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To all the people saying that this is nothing new: to me the key point here is that the author of this article, Bert Hubert, isn't your average activist / puris

To all the people saying that this is nothing new: to me the key point here is that the author of this article, Bert Hubert, isn't your average activist / purist linux hacker. He's at least somewhat influential in government circles, in that he has held various government IT consulting positions and is listened to by lots of government IT workers. He's one of the few people I know of who deeply understands how tech works, and also deeply understands how government works (at least the Dutch government). He's also a frequent guest in radio and TV shows and the likes. I'm hoping that this article acts as a catalyst for the Dutch government, and other EU governments, to move everything away from American clouds.

tempodox 2y ago
Here's to hoping that decision makers will listen to him.
Mossy9 2y ago
I hope so too, but move where? Does Scaleway or UpCloud or any other EU cloud provider have comparable offerings? Sure, if everything you have is running on containers or VMs, the stuff is easy to port to Hetzner et al., but what to do with the cloud specific apps (Azure functions etc.)? Rebuilding those for other platforms is probably a no-go unless the Union pours billions into supporting this. Though I've cursed it for years, I'm increasingly glad our org's cloud migration has been so slow that we've only now rolled out the first apps. Pretty much everything we've build can be run anywhere we want, so if it's time to drop the ball and go back to onprem, we've not wasted anything but time on setting up the base
- wahnfrieden 2y ago
  Canada
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- 1over137 2y ago
  >I hope so too, but move where? On premises.
- buildfocus 2y ago
  Scaleway at least is genuinely not a bad alternative for this kind of thing already today - they do have plenty of managed services like serverless functions, object storage, queues, etc, in addition to the simple VMs and container hosting.
  - neoromantique 2y ago
    Scaleway (and I say this with very deep sadness) is pretty bad in terms of reliability right now, there are at least a couple big outages every year over the course of last few years that I've been using them. Admittedly they have a new CTO who according to our support agent is very focused on improving that, so here's hoping, because otherwise their tech offering is very convenient.
    - DoctorOW 2y ago
      I mean a new CTO and a potential large investment from EU govs could work wonders for stabilizing the platform.
  - matt-p 2y ago
    The reliability is pretty terrible, the billing sucks (especially SEPA) but apart from that..
- portaouflop 2y ago
  OVH? Hertzner?
  - raffraffraff 2y ago
    Lidl? :/
- kefirlife 2y ago
  OpenFaaS is one option for your functions. Knative is pretty good as well for the bulk of your applications without exposing developers to kubernetes directly. Between that and Crossplane I think you have all the pieces needed to move away to a self hosted solution where you are managing either metal or VMs through a hosting provider. I’m not sure what this looks like outside of the US, but colocation providers offer racks of machines, or to host your machines, while providing access to cheap bandwidth and peering capabilities. It’s absolutely possible to move away from the major cloud providers. However, it will require a degree of investment within your organization to support these deployments no matter which you choose, which could be a new investment compared to using AWS, GCP or Azure.
  - matt-p 2y ago
    You need teams of people, the good news is that they're available here. It's not hard as such just requires time and money (quite a lot). It's not just kubernetes and openFaaS, what about that thing that's a virtual appliance and requires a VM, now you need KVM. Network and firewalls? Storage as in fully replicated cannot ever lose a byte or have it unavailable storage? Object as well as block. Databases, point in time restores/backups/automated maintenance for postgres and then you've probably got a mssql server for that one app, and mysql for that other app. It becomes just a fairly massive task back in the real world.
    - sekh60 2y ago
      OpenStack out of the box does KVM, network, firewalls, NVFs, orchestration (via native heat or terraform), and with the Magnum component can launch k8s, Mesos, or Swarm largely automagically. Storage is typically via ceph (which does block, object [supports Swift/S3 protocols] and filesystem) and supports snapshots and is fully replicated. Sadly the managed database service didn't make it far, but with Heat or Terraform it's pretty easy to spin up a VM holding your DBs. The native FaaS service, Qinling got deprecated a while back. Secrets management via the barbican component. Web interface via the horizon component. I'm not too familiar with the whole range of AWS offerings, but I really think aside for DBaaS and FaaS OpenStack can cover pretty much everything someone would need, especially combined with Ceph for storage. All opensource.
