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Here in Germany I used to work for a company that swore off Amazon and other US cloud vendors because of things like this: the relationships between them and th

Here in Germany I used to work for a company that swore off Amazon and other US cloud vendors because of things like this: the relationships between them and the government are too tight. They didn’t want German user data being compromised. It could have been FUD to do things on premises or what not but it seemed to make sense at the time and now with this...

88840-8855 6y ago
Are you sure you didnt spell "China cloud" and "Huawei" wrong? /s Just because we (Germans, Europeans) are culturally closer to Americans and share certain values does not mean that we should have a double standard on our external affairs. We are kicking out Huawei. When will we kick out Amazon, Google, Apple and Cisco?
- tick_tock_tick 6y ago
  There needs to be EU based options before any of them could be replaced.
  - PeterStuer 6y ago
    As always, if there ever threatened to emerge one it will be bought by a US company with free petrodollar.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  Though I completely agree that the double standard is ridiculous, the reasoning behind it likely involves the complicated arrangement between Germany and the US military. China doesn't still have 30,000 troops "occupying" Germany.
  - puszczyk 6y ago
    How are they occupying Germany? When was the last time they’ve intervened or even threatened to intervene? Don’t blow it out of proportion.
    - fvdessen 6y ago
      Didn't they threaten to invade the Netherlands if they continue their investigation in US War Crimes ?
      - sdoering 6y ago
        You are, I believe, referring to the "American Service Members Protection Act" [1], signed into law in 2002 by Bush? This law, still on the books, theoretically allows the president to order military action against the ICC in Den Haag (The Hague) should they ever try an American Service Member. > The act also prohibits U.S. military aid to countries that are party to the court. However, exceptions are allowed for aid to NATO members, major non-NATO allies, Taiwan, and countries that have entered into "Article 98 agreements", agreeing not to hand over U.S. nationals to the court. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr... Nonetheless that does not make the US forces in Germany an occupational force.
        srean 6y ago
        > Nonetheless that does not make the US forces in Germany an occupational force. A stick is a stick regardless of whether it has been used to thrash someone lately.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      I put it in quotes in an attempt to highlight that it was not a formal military occupation. Their presence does show some level of influence the US military has and it is a threat to prevent Germany from making any truly radical moves.
  - syshum 6y ago
    Has Germany asked the US to leave? Taking all the US Money with it? Some how I doubt it. Maybe Germany (and the EU as a whole) should start paying for its own defense, and paying their agreed to share of GDP into NATO while they are at it
    - Semaphor 6y ago
      > Maybe Germany (and the EU as a whole) should start paying for its own defense, and paying their agreed to share of GDP into NATO while they are at it Huh, and here I thought it was 2020 and not 2024. Weird.
      - Semaphor 6y ago
        For the downvoters: > Allies whose current proportion of GDP spent on defence is below this level [2% of GDP] will […] aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade. From the 2014 NATO summit: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/351406/Wales_Summit_Declaration.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
- mcqueenjordan 6y ago
  I think there’s a lot more to it than just sharing values. If my values are mutually exclusive with your values, then there’s a lot more reason to kick me out.
- pmontra 6y ago
  Maybe when we (re)create our own electronics industry. Even China has problems with sourcing components (the TSMC/USA licenses case). It also doesn't help to be a collection of small countries that can be played one against the other by USA, China and Russia and possibly others.
  - Hokusai 6y ago
    > Maybe when we (re)create our own electronics industry. It works the other way around. We cannot have an European industry meanwhile USA government backed-up companies are competing with our startups. > collection of small countries Europe is bigger than the USA. And the division within the USA is as big or bigger than Europe. And, we cannot talk about China.
    - pmontra 6y ago
      > Europe is bigger than the USA. OK, on some metrics. But I think nobody questions which country is still leading the world. > And the division within the USA is as big or bigger than Europe. And, we cannot talk about China. I don't agree with this or we're talking about different things. The grip of Washington DC on the states of the USA is much stronger than Brussels' on the countries of the EU. The degree of sovereignty is very different. No matter the internal divisions inside the USA, first of all there is one USA. On the other side of the ocean first of all there are multiple competing EU countries, each of them trying to exploit the others and the EU and with different economics and foreign policy goals. About that, do (random picks among large states) California, Texas and New York have a foreign policy worth talking about?
