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There is so much I want to say about this comment! First of all, it sounds like you had a terrible experience because you picked a bad ISP. I sympathize. But th

There is so much I want to say about this comment! First of all, it sounds like you had a terrible experience because you picked a bad ISP. I sympathize. But then you generalize from that and imply that anyone wanting an EU host will experience the same. Obviously that's not true - or do you believe no good ISPs exist in France? Second of all, why did you fork your code? Did you write your service to use proprietary Azure APIs without regard to vendor lock-in? Why not take this as an opportunity to incrementally extract the proprietary apis out of your application and replace them with processes you actually own? This will allow you to undo the fork and continue on, able to deploy your application anywhere you want.

VikingCoder 5y ago
We did our research, and settled on the French cloud provider that fit our parameters. They made promises about support hours that they did not keep. Changing cloud service providers is not cheap. We were a small team, and this cost us lots of effort. We didn't fork our code, we forked our services. We ran everything on Azure. Then we had to configure our kiosk devices to either talk to Azure, or to talk to our servers in France. "Did you write your service to use proprietary Azure APIs without regard to vendor lock-in? Why not take this as an opportunity" I'm sorry, do you have any idea of the cost of doing these things? If you have 6 developers, total, how many of them are you willing to allocate to rewriting your stack, so that you can sell your product in Europe?
- cpeterso 5y ago
  Do cloud service providers like Azure not have a way to "pin" some of your service instances to servers in specific countries? Seems like this capability would be important differentiating feature given EU privacy laws about where user data is hosted.
  - seszett 5y ago
    They do, in fact Azure is totally compatible with French law for handling private data. Many large companies use it.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- javajosh 5y ago
  >I'm sorry, do you have any idea of the cost of doing these things? Oh indeed yes, which is why for years now I've been warning people to not write to proprietary APIs in the first place. It's a faustian bargain and sooner or later the bill is going to come due! If not because of legal requirements, then because MS or Amazon saturates the market, and has to increase revenue somehow. This is an example of where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The upshot is that ignoring the warnings of people like me was a mistake. (It's funny how people have moaned for years about "vendor lock-in" WRT Oracle. "They charge for every core!" But the cloud providers charge for every invocation, which is infinitely worse. And yet no-one seems to worry about it. It's really odd.)
  - VikingCoder 5y ago
    So yeah, using HTTP to connect to a server that happened to be in the US... That's the thing that prevented us from selling in France. But thanks for lecturing me that "vendor lock in" was what killed our 6-developer team that was developing hardware, and computer vision, and 3D computer graphics, while developing a health care product under the tons of regulation that comes with that. Your arrogance is just stunning.
    - javajosh 5y ago
      Hey, I feel your pain. Companies are like children to a founder, and you have described the heroic acts you've taken to save your child. It absolutely sucks to be in your position. I think it's important to warn "parents" (or future parents) to avoid this particular tragedy, which I think is quite avoidable. I want to encourage people to question the orthodoxy around cloud, that everyone is doing it so its fine, and worse is better anyway, yada yada. It may be insensitive to use your situation to illustrate the downside of cloud vendor lock-in, but my motivation is not to look down on you, but to warn others about this very real, very painful outcome that they court when they make the popular choice.
      - VikingCoder 5y ago
        I wasn't a founder. I was one of the 6 developers. We happened to not use any vendor-specific APIs. And it still killed us to fork our stack, and to teach our kiosks to be able to talk to the right server, and the extra cost of the servers in France, and the lack of support we saw from the provider in France...
jonny_eh 5y ago
> do you believe no good ISPs exist in France Nothing comparable to AWS/GCP/Azure.
- forty 5y ago
  There are AWS and Azure regions in France. GCP should open one early 2022.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    But they don't count because they're still controlled from the USA.
    - paulfurtado 5y ago
      Is this really true? As far as I know you can be perfectly compliant with EU law by running in AWS's EU regions.
      - Jon_Lowtek 5y ago
        The core issue here are the CLOUD ACT and FISA Section 702. Basically the US government says it gets free access to all data stored by any US company or its international subsidies anywhere and that non-us-citizens have absolutely no right to any data privacy at all. However european citizens do have such a right, and as such, companies can not process personal information using american subprocessors, because those can not guarantee to respect the citizens rights. For a long time this was all about some contractual clauses between processor and sub-processor: the american subprocessor guarantees by contract to respect the data subjects fundamental right to data privacy. And then the USA made the CLOUDA and FISA and all those contracts are no longer worth the bits they are encoded in. American companies are by law required to not respect the right to data privacy and can not guarantee to respect it in good faith, as they are themselves subjects of a surveillance state. Now look at how AWS reacted to this problem: they added new clauses to the contract with their european customers, in which they promise to challenge law enforcement requests, especially those that are overbroad. When EU goes after FAANG like this, it pushes them to position themselves against mass surveillance and in favor of a global basic human right to data privacy. In my honest opinion this fight is very necessary and i can only hope that humanity wins against surveillance capitalism in the end.
gigatexal 5y ago
The small startup I worked for in Hamburg had a similar problem. They had to run all their infra on premise due to some wording of some of their largest clients and some odd rulings from BaFin. The colo/managed provider they chose and had been working with for years was nigh incompetent. I was positive that being able to spin up infra in any of the clouds would have been a ton more reliable.