- anon84873628 2y ago
  Isn't Google doing some thing where they give the software stack to a local operating partner? I guess you can say the code is still backdoored / untestable but it seems that could be audited.
  - decimalenough 2y ago
    From the article: > People also fool themselves that special keys and “servers in the EU” will get you “a safe space” within the American cloud. It won’t. The problem isn't sneaky backdoors, the problem is that the King of America can order Google to shut that thing down and Google will have no choice but to comply.
    - jankeymeulen 2y ago
      Not really, the whole point of this type of cloud offering is that it doesn't phone home to Google / the US. Sure, it will be left to the partner to support all of it, but it can't be shut down from one day to the other. (Googler, opinion my own)
      - pyrale 2y ago
        The issue with that is that Google can be required to backdoor it, and the partner can't realistically vet updates to a reasonable level.
      - saghm 2y ago
        If Google isn't able to shut it down or providing the infrastructure necessary to keep it running in some way, why pay them at all? Whatever path towards work that you say could happen to support it in the future could just happen now instead. If that's too expensive for the customer or the local partner to consider, I have to question what this setup is even helping hedge against at all, because the whole point of it seems like it should be for the customer to be able to put in whatever work they need to up front to be able to avoid being forced to deal with it on a timetable they don't have control about in the future.
- riehwvfbk 2y ago
  > but what to do with the cloud specific apps (Azure functions etc.)? Don't build them. Vendor lock-in is a real problem: even if there are no political issues, it's a business risk because they can charge you whatever they want. Also, the cost of migrating off these things is usually overestimated. It's an HTTP request, for crying out loud.
  - Mossy9 2y ago
    Fully agree with you there - building cloud-only stuff has always seemed foolish to me. Even Azure Functions can be done as e.g. simple C# programs which would be trivial-ish to port ovee to VMs. But my concern is for those that have built something as Azure/AWS only, who are now stuck with the bed they've made. Sure, there are lessons to be learned here, but if the volume of these is too high, then there will be pushback on any meaningful change since it will be too expensive
- 6510 2y ago
  If it costs billions then that is what it costs.
  - Mossy9 2y ago
    If that's the price tag, then I fear that "let it slide" will win the vote when governments decide what to do. Put another way, if the effort of making a change could be lowered, it's more likely that a change will be attempted
  - matt-p 2y ago
    The upside of having a "aws" level competitor that pays taxes in Europe, could be worth billions or more.
- preisschild 2y ago
  https://european-alternatives.eu/ https://european-alternatives.eu/
- _carbyau_ 2y ago
  I find that often people conflate "move to cloud" with "take crusty thick client application and webify it". Replace (most, not all) crusty apps with a web version - sounds good to me. Put it in the cloud - that's optional.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y ago
  > but move where? For hosting their government's own specific computing needs, and assuming a respectable GDP, they can build their own datacenters (pretty trivial) and hire contractors to build cloud computing environments (more challenging). Open source cloud isn't too hard. There's OSS for about 80% of software needed for a cloud computing service provider, and you fill in the rest with proprietary and custom stuff. There's already several providers (one in the US, several in the EU/other countries) that offer "public cloud" using OpenStack. They literally give you, the customer, your own OpenStack cluster, and bill you for what you use. It's insanely easy and powerful. Yet everybody still uses the more popular providers (DO, Hetzner, Scaleway, etc), despite the fact that they all have proprietary interfaces, without anything close to feature parity with OpenStack. I guess people really like vendor lock-in and lack of features. The hardware is more challenging to source; the chips all come from Taiwan or China, and the US and China make most of the good hardware. For private business in their country, they might offer grants and tax incentives to EU companies to build out more local cloud hosting services. But since it's the EU I'm sure it's massively more complicated than that.
  - Mossy9 2y ago
    Interesting, thank you! Care to link any OpenStack providers? Do you have experience working with any of them?
    - matt-p 2y ago
      Rackspace where the archetypal provider and they sucked. The irony is I've only actually ever really seen internal open stack instances, providers for whatever reason seem to prefer to roll thier own
      - junto 2y ago
        They were great early on until they got bought and then they sucked. All of the talented people left around 2013 if memory serves me right.