      - Dahoon 6y ago
        You make it sound very benign and positive; "leading the world". In actuality it is more often than not bullying, forcing, coercing, buying. You can of course call that leading the world but really it is leading in the same way wolfpacks are leading their pray. There's no doubt that leading -when meant in a positive way- the US is not in any way a leader or near the top. Being number one in say use of military force around the world, most incarcerated, worst foreign aid by any western country (tied to the defence industry), etc. isn't something anyone else is striving for. So yes, the US might be "a leader", but so was Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot, and yes it migh be able to bully others to do what it want, but it is in no positive way a leader of the world. So in short, yes many many people is most definitely questioning that the US is a world leader.
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
  I find that neither pragmatic nor ethically sound. If you're in a security alliance with countries you share values and goals with, how can you not apply different standards in terms of data sharing? And how can you not react somewhat differently to any transgressions, mistakes and imperfections? I know Trump has made this very difficult by making his personal whims indistinguishable from the interests and commitments of his country. In my view this is a form of corruption that does massive damage to the U.S. And yes, democratic control over security services has been rather tenuous at the best of times. But I still see many good reasons not to impose broad economic sanctions on allied democracies. And I do see good reasons to side with them against completely illegitimate regimes that use their security services to keep themselves in power without a democratic mandate. Of course there are many grey areas and a lot of valid criticism. But asking for Europe to officially impose economic sanctions on the U.S is not a proportionate reaction to that. The economic damage would far outweigh any additional freedom or security. If you refuse to apply a degree of pragmatism and proportionality, other countries would then have to impose economic sanctions on Germany for their use of Staatstrojaner. Essentially, all cross border trade in digital goods and services would have to end globally. That can't be a good idea.
  - Dahoon 6y ago
    >And I do see good reasons to side with them against completely illegitimate regimes that use their security services to keep themselves in power without a democratic mandate. Really though, with the system in place in the US it isn't in a position to point fingers. Do you really feel the poor homeless person has more power in the US elections than in those you just compared it to ? I really don't. So yes democratic countries should work together but the question is, does the US belong in that club or did it force itself on it? The answer isn't really that easy.
    - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
      >Do you really feel the poor homeless person has more power in the US elections than in those you just compared it to ? Yes I do. It follows from the simple fact that there are no free and fair elections on those countries. Freedom of speech in combination with elections gives us some power to change things. People in dictotorships don't have those powers, regardless of whether or not they are homeless. Homelessless exists in Europe as well by the way.
- snarf21 6y ago
  You answered your own question. We can't control Huawei so goodbye. The others we can so they get to stay.
- throw51319 6y ago
  Are Huawei and Amazon/Google/Apple/Cisco equivalent? Is the "spying" by the US on Germany as damaging to Germany's future as spying by the Chinese? If you answer these questions honestly, you'll understand why you're making a false equivalence.
ghgr 6y ago
Exactly. I'm constantly surprised how many companies carelessly upload all their internal documents to Google Docs, S3, Dropbox, GitHub, Slack et al. I'd suggest that anything that's not supposed to be public never be uploaded to such services, specially if you are not from the US. The way to go even for small tech companies is self hosting, except maybe for email, due to GMail marking your emails as spam from what I've heard.
- fluffything 6y ago
  And doing this is so simple. Just host your own gitlab server, and version all your company's IP on git. For chat we use Zulip, which we also self-host. And honestly moving to these tools from slack, confluence, etc. has been awesome. Zulip threading model is great. So much better than slack. And using markdown and jupyter notebooks for documentation on gitlab? Damn awesome.
  - CyanBird 6y ago
    I got to use zulip for a big project last year, I do very much recommend it, lots of emotes too which was pretty fun
