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Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

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Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#61

Post by filleduchaos »

tt24 wrote: post #37
retired wrote: post #5

Years ago I was making the case that instead of digging ourselves into the Amazon eco-system with S3 storage, EC2 instances, DynamoDB and various other Amazon specific cloud products... we should just host virtual machines and have everything in there using open source products. People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.

This is great, your suggestion to replace s3 and ddb is to run some VMs? I don’t blame people for being skeptical

Projects like Ceph and Minio have existed for years, though?

Beyond that, I just don't understand your point of view at all. Do people unironically think there is some super special dark magic being done in the bowels of Amazon, as opposed to just...code that runs on (virtual and physical) machines? The open source community yielded Linux but it's just sooo impossible for it to yield an object storage service? What a strangely shackled view of the world.

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#62

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

> will sign a major contract tomorrow

Ok so nothing has actually happened. It's also not specified whether this is in addition to their AWS footprint, or if it's a migration. It will be interesting to see an update in 5 years on how this goes.

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#63

Post by green7ea »

RobotToaster wrote: post #33
xfactorial wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole business model is around “Optimization through custom tools”. We can go with your idea, sure: a few months in, an Account Manager from the cloud provider shows up and says your bill could be reduced by 50% if you just adopt some changes, using their custom, super optimized tools (“minor changes” will be the mantra). And now you have your own company looking back to you on how can they get those savings, peo…

Do people actually take claims like that from glorified salesmen seriously? If a car salesman told me I could save 50% of my fuel bill from driving their special car a certain way I'd laugh at them.

I had many conversations with a former boss about the Azure sales team. They would come in, say they can do it cheaper, simpler and better — he was immediately convinced.

I would do a calculation based on their public price plan and come up with a 5-10x price compared to the bare metal OVH solution that perfectly fit our use case. I would then ask the sales team where I made a mistake in my calculation and hear nothing back.

A few months later, they would come back with the same pitch and the whole process would repeat...

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#65

Post by holoduke »

kypro wrote: post #40
retired wrote: post #5

Years ago I was making the case that instead of digging ourselves into the Amazon eco-system with S3 storage, EC2 instances, DynamoDB and various other Amazon specific cloud products... we should just host virtual machines and have everything in there using open source products. People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.

This would only work if you have a solid devops team imo. AWS makes it extremely easy to deploy and scale infra. Another advantage of AWS is permission management, automatic RDS snapshots, cloudwatch comes out of the box... You can do everything with VMs, but in practise it's probably much harder.

With opsAI using Claude it's becoming easier again.

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#67

Post by palmotea »

walrus01 wrote: post #17
xfactorial wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole business model is around “Optimization through custom tools”. We can go with your idea, sure: a few months in, an Account Manager from the cloud provider shows up and says your bill could be reduced by 50% if you just adopt some changes, using their custom, super optimized tools (“minor changes” will be the mantra). And now you have your own company looking back to you on how can they get those savings, peo…

Preventing this from happening requires a clued-in CTO and equivalent senior level leadership who can defend against such 'attack' methods and knows the difference between, for instance, paying a monthly recurring cost to host a Linux/KVM virtual machine and paying for some totally 'cloud' SaAs. Further, it needs people in decision making roles who understand and value the strategic differences between having an infr…

> Preventing this from happening requires a clued-in CTO and equivalent senior level leadership who can defend against such 'attack' methods and knows the difference between, for instance, paying a monthly recurring cost to host a Linux/KVM virtual machine and paying for some totally 'cloud' SaAs.

And the reality is eventually you'll get a clueless one, and everything will revert to the mean.

And the mean is heavily influenced by marketing propaganda.

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#68

Post by lmf4lol »

retired wrote: post #5

Years ago I was making the case that instead of digging ourselves into the Amazon eco-system with S3 storage, EC2 instances, DynamoDB and various other Amazon specific cloud products... we should just host virtual machines and have everything in there using open source products. People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.

I am running my startup out of a self build GPU server from our office with a backup to the cloud. I only pay for the IP address as electricity is included in the rent. If the startup fails, Ill have thousand other potential use case for it and in the worst case, it will make for a awesome gaming machine.

The machine is a beast and I can serve a lot of users with it. In fact, and quite funnily, I already serve much more users with it than a lot of my older clients do with their software running on expensive k8s setup because „scale“ :-)

And last, but not least, I had a lot of fun building it. Its just nice to hear that thing humming away in the corner.

Re: Dutch central bank ditches AWS and chooses Lidl for European Cloud

#70

Post by lelanthran »

BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #39
retired wrote: post #5

Years ago I was making the case that instead of digging ourselves into the Amazon eco-system with S3 storage, EC2 instances, DynamoDB and various other Amazon specific cloud products... we should just host virtual machines and have everything in there using open source products. People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.

I prefer not using managed services but I kind of understand the appeal. Instead of paying several engineers, that you have to vet first, to configure and maintain the services adjacent to your product you can just pay AWS or Azure or someone else to maintain the service. Then you can concentrate your whole manpower on your product. In case the service goes down you can blame someone else and maybe even recover some…

> Instead of paying several engineers, that you have to vet first, to configure and maintain the services adjacent to your product you can just pay AWS or Azure or someone else to maintain the service.

Your engineers who all have to possess AWS or similar certs before you hire them, work for free?

A move off VPS to managed services doesn't reduce your headcount or labour costs.

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