    - gilPiHlq 2y ago
- stego-tech 2y ago
  > but what to do with the cloud specific apps Coming from IT land, the answer is simple: you don't use them in the first place, and you grit-and-bear the replacement cost if and when the time comes. This is a negative on my research notes, slide decks, and papers when it comes to evaluating various cloud platforms for our workloads, and yet it's also the number one reason we're forced into a specific provider (some leader loves their proprietary tooling, and forces us to use it). Look, I'm not saying these proprietary tools are bad, per se, just that they have a steeper cost than initially presented to the consumer in terms of architecture complexity and inevitable migration. The very first question you should be asking before consuming niche or proprietary products from vendors is, "Can I do this in a standard way that's more portable?" For stuff like Azure Functions, the answer is emphatically yes - but it comes at the cost of managing additional infrastructure, which is often the main reason companies want to use those tools in the first place (a misguided notion about throwing out infrastructure to save money). As for the solved problem of compute (VMs and Containers), well, literally any cloud provider should have that ready to go. The question is whether or not your org is willing to retain the talent needed to build and support your clouds internally, or if they'd rather pay higher outsourcing costs with vendor lock-in instead.
  - smackeyacky 2y ago
    One thing that isn't so simple, even if you stuck to VMs or docker containers, is the networking. The networking stack in Azure or AWS are so different that they require a different mindset to work, especially securely. If your networking needs are simple you are very lucky.
    - raxxorraxor 2y ago
      You can have a very complex networking infrastructure with very simple proxies and network segmentation. What specific feature do you have in mind. Load balancing and resource synching? Often there are proprietary solution to proprietary problems you would otherwise not have in the first place. I used AWS for a long time but I am back to hosting myself. What arcane network requirement would that entail? I don't think there are benefits even for government scale problems.
- sreekanth850 2y ago
  People who build vendor locked applications are making a short-sighted decision. Call me old-school, but vendor lock-in benefits developers more than businesses. Agree that they can learn new shuny things. A well-built application should run seamlessly on any Linux-based system without unnecessary dependencies on proprietary ecosystems.
- Tarq0n 2y ago
  The real moat is Azure AD and Exchange. The government IT teams I know can operate a fleet of VMs just fine, but they need email and identity management handled for them.
jasonvorhe 2y ago
I've been interviewing candidates using questions targeted at getting them to talk about experience instead of skill. Like asking about their involvement during production incidents, then drill down to see if there's anything interesting to focus on. Can probably also be gamed by AI but people are usually surprised about my approach and they often provide good feedback after the call, even if I have to decline their application so I guess it works somewhat well for both since it doesn't force anyone to just recite the same phrases.
NomDePlum 2y ago
The concern isn't new. I've been involved in several UK government projects that considered moving to AWS. Each time the discussion on moving to a US based provider was a big consideration, particularly the use of managed services that involve data was a hot topic. Part of the risk assessment was considering what the consequences might be if the US government became a bad actor. It was seen as high impact but extremely low probability. Starting to look like we got that part of the assessment wrong. I think it will take time for the impetus to move to US clouds providers to slow and reverse but I'm not sure I'd be surprised if it does happen now.
- int_19h 2y ago
  > if the US government became a bad actor. It was seen as high impact but extremely low probability. Was that before or after 2016?
  - NomDePlum 2y ago
    Both. eu-west-2 on AWS may be looked at now as a false dawn.
grandempire 2y ago
By that do you mean influential with the Obama/biden administration?
- skrebbel 2y ago
  I said the word "Dutch" multiple times. The article itself says it a million times. So, no, not the "Obama/biden administration".
  - grandempire 2y ago
    My confusion came from this line: > To all the people saying that this is nothing new An EU state wants to boycott or regulate American business? I don’t know how that’s new.
svilen_dobrev 2y ago
heh. by the course of looking for programming job, i have scanned hundreds of job-ads, incl. governmental. everybody-and-his-dog requires AWS/Azure/GCP knowledge as if it matters thaaaat much. These cloud-y things have become a mandatory buzzword, and i am not talking about sysadmin/devops. In my last gig the system was kept cloud-agnostic, so moving between providers or on-prem be possible at any time. And i as CTO kept that good thing, although had to resist some pushes. But seems such cases are few - most places now dream of hyper mega-giga-scale and Lambdas and Big-queries.. while doodling few thousands of requests. Lets see if there's any wind change.. vendor-lock is a real thing, with much deeper (architectural or life-cycle) consequences than usually perceived.
