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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

#531

Post by throwaway902984 »

allarm wrote: post #505
Zigurd wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but obv. Only lunatics would use a Russian cloud service. The interesting part is whether and what extent China is different. Also, why Europe should start treating us like Russians.

> why Europe should start treating us like Russians. I don't know, maybe because your president is a dangerous lunatic? I really enjoy these "are we the baddies?" moments.

Was that not an imperative statement agreeing with your cathartic comment? A little weird there isn't an explicit "this is why", but asking questions with a poorly conjugated why along with bad punctuation isn't usually a native speakers habit.

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

#532

Post by fakedang »

detourdog wrote: post #440
bborud wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think Susan Collins is a great example of this. Her support of Kristi Noem is based on deals she finds acceptable for Maine residents. The fact that other states suffer at the hands of ICE doesn't effect her decision's. Collins feels she only is responsible for Maine and not humans that live outside of Maine. I find this sort of compartmentalization offensive to the common good.

That's representative democracy for you. Heck, even China faces the same issue, but they get to make it a competition between provinces, on who can win the favor of the emperor. Helps for them that the emperor has supreme authority though.

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

#533

Post by locknitpicker »

cmenge wrote: post #498

1. Europe doesn't have comparable offerings. The amount of money invested is below what a single hyperscaler spends per quarter. (StackIT might be on track to change that looking at the pure numbers) 2. European politicians still seem to believe it's about renting compute and storage; they seem to have little understanding of what "a cloud offering" really is; the EU has less than 5% of GPUs, supposedly 3. For health…

> 1. Europe doesn't have comparable offerings.

I think you should pause for a moment. There are plenty of European cloud providers that allow you to run VMs in multiple points of presence across the world. Some even offer managed Kubernetes clusters.

It is true that most European cloud providers don't offer many high-level managed services such as function-as-a-service compute solutions, durable execution engines, etc. However, those are not exactly hard requirements. In fact, some cloud providers offer these services for reasons that are not in line with the customer's best interests, such as better hardware utilization and vendor lock-in.

So think about it for a second: if you can put together a Kubernetes cluster, what high-level service do you absolutely need to be able to put together a working service?

I can tell you right away: nothing.

> 2. European politicians still seem to believe it's about renting compute and storage;

I think you need to touch grass on this one. European companies require cloud services for the same reason any other company requires cloud services. If you take the time to learn about how cloud providers such as AWS market their services, you will learn that they firmly base their offering on the exact criteria you are arguing against: compute that scales, and reliability. To argue otherwise, you must argue against how US cloud providers market themselves, which would be baffling.

> 4. If push comes to shove, the EU is critically dependent (...)

There is no "if". We are already at that point. NATO is already running military exercises without the US, and since Trump took over support for Ukraine has been driven primarily by Europe. NATO has been very vocal in how France and the UK have been the primary providers of intelligence to Ukraine.

> 5. As a private citizen, given the incarcerations in the UK and Germany, it seems one should worry more about the EU getting your data than the other way around

You got to be joking. The US now demands access to your social media accounts as precondition to enter the country, and the US also outright disappears people out of the street.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dz0g2ykpeo

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

#534

Post by throwaway902984 »

Zigurd wrote: post #413
miohtama wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russian and China are already getting rid of Microsoft.

True but obv. Only lunatics would use a Russian cloud service. The interesting part is whether and what extent China is different. Also, why Europe should start treating us like Russians.

Are you asking a rhetorical question or making a statement?

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

#535

Post by tene80i »

thethimble wrote: post #517
fnoef wrote: post #512

I keep seeing over and over how Europe should be self sufficient. I’d be happy for Europe to be self sufficient. But the truth is that Europe does not have the infrastructure and offering to be self sufficient. Even looking at basic things like AWS SES, there is no European offering. Apart from scaleway, there are no competitions for big cloud providers. There are no alternative to office suites. And I’m not even tal…

Perhaps there should be an EU committee to draft a mandate for a working group tasked with identifying the necessary stakeholders for a preliminary report on digital infrastructure.

Perhaps instead there should be a president enriching himself and insulting citizens executed by his goons.

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

#536

Post by Juliate »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #304
Juliate wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer. But there is also no requirement for... most of their specific offering to start an online business. Some people seem to miss this in the picture: you _can_ build without them, outside of them, and fund equivalent technology development while staying outside of them. It's a matter of strategy and of cho…

It's also a matter of "how easy is to find people that are good with X, Y, Z" where X, Y, Z are some niche technologies or offerings compared to the more wildly used ones. You can start a business in your laundry room if you know how to set up servers and get internet and stuff. But that's gonna be you and maybe a few "hobbyists" that might want to join on that endeavor, but the rest of developers or admins will want…

I definitely hire talent that can grow the business, and grow with it.

And that means knowing your 0's and 1's better than knowing how to operate the latest trendy calculator: it's easier to understand the calculator, when you know what it's made of; harder to work your way backwards, although doable.

Yes, finding people that master PostgreSQL clustering (and SLA/RTO tradeoffs) is harder than finding AWS-certified folks, but that deeper knowledge definitely pays off: you understand the tradeoffs why, before you migrate, not after. When you know the fundamentals, you learn their implementation way faster.

The "wildly used", locked-in services are more often than not, built with/over the "niche", no-strings-attached ones.

