6 ms·

Towards a true multi-cloud offering to deliver on broken promises

36 points by luu 2y ago

0xcoffee 2y ago
(2022)
throwaway81523 2y ago
This is from 2022, any idea what eventually happen with it? Does anyone care about OpenStack any more?
- wmf 2y ago
  The article doesn't mention OpenStack at all but apparently it's still going: https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/geico_vmware_openstack_migration/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/geico_vmware_openstac... Gaia-X appears to have delivered nothing useful. Related newer rant: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-distraction/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-dis...
- j45 2y ago
  Proxmox seems to be a way forward. The IaaS that OpenStack was interesting but I'm not sure that it's made enough strides to keep up to options in the market. With that being said, I definitely have used OpenStack and wish it was more well known.
- sofixa 2y ago
  > Does anyone care about OpenStack any more? Yep, it's still widely used in a bunch of orgs (if I'm not mistaken it's popular at telcos, for instance). If you want a full blown private cloud (like the hyperscalers, but in your own datacenters on your own hardware), it's literally the only option. All alternatives just do Virtual Machines and that's it.
mrbluecoat 2y ago
"Cloud by Committee" - sort of a predictable outcome
tbrownaw 2y ago
Multi-cloud is simple, just don't use anything that's unique to a particular provider. (Losing weight is simple, just eat fewer calories than you burn.)
- gchamonlive 2y ago
  Simple but inconvenient. And it doesn't take much to get sucked into cloud lock-in. As soon as you need to work on permissioning that is slightly less trivial you start to sink.
  - j45 2y ago
    Could permissioning not be run along the packaging to keep things cloud agnostic? Some days I wish there was an entire HN devoted to self-hosting and cloud-agnosticity lol.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      the problem is there's not an exact 1:1 mapping between clouds, so there's complexity to hold in your head. gcp project, aws account, and azure subscription don't represent exactly the same thing, so at some level you can paper over the differences but you really can't, once you get into the nitty gritty of it, so then you're left building up expertise as a multi-cloud software engineer that knows those subtle differences.
- chipdart 2y ago
  > Multi-cloud is simple, just don't use anything that's unique to a particular provider. Using provider-specific services is fine. You only need to be mindful of what it will take to migrate that functionality out of that specific cloud provider,and what work will be required to replace it. Everything is a tradeoff. The time and cost required to roll out a feature is balanced by the cost of avoiding a tie-in. It makes no sense to spend ages and tons of cash writing a cloud-agnostic implementation when a one-liner of a cloud-specific service does the same job.
  - 2y ago
j45 2y ago
"The first few months of GAIA-X’s existence were characterized by a significant lack of understanding about its scope and objectives" This feels like a commitment to misunderstanding. A cloud's objective is only to acquire, and deeply retain customers including making switching cost and efforts unbearable.
ofrzeta 2y ago
It's a post by Scaleway (from 2022). Now which cloud provider has a huge interest in offering their customers true "multi-cloud capabilities"? I guess the criticism of GAIA-X is fair as it is probably a multi-million euro deadend (or the usual kind of hidden subsidies to the huge players). I can't figure from the blog post what Scaleway does in terms of "multi-cloud offering" apart from the fact they are taking part in EUCLIDIA.
- chipdart 2y ago
  > I guess the criticism of GAIA-X is fair as it is probably a multi-million euro deadend (or the usual kind of hidden subsidies to the huge players). Projects like GAIA-X are aimed at eliminating the dependency on US companies for critical infrastructure. A few million are peanuts in the scope of shedding a multi-million dependency.
  - krab 2y ago
    + Chinese
    - chipdart 2y ago
      Well not really. China is not a player in cloud computing. All the established cloud providers are US companies - AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. Alibaba cloud is currently one of the top 5 providers but it's market share is heavily skewed by the chinese market and even then it's only single-digit. Among the top 10 cloud provides, 7 are from the US and below the top 3 all other players are barely in the single-digit scale.
      - krab 2y ago
        They specifically mentioned Huawei. The dependency of telecom networks has been discussed repeatedly in Europe. This inititative isn't only about cloud computing.
        chipdart 2y ago
fergie 2y ago
The article seems a little out of sync with the title.
figassis 2y ago
From Bert Hubert's post: "The actual and official Gaia-X product is a set of standards so we can communicate about (as yet to be written) cloud/data standards. This is two steps removed from being useful - not a cloud, not a standard for a cloud, but a way to exchange authenticated data about standards compliance." - https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-distraction/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-dis... This is such a European way of approaching problems. We were colonized by them, and this kind of vapor work reigns in all their ex colonies.