cavisne 2y ago
The thing that gets me is the disingenuous parallel construction. Just say the truth. Europe wants to improve its economy by growing their consumer tech industry. Some of these products like Google Analytics (the example he is upset about) are really hard to replicate (writing to a database on every visit to your website is an expensive thing to do, significantly more expensive than hosting the website!). So they've been slowly increasing the tariffs (disguised as privacy regulations) on US tech firms. It's gone poorly, even EU governments (let alone EU businesses) still use products like Google Analytics, and US tech firms have been able to engineer their way around the regulations, again doing a better job than EU governments who have been busted countless times for breaking GDPR with their own systems. No one cares about any "data sharing agreement" or a "Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board" no one has ever heard of that has never done anything. Its a tariff with various ways to pick winners and losers. The only thing thats changed is there is a higher chance these privacy regulations will be recognized as tariffs by the US.
- pm3003 2y ago
  What you describe is true, and it can also be counterproductive vecause to be competitive you need the best and cheapest services, and raising the prices doesn't often result in a healthier tech ecosystem. Typical Eurocrat thinking. But EU citizens genuinely care about privacy, in part because of decades of totalitarian and near-totalitarian regimes. There is another risk underpinning this, I'm not familiar with this so it's mostly hearsay on my part, but foreign firms in the US routinely get completely screwed in US courts, and fear the seizing of their data in discovery processes or other ways. The data sharing agreement was made to provide some degree of clarity or assurances in this regard. I've met managers who are convinced that if they're not careful, their IP and business data will get stolen by their US competitors through various legal or less-legal means. EU executives have been detained for days at the border on suspicions of terrorism to coerce them into selling US assets. I can't judge if this is paranoia, and maybe those companies could make use of better protection against Chinese hackers but there's certainly some truth to that.
  - cavisne 2y ago
    Are there any news stories about these specific claims (executives held by the US until they divest assets, EU companies losing their data in discovery and being copied)? The EU's biggest exports to the US are cars & pharma. I guess the VW diesel situation could be seen through that lens, or the GLP1 compounding rules.
fasbiner 2y ago
I certainly don't blame the activists for governments refusing to listen, but this threat was clear at least 15 years ago and I would expect someone as knowledgeable as Bert Hubert to have perceived it at the time. Is the idea that they're more ready to listen and take action because of recent executive changes in the US, even though the cost of doing so has gone up by 100-1000x and the possibility of a joint retaliation from US tech giants and the government working in concert is now much higher? I hope you're right, but one of the rough dislocations of the present moment is the disconnect between how europeans conceive of their sovereignty and the reality of their economic, military, and cultural fragility in their relationship with the US and US companies. No amount of grandstanding rhetoric and appeals to "courage" changes that if there are any serious economic consequences (caused by US/corporate coercion or otherwise), the government would likely fall and be replaced by someone more amenable to the status quo. What feels like a small price to pay for someone focused on security long-term may be an unacceptable price for someone focused on short-term outcomes in their political fortunes.
- Recurecur 2y ago
  The concerns expressed seem a bit silly, unless the various Euro systems didn't take the very basic approach of using open standards and avoiding lock-in. Oh, and they should be backing up their data somewhere besides "in the cloud". If those very basic precautions had been taken, migrating to a Euro cloud, or a private environment (open cloud stack) would be trivial. If not, a lot of people should be fired...but granted, there are a lot of stupid people out there... All that said, I'd say the concerns around this are vastly overblown.
  - dijit 2y ago
    “the very basic step” is a lot less basic than you imply. There’s a million little proprietary APIs and the temptation to glue one to another, especially circumstances like AWS where they use lambdas for basic functionality that should have been just provided by the cloud provider itself.