  - ZuLuuuuuu 6y ago
    A few questions: - Is your company mainly a software company? - How much time do you spend on a week on maintaining your servers? - How do you make sure that your servers are secure? Maybe you are being hacked every night, does your company have the means to check if there has been a security breach? - Do you follow/apply the security patches for the OS you are using on the server and all the software you are using on the server? - Do you have regular offline backups? What would happen if there is a fire in your offices? These are some of the reasons to go for a cloud solution, especially when you are not a software company (hence you don't have many people who have the knowledge for setting up/maintaining such stuff) or when you don't have the resources to hire dedicated sysadmins.
    - fluffything 6y ago
petre 6y ago
What did they use instead? Ovh, Scaleway? Never trusted Bezos and the Amazon offerings are too expensive anyway.
- gigatexal 6y ago
  Everything was done on premises with a colo to house some servers. We ran kubernetes and had some really smart ops engineers do our platform for us. I was always of the opinion that those super smart engineers (much better than I was) were wasted on reinventing the wheel when we could have used an IaaS and they could have helped us on improving the product
GrimRe 6y ago
This is such a ridiculously primitive view of the world it beggars belief. By taking this view you are significantly reducing your security posture, no improving it. There is an AWS Region in Germany. Your data will stay in Germany unless you specifically decide to move it elsewhere. AWS also provide you with the tools to encrypt everything and if done correctly means that Amazon no matter how "evil" they are cannot decrypt the data. Not only that, there is such a huge separation in access and rigour around governance that there is no way anyone within Amazon can simply login and see your data even if unencrypted. Every single case of data being leaked from AWS is because the people working for the company that manage the data literally checked a box to make the contents public. Contrast this to "on-prem" where physical security can get compromised or the vendors of the physical hardware/software leave gaping holes or maintenance backdoors that get exploited. Honestly these types of views are no more grounded in reality that flat earth conspiracy type views.
- catmanjan 6y ago
  >Your data will stay in Germany unless you specifically decide to move it elsewhere. Prove it
  - fluffything 6y ago
    Also, what happens if you find a leak? Or that it has been moved somewhere else? They say "We are sorry", give you some free credit, and that's it ?
    - jacobush 6y ago
      No, that won't happen. "Sorry not sorry" and no credit.
  - GrimRe 6y ago
    Why don't I prove the earth isn't flat while I'm at it? Oh wait, I can't. I guess you win. Clearly my inability to prove the earth isn't flat means that it is flat. See how ridiculous you sound? You think that 25,000+ employees that work at AWS have somehow been silenced into some grand conspiracy? The underlying architecture of an AWS Region is fundamentally designed to keep data in the Region you specify. There is no physical way for it to move between Regions without you specifically logging in and telling it do so. Not only that its extremely expensive to move that data around. You pay for this in Region to Region transfer costs. Believe me AWS would not want this happening for free. That brings me to my other point: AWS don't give a flying fuck about your your boring corporate data either by the way. What they really want is to replace your old expensive insecure data centre hosting shitware like SAP. If you think AWS are secretly peering into your data to make the Amazon global cabal more powerful then you may as well unplug your datacenter and go back to the Stone Age. It'd be FAR easier for AWS to simply exploit some security vulnerabilities is your decades old, half-baked piecemeal built datacenter and syphon intelligence that way than it would be to try and attack their own cloud services.
llarsson 6y ago
With the Schrems 2 ruling of this summer finding the Privacy Shield inadequate for storing personal data in US-owned clouds, your previous employer made the right choice for GDPR compliance. Cloud Act and National Security Letters really fuck things up for American cloud providers with regard to doing business with European customers.
INTPenis 6y ago
But it's hard to avoid the cheap offerings of US cloud. I'm from Sweden myself and I'm only speaking as a layperson who is observing the IT industry. It feels like the rampant capitalism in the United States, and lack of regulations, fuels the VC economy. Making startups like Google, Amazon and others possible. I can't imagine a company running on hundreds of millions in dollars of VC money with no real profit coming in, just hoping for an exit. That's a very strange phenomenon, sort of like the .com bubble never burst but just got bigger. I'm afraid that in order to see the same rapid development of cloud companies here in Europe we'd have to adopt the lax corporate regulations of the US. Which in turn would lead to other issues like workers losing rights.
