that supposed to solve? Also, fuck apps. I had to set up an app for my mother to recharge her new hybrid car and I am not joking: at one point I had to create a log in for her and was greeted by a screen with two options: Log In (blue button, white text), and Log…

> So you move the power from two American companies (Visa and Mastercard) to two American companies (Apple and Google)? What's that supposed to solve? Unsure what you mean, but for context I use an app developed by a consortium of local banks and it works by scanning a QR code. Indeed, I use an Android phone but my next one will be a de-googled one like a Fairphone with /e/OS. Hopefully the same app will work there..…

> Hopefully the same app will work there...

That's the problem: currently many of those banking apps in the EU require having a phone with Google Play services and other "security" stuff that makes you reliant on American companies, like the post you're replying to claims.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#402

Post by polski-g »

UltraSane wrote: post #174
albert_e wrote: post #171

AWS seems to have seen the writing on the wall and has already launched a European Soverign Cloud -- a separate partition like they have for GovCloud and China. I am guessing other hyperscalers must be doing the same? Are we seeing a strong aversion among EU companies to use these offerings from US firms (AWS, Google, Microsoft) and viable competition emerging from Europe? The selling point of many offerings from cur…

Can any AWS data center really be immune from US national security letters?

Nope. They'd have to spin up the infra and sell the entire enterprise.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#404

Post by pyrale »

bjackman wrote: post #302
armcat wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer That's true right now, yes. But things are changing rapidly, e.g. there is evroc [1], Mimer [2] and others are popping up too. it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard be…

Getting Google Docs to be a Word alternative was an order of magnitude easier than getting GCP to be an AWS competitor. Now that AWS has two serious competitors (and some non serious ones), privately funding another one just seems impossible to me. Who is gonna chip in tens of billions of dollars to fund "that, but European, and 15 years from now"? I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is some combinati…

> I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is some combination of

Just mandate EU countries' public administration to rely exclusively on EU cloud solutions. That doesn't need to be done at once.

This would create enough of a captive market to start the homegrown industry.

> Europeans have to use lower-level infra and do a lot more ops in-house

To be honest, every large enough company would benefit from doing a little bit of that.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#405

Post by belorn »

9dev wrote: post #385
belorn wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go through a security review. It not as simple as just saying "we outsource that so we have no idea what they do or how they manage the data". It is disingenuous to claim that people can just outsource the whole problem and not care. This would be part of the responsibility of the cloud managers, which need to be hired, paid and trained, on top of the cost of paying the cloud providers. There is no free lunch.

I am responsible for security reviews. I never claimed it was that simple, nor that there was free lunch. I said it is easier to outsource it than to handle it yourself to an equal level of what a cloud provider is able to do, from a legal and operational perspective.

Easier is a very subjective measurement. Lets compare two solutions with different hires. One hire system administrators that rent space in a serverhall. The other hire cloud managers that rent space in the cloud.

What can we definitive say about the difference be in salaries, training, and team size? Can we say anything specific about legal and operational perspective?

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#406

Post by Throaway3126 »

ben_w wrote: post #395
Throaway3126 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump and his team repeatedly saying they have no problems using force against Greenland and Canada were the red lines and they have already been crossed.

I want those actions to have been the red line, and wish my representatives to treat it so if they are not yet. It is important to keep separate what I want to be and what is.

They are the red lines. There is no going back. The USA is too dangerous to rely on, that's quite clear.

People don't quite realize how big a deal "invading" Greenland would have been. That's literally an act of war! What's next, occupying France? Saying that it's at all a possibility is far beyond any red line that the EU thought it would have to deal with.

Not only would the rest of the world ditch the USA, but the Democrats themselves would take the opportunity to publically announce that they do not recognize Donald Trump's government.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#407

Post by ExoticPearTree »

Nextgrid wrote: post #378
ExoticPearTree wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You go multi-region. Multi-cloud is extremely expensive, both in terms of data and functional equivalence. Bare metal is pretty much the same story: you can host it at different providers, but scaling that and maintaining coherence between data centers is not an easy feat as it might sound. And seriously now, no sane provider is willing to cover your losses if they go do down. On the other hand, it's not a secret thi…

If you’re going to go multi-region and take the latency hit may as well go multi-provider no? Multi-region within the same provider won’t shield you against unknown shared dependencies on a single point of failure (AWS console auth still relies on credentials being checked in a single region if I remember right). And yes fully agreed that maintaining consistency between active-active regions (whether cloud or bare-me…

> If you’re going to go multi-region and take the latency hit may as well go multi-provider no?