- skrebbel 2y ago
  > Is the idea that they're more ready to listen and take action because of recent executive changes in the US, even though the cost of doing so has gone up by 100-1000x and the possibility of a joint retaliation from US tech giants and the government working in concert is now much higher? I believe so, yes. I don't think Americans realize how profoundly the last few weeks have affected European political thought. It'll take a while before you see concrete changes. Europe is like a mammoth tanker, slow to change direction, but practically unstoppable. I believe that it's more likely now than ever before for European governments and businesses to sever their dependency on American technology. Lots of comments in this thread explain how hard this is, how big the feature gap between, say, AWS and OVH is, but as a European entrepreneur I gotta say, this looks a lot more like an opportunity than a problem to me.
speleding 2y ago
I understand the sentiment, but as a Dutch person: The only thing I am more worried about than the government moving all our data to US clouds, is the government trying to do anything IT related themselves. They do not have the skill and have proven that over and over again in a long list of bungled projects. I'd rather have my data end up with Google/Amazon/CIA than it ending up everywhere on the internet due to poorly configured DIY servers (and at twice the cost probably).
- 28304283409234 2y ago
  That is because you only hear about the failures.
  - 28304283409234 2y ago
    Besides: this is not a problem of competence or incompetence of either US companies or Dutch government. It is about the very real threat of US government no longer allowing US companies to provide us with services. It is Russian gas all over again.
    - skrebbel 2y ago
      Or stealing and abusing all the data. It's like Russian gas except also the gas pipelines let Putin spy on every government agency and every household.
- jononor 2y ago
  If there really is no organizations competent to run government application in the Netherlands, then that is even bigger reason to start doing more of that in the country. I mean, computers are not going away! The competence and infrastructure does not magically appear. It requires consistent investment over time. Not being able to maintain computer based infrastructure is like not being able to maintain water supply of a country. Completely unacceptable. Heck these days maintaining water supply at city scale is difficult without computers and networking...
raxxorraxor 2y ago
The dependence was established sooner by using external infrastructure. The premises that this infrastructure is not under your control is exactly what he now derides. Someone knowledgeable should have seen this before, this is a core issue when setting up a strategy for digital systems. And this isn't an issue between "purists" and the rest, that is a false dichotomy. The decision was simply to outsource infrastructure to systems you have significantly less control over. Might work for 15+ years or it might not. I doubt anything will be done now, investments are probably too high. But it is an issue with lacking foresight. Between countries and the main task for intelligence agencies is industrial espionage. The Dutch government, like many others, decided that exposing themselves is no issue. I disagree that it has become a problem only now, this is due to his narrow view on politics and a bit naive in my opinion.

tempodox 2y ago

Here's to hoping that decision makers will listen to him.

Mossy9 2y ago

I hope so too, but move where? Does Scaleway or UpCloud or any other EU cloud provider have comparable offerings? Sure, if everything you have is running on containers or VMs, the stuff is easy to port to Hetzner et al., but what to do with the cloud specific apps (Azure functions etc.)? Rebuilding those for other platforms is probably a no-go unless the Union pours billions into supporting this. Though I've cursed it for years, I'm increasingly glad our org's cloud migration has been so slow that we've only now rolled out the first apps. Pretty much everything we've build can be run anywhere we want, so if it's time to drop the ball and go back to onprem, we've not wasted anything but time on setting up the base

wahnfrieden 2y ago
Canada
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
1over137 2y ago
>I hope so too, but move where? On premises.
buildfocus 2y ago
Scaleway at least is genuinely not a bad alternative for this kind of thing already today - they do have plenty of managed services like serverless functions, object storage, queues, etc, in addition to the simple VMs and container hosting.
- neoromantique 2y ago
  Scaleway (and I say this with very deep sadness) is pretty bad in terms of reliability right now, there are at least a couple big outages every year over the course of last few years that I've been using them. Admittedly they have a new CTO who according to our support agent is very focused on improving that, so here's hoping, because otherwise their tech offering is very convenient.
  - DoctorOW 2y ago
    I mean a new CTO and a potential large investment from EU govs could work wonders for stabilizing the platform.
- matt-p 2y ago
  The reliability is pretty terrible, the billing sucks (especially SEPA) but apart from that..
portaouflop 2y ago
OVH? Hertzner?
- raffraffraff 2y ago
  Lidl? :/
kefirlife 2y ago
OpenFaaS is one option for your functions. Knative is pretty good as well for the bulk of your applications without exposing developers to kubernetes directly. Between that and Crossplane I think you have all the pieces needed to move away to a self hosted solution where you are managing either metal or VMs through a hosting provider. I’m not sure what this looks like outside of the US, but colocation providers offer racks of machines, or to host your machines, while providing access to cheap bandwidth and peering capabilities. It’s absolutely possible to move away from the major cloud providers. However, it will require a degree of investment within your organization to support these deployments no matter which you choose, which could be a new investment compared to using AWS, GCP or Azure.