- Hokusai 6y ago
  > It feels like the rampant capitalism in the United States, and lack of regulations, fuels the VC economy. Google, Apple, Amazon, ... are not startups, they are behemoths backed up by the USA government. Europe has many very good startups that are just purchased with USA dollars once they are successful. > we'd have to adopt the lax corporate regulations of the US That would only ruin Europe standards of living and open us more to be purchased by USA companies. The other way around is the way. It worked for China. Forbid non-European companies to purchase key software companies. USA is not successful because capitalism, USA is successful were the government puts a lot of money: Military, I+D.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    > USA is not successful because capitalism, USA is successful were the government puts a lot of money: Military, I+D. This is incorrect. The current big tech companies became successful and massive without any special government deals. Google dominated search, Microsoft dominated all business and home PCs for decades, Apple and Google dominated mobile for consumers and businesses, Amazon beat them all to cloud and ate online retail with free fast shipping. It’s only recently with JEDI that Amazon/Microsoft tried to attach directly to the government’s wallet in a big way. And even with losing that, it will be a drop in the bucket for either of them. These companies were successful because they were allowed to move quickly and beat out competitors. The entire Internet industry blossomed and gave birth to these companies before the government even took the Internet very seriously.
teekert 6y ago
Amazon is like the Huawei of the US. Strong ties to the government, too big to fail, massive influence over the world. It's like the cancer of capitalism and the way it operates together with the US government is very similar to whatever we call China's model of state. No doubt they influence state decisions in very undemocratic ways. This has nothing to do with Freedom, and it's worrying that such different government models arrive at such similar modes of action. They foster centralized, undemocratic power that infringes on individual rights such a the right to privacy... Is it just he way humanity is destined to be ruled? By constant waves of power concentration followed by revolution?
TomSwirly 6y ago
Amazon got too creepy for me five years ago. I have avoided doing business with them ever since.
- znpy 6y ago
  what happened five years ago?
  - teekert 6y ago
    It got too creepy for him. (sorry, couldn't resist)
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    Alexa?
feralimal 6y ago
Too tight? As in they could be separated? I see - does it just take a different name to make a distinction then?
koheripbal 6y ago
I don't know... I don't think there's a strong business case or CSO case for ditching Amazon for ties to yhe US gov't. What are the realistic odds that someone internally at Amazon is going to break into your instances to look at your data if you're just a regular business? If you're in a German cloud, those risks are probably higher since your business has local competition, and if you're self-hosting, then your overall security risks are even higher. This seems like a emotional choice, not based on realistic business or security sense.
- gigatexal 6y ago
  Personally I have 100% confidence that the big clouds are not going to compromise customer data for their own benefit. Perhaps Amazon did this on an abstract level to understand video streaming and the Netflix business to create Amazon Video but I doubt Amazon would have cared for the tiny startup I worked at here in Hamburg. But the hysteria and the “but what if?” thinking is real and it was really codified in bank contracts. So much so that BaFin stipulated that the tech stacks could be audited and there was no way that Amazon was going to allow anyone in to look at it and such. On the whole if it can be afforded my team is so much more productive being able to build on AWS than to spend all that time both building our product and the infrastructure to go with it. I’m just not that smart.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    > BaFin stipulated that the tech stacks could be audited It's hard to imagine that this includes the code within a Cloud provider. If you're using a Windows server, are they expecting Microsoft to fork over MS source code? This just sounds like an overly-conservative interpretation of the rules. It basically rules out ANY cloud solutions - which is unreasonable and wouldn't ever hold up under scrutiny even if the Bank or regulators explicitly asked for it.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    While AWS is a different operational unit than the shopping one, it is known that they didn't play fair with some vendors. In the end, they cloned some, and ruined some. So the vulture culture exists in parts.
turing_complete 6y ago
Relationships between large German companies and the government are even tighter than Amazon's.