VikingCoder 5y ago

We did our research, and settled on the French cloud provider that fit our parameters. They made promises about support hours that they did not keep. Changing cloud service providers is not cheap. We were a small team, and this cost us lots of effort. We didn't fork our code, we forked our services. We ran everything on Azure. Then we had to configure our kiosk devices to either talk to Azure, or to talk to our servers in France. "Did you write your service to use proprietary Azure APIs without regard to vendor lock-in? Why not take this as an opportunity" I'm sorry, do you have any idea of the cost of doing these things? If you have 6 developers, total, how many of them are you willing to allocate to rewriting your stack, so that you can sell your product in Europe?

cpeterso 5y ago
Do cloud service providers like Azure not have a way to "pin" some of your service instances to servers in specific countries? Seems like this capability would be important differentiating feature given EU privacy laws about where user data is hosted.
- seszett 5y ago
  They do, in fact Azure is totally compatible with French law for handling private data. Many large companies use it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
javajosh 5y ago
>I'm sorry, do you have any idea of the cost of doing these things? Oh indeed yes, which is why for years now I've been warning people to not write to proprietary APIs in the first place. It's a faustian bargain and sooner or later the bill is going to come due! If not because of legal requirements, then because MS or Amazon saturates the market, and has to increase revenue somehow. This is an example of where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The upshot is that ignoring the warnings of people like me was a mistake. (It's funny how people have moaned for years about "vendor lock-in" WRT Oracle. "They charge for every core!" But the cloud providers charge for every invocation, which is infinitely worse. And yet no-one seems to worry about it. It's really odd.)
- VikingCoder 5y ago
  So yeah, using HTTP to connect to a server that happened to be in the US... That's the thing that prevented us from selling in France. But thanks for lecturing me that "vendor lock in" was what killed our 6-developer team that was developing hardware, and computer vision, and 3D computer graphics, while developing a health care product under the tons of regulation that comes with that. Your arrogance is just stunning.
  - javajosh 5y ago
    Hey, I feel your pain. Companies are like children to a founder, and you have described the heroic acts you've taken to save your child. It absolutely sucks to be in your position. I think it's important to warn "parents" (or future parents) to avoid this particular tragedy, which I think is quite avoidable. I want to encourage people to question the orthodoxy around cloud, that everyone is doing it so its fine, and worse is better anyway, yada yada. It may be insensitive to use your situation to illustrate the downside of cloud vendor lock-in, but my motivation is not to look down on you, but to warn others about this very real, very painful outcome that they court when they make the popular choice.
    - VikingCoder 5y ago
      I wasn't a founder. I was one of the 6 developers. We happened to not use any vendor-specific APIs. And it still killed us to fork our stack, and to teach our kiosks to be able to talk to the right server, and the extra cost of the servers in France, and the lack of support we saw from the provider in France...

jonny_eh 5y ago

> do you believe no good ISPs exist in France Nothing comparable to AWS/GCP/Azure.

forty 5y ago
There are AWS and Azure regions in France. GCP should open one early 2022.
- native_samples 5y ago
  But they don't count because they're still controlled from the USA.
  - paulfurtado 5y ago
    Is this really true? As far as I know you can be perfectly compliant with EU law by running in AWS's EU regions.
    - Jon_Lowtek 5y ago
      The core issue here are the CLOUD ACT and FISA Section 702. Basically the US government says it gets free access to all data stored by any US company or its international subsidies anywhere and that non-us-citizens have absolutely no right to any data privacy at all. However european citizens do have such a right, and as such, companies can not process personal information using american subprocessors, because those can not guarantee to respect the citizens rights. For a long time this was all about some contractual clauses between processor and sub-processor: the american subprocessor guarantees by contract to respect the data subjects fundamental right to data privacy. And then the USA made the CLOUDA and FISA and all those contracts are no longer worth the bits they are encoded in. American companies are by law required to not respect the right to data privacy and can not guarantee to respect it in good faith, as they are themselves subjects of a surveillance state. Now look at how AWS reacted to this problem: they added new clauses to the contract with their european customers, in which they promise to challenge law enforcement requests, especially those that are overbroad. When EU goes after FAANG like this, it pushes them to position themselves against mass surveillance and in favor of a global basic human right to data privacy. In my honest opinion this fight is very necessary and i can only hope that humanity wins against surveillance capitalism in the end.

gigatexal 5y ago

The small startup I worked for in Hamburg had a similar problem. They had to run all their infra on premise due to some wording of some of their largest clients and some odd rulings from BaFin. The colo/managed provider they chose and had been working with for years was nigh incompetent. I was positive that being able to spin up infra in any of the clouds would have been a ton more reliable.