No. If you go multi-region, you use the same tooling, same terraform modules and logic and so on. There's little plumbing needed to make it work. And latency wise this is not an issue in most cases, since most of the requests are covered by the CDN anyway. And you don't have to duplicate everything.

If you go multi-cloud you need to learn a whole new set of systems. And that is expensive. Both in terms of operating and people - because you will need more.

> Agreed, but thats why all those who justify the 10-90x premium of the cloud over bare-metal are full of it - that premium is not actually worth it.

You get charged a premium for convenience. And a high enough chance you don't have downtime.

> Maybe for you it’s not a secret? Literally every thread tries to justify cloud reliability and their resulting markups.

Cloud is reliable if you are willing to spend some money to benefit from that reliability and convenience.

---

Besides this, another thing where cloud saves you money is compliance. They have all the right attestations in place to make your audits go easy. If you self-host on bare metal, you're going to spend a lot of time to be compliant with various regulations. Maybe if you're a small company, you don't have that much compliance you need to do. But once you grow a little, those immutable Stackdriver logs are a godsend when you're asked to prove logs have not been tampered with.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#408

Post by gchamonlive »

gottorf wrote: post #374
nixpulvis wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. One of the USA's greatest exports is intelligence and higher education, and what has been happening with that and the general anti-intellectual atmosphere is to me the most concerning as an american. Ironically, public education in america has been pretty bad for a while. But I'm going to start rambling here... way too many problems, and no damn leadership.

[flagged]

Could you elaborate on what constitutes far-left political activism?

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#409

Post by bborud »

nixpulvis wrote: post #346
bborud wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is risky to believe that the development gap alone makes for higher economic efficiency when manufacturing things in China. There are very real structural differences in how various industries are organized. Not least in terms of geography. This is an aspect the west seems to have missed entirely as there are no attempts to learn from it or emulate it. Everyone knows about Shenzhen. Not everyone knows that this is…

My point was that the development gap is what lead to the current situation, not that it's just cheap labor that makes Chinese stuff cheap. My point about maintaining higher economic efficiency is actually the same point you're making. How can the globe (not just the west vs the east) learn from the past and build for the future. We live in a magical world with translation services available to billions of people, ho…

I think Congress is actually the biggest obstacle to efficient manufacturing in the US. It is a body where the primary motivation of representatives centers around what they can get for their constituents, not what makes sense nationally. So any government spending (eg procurement) will actually tend to drive fragmentation as representatives fight for their states.

Take for instance the space sector. It is fragmented by design. By Congress. Not only is it spread all over the country, making collaboration expensive, time-consuming and clumsy: there are essentially six different federal space agencies of which NASA is just one. This is terribly inefficient.

I remember when reading about the Apollo missions it was astonishing just how much time they lost by different parts being built all over the US and then shipped across the country to be integrated. Utter engineering madness that was only made to work because one could pour immense amount of cash on it.

This is why companies like SpaceX was able to run more efficiently: they do a lot more in vastly fewer locations. Ditto for Lockheed during their golden years: Skunk Works was famous for having "everyone under one roof and within walking distance of each other". (That Skunk Works neither exists anymore, nor can it exist, but that's a longer story which is also about extreme inefficiency).

It is reasonable to assume that Europe wouldn't do any better. Or any setup where politicians are inclined to optimize for regional gain. You'd probably end up with the same political fights over who gets what if the EU were to push towards more of the kinds of manufacturing that you find in China.

We know we're inefficient and we have some idea of why. We like to blame factors that are easy to politicise or evoke emotion (environment, exploitation of the poor etc), but I don't think they are as important as people tend to think.

We just don't want to change. And there are legitimate reasons for that. Chief among them that we're uncomfortable with strong central control. (Well, we used to be. It only took a majority of republicans about a decade to turn 180 degrees on that question and prefer an all-controlling federal government dominated by the executive branch)

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#410

Post by pimlottc »

thunfischtoast wrote: post #327
znnajdla wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My theory is that 80% of workloads on AWS/GCP/Azure are pure waste. They sell complexity-as-a-service. 80% of startups and enterprises could run on a single beefy baremetal server (or two). AWS/GCP/Azure are the result of hype bubbles and VC-funded waste culture, it's not necessary for Europe to recreate that to compete.

I once had a working program, running on a 4 GB RAM virtual server with MongoDB. Everything was fast and testing and deploying a new version took me some minutes usually. Existing users were happy as far as I could tell. But then some corporate IT guy mandated everything had to be using managed AWS services in some three tier dev-test-production setup, despite having no prior experience with that on either side. Cost…

AWS is often unnecessary but I do hope you had some kind of pre-prod environment in your original setup
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