88840-8855 6y ago

Are you sure you didnt spell "China cloud" and "Huawei" wrong? /s Just because we (Germans, Europeans) are culturally closer to Americans and share certain values does not mean that we should have a double standard on our external affairs. We are kicking out Huawei. When will we kick out Amazon, Google, Apple and Cisco?

tick_tock_tick 6y ago
There needs to be EU based options before any of them could be replaced.
- PeterStuer 6y ago
  As always, if there ever threatened to emerge one it will be bought by a US company with free petrodollar.
boomboomsubban 6y ago
Though I completely agree that the double standard is ridiculous, the reasoning behind it likely involves the complicated arrangement between Germany and the US military. China doesn't still have 30,000 troops "occupying" Germany.
- puszczyk 6y ago
  How are they occupying Germany? When was the last time they’ve intervened or even threatened to intervene? Don’t blow it out of proportion.
  - fvdessen 6y ago
    Didn't they threaten to invade the Netherlands if they continue their investigation in US War Crimes ?
    - sdoering 6y ago
      You are, I believe, referring to the "American Service Members Protection Act" [1], signed into law in 2002 by Bush? This law, still on the books, theoretically allows the president to order military action against the ICC in Den Haag (The Hague) should they ever try an American Service Member. > The act also prohibits U.S. military aid to countries that are party to the court. However, exceptions are allowed for aid to NATO members, major non-NATO allies, Taiwan, and countries that have entered into "Article 98 agreements", agreeing not to hand over U.S. nationals to the court. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr... Nonetheless that does not make the US forces in Germany an occupational force.
      - srean 6y ago
        > Nonetheless that does not make the US forces in Germany an occupational force. A stick is a stick regardless of whether it has been used to thrash someone lately.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    I put it in quotes in an attempt to highlight that it was not a formal military occupation. Their presence does show some level of influence the US military has and it is a threat to prevent Germany from making any truly radical moves.
- syshum 6y ago
  Has Germany asked the US to leave? Taking all the US Money with it? Some how I doubt it. Maybe Germany (and the EU as a whole) should start paying for its own defense, and paying their agreed to share of GDP into NATO while they are at it
  - Semaphor 6y ago
    > Maybe Germany (and the EU as a whole) should start paying for its own defense, and paying their agreed to share of GDP into NATO while they are at it Huh, and here I thought it was 2020 and not 2024. Weird.
    - Semaphor 6y ago
      For the downvoters: > Allies whose current proportion of GDP spent on defence is below this level [2% of GDP] will […] aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade. From the 2014 NATO summit: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/351406/Wales_Summit_Declaration.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
mcqueenjordan 6y ago
I think there’s a lot more to it than just sharing values. If my values are mutually exclusive with your values, then there’s a lot more reason to kick me out.
pmontra 6y ago
Maybe when we (re)create our own electronics industry. Even China has problems with sourcing components (the TSMC/USA licenses case). It also doesn't help to be a collection of small countries that can be played one against the other by USA, China and Russia and possibly others.
- Hokusai 6y ago
  > Maybe when we (re)create our own electronics industry. It works the other way around. We cannot have an European industry meanwhile USA government backed-up companies are competing with our startups. > collection of small countries Europe is bigger than the USA. And the division within the USA is as big or bigger than Europe. And, we cannot talk about China.
  - pmontra 6y ago
    > Europe is bigger than the USA. OK, on some metrics. But I think nobody questions which country is still leading the world. > And the division within the USA is as big or bigger than Europe. And, we cannot talk about China. I don't agree with this or we're talking about different things. The grip of Washington DC on the states of the USA is much stronger than Brussels' on the countries of the EU. The degree of sovereignty is very different. No matter the internal divisions inside the USA, first of all there is one USA. On the other side of the ocean first of all there are multiple competing EU countries, each of them trying to exploit the others and the EU and with different economics and foreign policy goals. About that, do (random picks among large states) California, Texas and New York have a foreign policy worth talking about?
    - Dahoon 6y ago
      You make it sound very benign and positive; "leading the world". In actuality it is more often than not bullying, forcing, coercing, buying. You can of course call that leading the world but really it is leading in the same way wolfpacks are leading their pray. There's no doubt that leading -when meant in a positive way- the US is not in any way a leader or near the top. Being number one in say use of military force around the world, most incarcerated, worst foreign aid by any western country (tied to the defence industry), etc. isn't something anyone else is striving for. So yes, the US might be "a leader", but so was Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot, and yes it migh be able to bully others to do what it want, but it is in no positive way a leader of the world. So in short, yes many many people is most definitely questioning that the US is a world leader.
fauigerzigerk 6y ago
I find that neither pragmatic nor ethically sound. If you're in a security alliance with countries you share values and goals with, how can you not apply different standards in terms of data sharing? And how can you not react somewhat differently to any transgressions, mistakes and imperfections? I know Trump has made this very difficult by making his personal whims indistinguishable from the interests and commitments of his country. In my view this is a form of corruption that does massive damage to the U.S. And yes, democratic control over security services has been rather tenuous at the best of times. But I still see many good reasons not to impose broad economic sanctions on allied democracies. And I do see good reasons to side with them against completely illegitimate regimes that use their security services to keep themselves in power without a democratic mandate. Of course there are many grey areas and a lot of valid criticism. But asking for Europe to officially impose economic sanctions on the U.S is not a proportionate reaction to that. The economic damage would far outweigh any additional freedom or security. If you refuse to apply a degree of pragmatism and proportionality, other countries would then have to impose economic sanctions on Germany for their use of Staatstrojaner. Essentially, all cross border trade in digital goods and services would have to end globally. That can't be a good idea.
- Dahoon 6y ago
  >And I do see good reasons to side with them against completely illegitimate regimes that use their security services to keep themselves in power without a democratic mandate. Really though, with the system in place in the US it isn't in a position to point fingers. Do you really feel the poor homeless person has more power in the US elections than in those you just compared it to ? I really don't. So yes democratic countries should work together but the question is, does the US belong in that club or did it force itself on it? The answer isn't really that easy.
  - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
    >Do you really feel the poor homeless person has more power in the US elections than in those you just compared it to ? Yes I do. It follows from the simple fact that there are no free and fair elections on those countries. Freedom of speech in combination with elections gives us some power to change things. People in dictotorships don't have those powers, regardless of whether or not they are homeless. Homelessless exists in Europe as well by the way.
snarf21 6y ago
You answered your own question. We can't control Huawei so goodbye. The others we can so they get to stay.
throw51319 6y ago
Are Huawei and Amazon/Google/Apple/Cisco equivalent? Is the "spying" by the US on Germany as damaging to Germany's future as spying by the Chinese? If you answer these questions honestly, you'll understand why you're making a false equivalence.