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

#537

Post by locknitpicker »

hilios wrote: post #523
cmenge wrote: post #498

1. Europe doesn't have comparable offerings. The amount of money invested is below what a single hyperscaler spends per quarter. (StackIT might be on track to change that looking at the pure numbers) 2. European politicians still seem to believe it's about renting compute and storage; they seem to have little understanding of what "a cloud offering" really is; the EU has less than 5% of GPUs, supposedly 3. For health…

What incarcerations in Germany are you referring to?

[flagged]

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

#538

Post by vga42 »

cmenge wrote: post #498

1. Europe doesn't have comparable offerings. The amount of money invested is below what a single hyperscaler spends per quarter. (StackIT might be on track to change that looking at the pure numbers) 2. European politicians still seem to believe it's about renting compute and storage; they seem to have little understanding of what "a cloud offering" really is; the EU has less than 5% of GPUs, supposedly 3. For health…

>OpenStack by Huawei

If you mean to say that OpenStack is made by Huawei, that is not true. They are a major contributor and a platinum member of that open source project, though.

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

#539

Post by Juliate »

Nextgrid wrote: post #289
Juliate wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you still won't get with 170k in the Bay Area, what you get in Paris, Madrid, Nantes or Barcelona with 80k. In France, if you get 80k net, you do actually get ~160k, half of which is collected/distributed before by your employer to various mutualised funds (health, retirement, unemployment, state taxes, employee benefits, etc.). And the mechanism is somewhat similar in other EU countries.

80k net is 6.6k. If you're getting 80k (which is the very upper end of the range) it's likely you are in Paris, where you're gonna give at least 2k of that on rent for a shitty damp place, and double that for something decent. Trust me I would love to quit consulting and be able to have a chill permanent job that can afford me a good flat and lifestyle. I'm still searching. Spain situation is very similar last time I…

2k for a rent in Paris gets you nice places if you have the time to spend to look for it. Cooking your own food at home definitely makes a huge difference every month.

The suburb is quite nice too, if you get a few home-office days. For 4k? you can have a big house+garden at 30min from Paris center (https://www.seloger.com/classified-search?distributionTypes=...)

As a SRE, I got 65k in Nantes before I quit, and I've never had to think about any single expense at all, not once (having kids, house, dog, car, garden). That would still have been quite confortable in Paris (swapping the house for a smaller flat, and without the car/dog/garden though).

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

#540

Post by Zenst »

cmenge wrote: post #498

1. Europe doesn't have comparable offerings. The amount of money invested is below what a single hyperscaler spends per quarter. (StackIT might be on track to change that looking at the pure numbers) 2. European politicians still seem to believe it's about renting compute and storage; they seem to have little understanding of what "a cloud offering" really is; the EU has less than 5% of GPUs, supposedly 3. For health…

The Huawei ban in the European Union (EU) has been a gradual, uneven process, shifting from voluntary guidelines in 2020 to increasingly mandatory, country-specific, and EU-wide restrictions by 2025–2026.

Here is the timeline of Huawei's ban and restrictions in the EU and UK:

Phase 1: Initial Restrictions and Voluntary Guidelines (2019–2020) May 2019: The United States places Huawei on a trade blacklist, restricting access to key technologies (Google Android, US chips), which triggers security reviews across Europe.

January 2020: The European Commission launches its "5G Security Toolbox," encouraging EU member states to restrict or exclude "high-risk vendors" (HRV) like Huawei from critical core network infrastructure.

July 2020 (UK): The UK government announces a total ban on buying new Huawei 5G equipment after December 31, 2020, and orders the removal of all existing Huawei 5G gear by 2027.

October 2020 (Sweden): Sweden bans Huawei and ZTE from 5G networks and orders the removal of existing equipment by January 2025.

Phase 2: Implementation Hurdles (2021–2023) 2021-2022: Many EU nations slow-walk the implementation of the 5G toolbox, with only a small number of countries actively banning Huawei from core networks due to costs and dependence on its technology.

June 2023: EU officials express frustration that only one-third of EU countries have implemented restrictions on high-risk vendors.

Phase 3: Hardening Stance and National Bans (2024–2025) July 2024 (Germany): After years of delays, Germany announces an agreement with major operators to remove Huawei and ZTE critical components from 5G core networks by the end of 2026, and from access/transport networks by 2029.

August 2025 (Spain): Spain cancels a government contract with Telefonica involving Huawei equipment. November 2025 (EU-wide): The European Commission pushes for a binding, mandatory ban, threatening to make the 2020 voluntary guidelines legally required for all member states.

Phase 4: Proposed Mandatory EU-Wide Ban (2026) January 20, 2026: The European Commission unveils a new proposal aimed at forcing EU member states to remove Huawei and ZTE from their networks within three years of adoption.

January 2026: Reports indicate the EU may move to ban Huawei and ZTE from critical infrastructure, including fixed-line and fiber networks, not just 5G. Summary of Key Country Timelines

UK: New equipment banned (Dec 2020), full removal by 2027. Sweden: Full 5G ban, removal by Jan 2025. Germany: Core removal by end of 2026, RAN removal by 2029. EU (General): Proposed 3-year mandatory phase-out starting from 2026

Must say, tech that has held up for all that time, must be doing something right.

So this cloud ride, the possibility of a whole new paradigm in computing could happen before we see EU cloud centricity.

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