36 points by luu 2y ago

0xcoffee 2y ago

(2022)

throwaway81523 2y ago

This is from 2022, any idea what eventually happen with it? Does anyone care about OpenStack any more?

wmf 2y ago
The article doesn't mention OpenStack at all but apparently it's still going: https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/geico_vmware_openstack_migration/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/geico_vmware_openstac... Gaia-X appears to have delivered nothing useful. Related newer rant: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-distraction/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-dis...
j45 2y ago
Proxmox seems to be a way forward. The IaaS that OpenStack was interesting but I'm not sure that it's made enough strides to keep up to options in the market. With that being said, I definitely have used OpenStack and wish it was more well known.
sofixa 2y ago
> Does anyone care about OpenStack any more? Yep, it's still widely used in a bunch of orgs (if I'm not mistaken it's popular at telcos, for instance). If you want a full blown private cloud (like the hyperscalers, but in your own datacenters on your own hardware), it's literally the only option. All alternatives just do Virtual Machines and that's it.

mrbluecoat 2y ago

"Cloud by Committee" - sort of a predictable outcome

tbrownaw 2y ago

Multi-cloud is simple, just don't use anything that's unique to a particular provider. (Losing weight is simple, just eat fewer calories than you burn.)

gchamonlive 2y ago
Simple but inconvenient. And it doesn't take much to get sucked into cloud lock-in. As soon as you need to work on permissioning that is slightly less trivial you start to sink.
- j45 2y ago
  Could permissioning not be run along the packaging to keep things cloud agnostic? Some days I wish there was an entire HN devoted to self-hosting and cloud-agnosticity lol.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    the problem is there's not an exact 1:1 mapping between clouds, so there's complexity to hold in your head. gcp project, aws account, and azure subscription don't represent exactly the same thing, so at some level you can paper over the differences but you really can't, once you get into the nitty gritty of it, so then you're left building up expertise as a multi-cloud software engineer that knows those subtle differences.
chipdart 2y ago
> Multi-cloud is simple, just don't use anything that's unique to a particular provider. Using provider-specific services is fine. You only need to be mindful of what it will take to migrate that functionality out of that specific cloud provider,and what work will be required to replace it. Everything is a tradeoff. The time and cost required to roll out a feature is balanced by the cost of avoiding a tie-in. It makes no sense to spend ages and tons of cash writing a cloud-agnostic implementation when a one-liner of a cloud-specific service does the same job.
- 2y ago

j45 2y ago

"The first few months of GAIA-X’s existence were characterized by a significant lack of understanding about its scope and objectives" This feels like a commitment to misunderstanding. A cloud's objective is only to acquire, and deeply retain customers including making switching cost and efforts unbearable.

ofrzeta 2y ago

It's a post by Scaleway (from 2022). Now which cloud provider has a huge interest in offering their customers true "multi-cloud capabilities"? I guess the criticism of GAIA-X is fair as it is probably a multi-million euro deadend (or the usual kind of hidden subsidies to the huge players). I can't figure from the blog post what Scaleway does in terms of "multi-cloud offering" apart from the fact they are taking part in EUCLIDIA.

chipdart 2y ago
> I guess the criticism of GAIA-X is fair as it is probably a multi-million euro deadend (or the usual kind of hidden subsidies to the huge players). Projects like GAIA-X are aimed at eliminating the dependency on US companies for critical infrastructure. A few million are peanuts in the scope of shedding a multi-million dependency.
- krab 2y ago
  + Chinese
  - chipdart 2y ago
    Well not really. China is not a player in cloud computing. All the established cloud providers are US companies - AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. Alibaba cloud is currently one of the top 5 providers but it's market share is heavily skewed by the chinese market and even then it's only single-digit. Among the top 10 cloud provides, 7 are from the US and below the top 3 all other players are barely in the single-digit scale.
    - krab 2y ago
      They specifically mentioned Huawei. The dependency of telecom networks has been discussed repeatedly in Europe. This inititative isn't only about cloud computing.
      - chipdart 2y ago

fergie 2y ago

The article seems a little out of sync with the title.

figassis 2y ago

From Bert Hubert's post: "The actual and official Gaia-X product is a set of standards so we can communicate about (as yet to be written) cloud/data standards. This is two steps removed from being useful - not a cloud, not a standard for a cloud, but a way to exchange authenticated data about standards compliance." - https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-distraction/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-dis... This is such a European way of approaching problems. We were colonized by them, and this kind of vapor work reigns in all their ex colonies.