ghgr 6y ago

Exactly. I'm constantly surprised how many companies carelessly upload all their internal documents to Google Docs, S3, Dropbox, GitHub, Slack et al. I'd suggest that anything that's not supposed to be public never be uploaded to such services, specially if you are not from the US. The way to go even for small tech companies is self hosting, except maybe for email, due to GMail marking your emails as spam from what I've heard.

fluffything 6y ago
And doing this is so simple. Just host your own gitlab server, and version all your company's IP on git. For chat we use Zulip, which we also self-host. And honestly moving to these tools from slack, confluence, etc. has been awesome. Zulip threading model is great. So much better than slack. And using markdown and jupyter notebooks for documentation on gitlab? Damn awesome.
- CyanBird 6y ago
  I got to use zulip for a big project last year, I do very much recommend it, lots of emotes too which was pretty fun
- ZuLuuuuuu 6y ago
  A few questions: - Is your company mainly a software company? - How much time do you spend on a week on maintaining your servers? - How do you make sure that your servers are secure? Maybe you are being hacked every night, does your company have the means to check if there has been a security breach? - Do you follow/apply the security patches for the OS you are using on the server and all the software you are using on the server? - Do you have regular offline backups? What would happen if there is a fire in your offices? These are some of the reasons to go for a cloud solution, especially when you are not a software company (hence you don't have many people who have the knowledge for setting up/maintaining such stuff) or when you don't have the resources to hire dedicated sysadmins.
  - fluffything 6y ago

petre 6y ago

What did they use instead? Ovh, Scaleway? Never trusted Bezos and the Amazon offerings are too expensive anyway.

gigatexal 6y ago
Everything was done on premises with a colo to house some servers. We ran kubernetes and had some really smart ops engineers do our platform for us. I was always of the opinion that those super smart engineers (much better than I was) were wasted on reinventing the wheel when we could have used an IaaS and they could have helped us on improving the product

GrimRe 6y ago

This is such a ridiculously primitive view of the world it beggars belief. By taking this view you are significantly reducing your security posture, no improving it. There is an AWS Region in Germany. Your data will stay in Germany unless you specifically decide to move it elsewhere. AWS also provide you with the tools to encrypt everything and if done correctly means that Amazon no matter how "evil" they are cannot decrypt the data. Not only that, there is such a huge separation in access and rigour around governance that there is no way anyone within Amazon can simply login and see your data even if unencrypted. Every single case of data being leaked from AWS is because the people working for the company that manage the data literally checked a box to make the contents public. Contrast this to "on-prem" where physical security can get compromised or the vendors of the physical hardware/software leave gaping holes or maintenance backdoors that get exploited. Honestly these types of views are no more grounded in reality that flat earth conspiracy type views.

catmanjan 6y ago
>Your data will stay in Germany unless you specifically decide to move it elsewhere. Prove it
- fluffything 6y ago
  Also, what happens if you find a leak? Or that it has been moved somewhere else? They say "We are sorry", give you some free credit, and that's it ?
  - jacobush 6y ago
    No, that won't happen. "Sorry not sorry" and no credit.
- GrimRe 6y ago
  Why don't I prove the earth isn't flat while I'm at it? Oh wait, I can't. I guess you win. Clearly my inability to prove the earth isn't flat means that it is flat. See how ridiculous you sound? You think that 25,000+ employees that work at AWS have somehow been silenced into some grand conspiracy? The underlying architecture of an AWS Region is fundamentally designed to keep data in the Region you specify. There is no physical way for it to move between Regions without you specifically logging in and telling it do so. Not only that its extremely expensive to move that data around. You pay for this in Region to Region transfer costs. Believe me AWS would not want this happening for free. That brings me to my other point: AWS don't give a flying fuck about your your boring corporate data either by the way. What they really want is to replace your old expensive insecure data centre hosting shitware like SAP. If you think AWS are secretly peering into your data to make the Amazon global cabal more powerful then you may as well unplug your datacenter and go back to the Stone Age. It'd be FAR easier for AWS to simply exploit some security vulnerabilities is your decades old, half-baked piecemeal built datacenter and syphon intelligence that way than it would be to try and attack their own cloud services.

llarsson 6y ago

With the Schrems 2 ruling of this summer finding the Privacy Shield inadequate for storing personal data in US-owned clouds, your previous employer made the right choice for GDPR compliance. Cloud Act and National Security Letters really fuck things up for American cloud providers with regard to doing business with European customers.

INTPenis 6y ago

But it's hard to avoid the cheap offerings of US cloud. I'm from Sweden myself and I'm only speaking as a layperson who is observing the IT industry. It feels like the rampant capitalism in the United States, and lack of regulations, fuels the VC economy. Making startups like Google, Amazon and others possible. I can't imagine a company running on hundreds of millions in dollars of VC money with no real profit coming in, just hoping for an exit. That's a very strange phenomenon, sort of like the .com bubble never burst but just got bigger. I'm afraid that in order to see the same rapid development of cloud companies here in Europe we'd have to adopt the lax corporate regulations of the US. Which in turn would lead to other issues like workers losing rights.

Hokusai 6y ago
> It feels like the rampant capitalism in the United States, and lack of regulations, fuels the VC economy. Google, Apple, Amazon, ... are not startups, they are behemoths backed up by the USA government. Europe has many very good startups that are just purchased with USA dollars once they are successful. > we'd have to adopt the lax corporate regulations of the US That would only ruin Europe standards of living and open us more to be purchased by USA companies. The other way around is the way. It worked for China. Forbid non-European companies to purchase key software companies. USA is not successful because capitalism, USA is successful were the government puts a lot of money: Military, I+D.
- kortilla 6y ago
  > USA is not successful because capitalism, USA is successful were the government puts a lot of money: Military, I+D. This is incorrect. The current big tech companies became successful and massive without any special government deals. Google dominated search, Microsoft dominated all business and home PCs for decades, Apple and Google dominated mobile for consumers and businesses, Amazon beat them all to cloud and ate online retail with free fast shipping. It’s only recently with JEDI that Amazon/Microsoft tried to attach directly to the government’s wallet in a big way. And even with losing that, it will be a drop in the bucket for either of them. These companies were successful because they were allowed to move quickly and beat out competitors. The entire Internet industry blossomed and gave birth to these companies before the government even took the Internet very seriously.

teekert 6y ago

Amazon is like the Huawei of the US. Strong ties to the government, too big to fail, massive influence over the world. It's like the cancer of capitalism and the way it operates together with the US government is very similar to whatever we call China's model of state. No doubt they influence state decisions in very undemocratic ways. This has nothing to do with Freedom, and it's worrying that such different government models arrive at such similar modes of action. They foster centralized, undemocratic power that infringes on individual rights such a the right to privacy... Is it just he way humanity is destined to be ruled? By constant waves of power concentration followed by revolution?

TomSwirly 6y ago

Amazon got too creepy for me five years ago. I have avoided doing business with them ever since.

znpy 6y ago
what happened five years ago?
- teekert 6y ago
  It got too creepy for him. (sorry, couldn't resist)
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  Alexa?

feralimal 6y ago

Too tight? As in they could be separated? I see - does it just take a different name to make a distinction then?

koheripbal 6y ago

I don't know... I don't think there's a strong business case or CSO case for ditching Amazon for ties to yhe US gov't. What are the realistic odds that someone internally at Amazon is going to break into your instances to look at your data if you're just a regular business? If you're in a German cloud, those risks are probably higher since your business has local competition, and if you're self-hosting, then your overall security risks are even higher. This seems like a emotional choice, not based on realistic business or security sense.

gigatexal 6y ago
Personally I have 100% confidence that the big clouds are not going to compromise customer data for their own benefit. Perhaps Amazon did this on an abstract level to understand video streaming and the Netflix business to create Amazon Video but I doubt Amazon would have cared for the tiny startup I worked at here in Hamburg. But the hysteria and the “but what if?” thinking is real and it was really codified in bank contracts. So much so that BaFin stipulated that the tech stacks could be audited and there was no way that Amazon was going to allow anyone in to look at it and such. On the whole if it can be afforded my team is so much more productive being able to build on AWS than to spend all that time both building our product and the infrastructure to go with it. I’m just not that smart.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- koheripbal 6y ago
  > BaFin stipulated that the tech stacks could be audited It's hard to imagine that this includes the code within a Cloud provider. If you're using a Windows server, are they expecting Microsoft to fork over MS source code? This just sounds like an overly-conservative interpretation of the rules. It basically rules out ANY cloud solutions - which is unreasonable and wouldn't ever hold up under scrutiny even if the Bank or regulators explicitly asked for it.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  While AWS is a different operational unit than the shopping one, it is known that they didn't play fair with some vendors. In the end, they cloned some, and ruined some. So the vulture culture exists in parts.

turing_complete 6y ago

Relationships between large German companies and the government are even tighter than Amazon's.