- matt-p 2y ago
  You need teams of people, the good news is that they're available here. It's not hard as such just requires time and money (quite a lot). It's not just kubernetes and openFaaS, what about that thing that's a virtual appliance and requires a VM, now you need KVM. Network and firewalls? Storage as in fully replicated cannot ever lose a byte or have it unavailable storage? Object as well as block. Databases, point in time restores/backups/automated maintenance for postgres and then you've probably got a mssql server for that one app, and mysql for that other app. It becomes just a fairly massive task back in the real world.
  - sekh60 2y ago
    OpenStack out of the box does KVM, network, firewalls, NVFs, orchestration (via native heat or terraform), and with the Magnum component can launch k8s, Mesos, or Swarm largely automagically. Storage is typically via ceph (which does block, object [supports Swift/S3 protocols] and filesystem) and supports snapshots and is fully replicated. Sadly the managed database service didn't make it far, but with Heat or Terraform it's pretty easy to spin up a VM holding your DBs. The native FaaS service, Qinling got deprecated a while back. Secrets management via the barbican component. Web interface via the horizon component. I'm not too familiar with the whole range of AWS offerings, but I really think aside for DBaaS and FaaS OpenStack can cover pretty much everything someone would need, especially combined with Ceph for storage. All opensource.
anon84873628 2y ago
Isn't Google doing some thing where they give the software stack to a local operating partner? I guess you can say the code is still backdoored / untestable but it seems that could be audited.
- decimalenough 2y ago
  From the article: > People also fool themselves that special keys and “servers in the EU” will get you “a safe space” within the American cloud. It won’t. The problem isn't sneaky backdoors, the problem is that the King of America can order Google to shut that thing down and Google will have no choice but to comply.
  - jankeymeulen 2y ago
    Not really, the whole point of this type of cloud offering is that it doesn't phone home to Google / the US. Sure, it will be left to the partner to support all of it, but it can't be shut down from one day to the other. (Googler, opinion my own)
    - pyrale 2y ago
      The issue with that is that Google can be required to backdoor it, and the partner can't realistically vet updates to a reasonable level.
    - saghm 2y ago
      If Google isn't able to shut it down or providing the infrastructure necessary to keep it running in some way, why pay them at all? Whatever path towards work that you say could happen to support it in the future could just happen now instead. If that's too expensive for the customer or the local partner to consider, I have to question what this setup is even helping hedge against at all, because the whole point of it seems like it should be for the customer to be able to put in whatever work they need to up front to be able to avoid being forced to deal with it on a timetable they don't have control about in the future.
riehwvfbk 2y ago
> but what to do with the cloud specific apps (Azure functions etc.)? Don't build them. Vendor lock-in is a real problem: even if there are no political issues, it's a business risk because they can charge you whatever they want. Also, the cost of migrating off these things is usually overestimated. It's an HTTP request, for crying out loud.
- Mossy9 2y ago
  Fully agree with you there - building cloud-only stuff has always seemed foolish to me. Even Azure Functions can be done as e.g. simple C# programs which would be trivial-ish to port ovee to VMs. But my concern is for those that have built something as Azure/AWS only, who are now stuck with the bed they've made. Sure, there are lessons to be learned here, but if the volume of these is too high, then there will be pushback on any meaningful change since it will be too expensive
6510 2y ago
If it costs billions then that is what it costs.
- Mossy9 2y ago
  If that's the price tag, then I fear that "let it slide" will win the vote when governments decide what to do. Put another way, if the effort of making a change could be lowered, it's more likely that a change will be attempted
- matt-p 2y ago
  The upside of having a "aws" level competitor that pays taxes in Europe, could be worth billions or more.
preisschild 2y ago
https://european-alternatives.eu/ https://european-alternatives.eu/
_carbyau_ 2y ago
I find that often people conflate "move to cloud" with "take crusty thick client application and webify it". Replace (most, not all) crusty apps with a web version - sounds good to me. Put it in the cloud - that's optional.
0xbadcafebee 2y ago
> but move where? For hosting their government's own specific computing needs, and assuming a respectable GDP, they can build their own datacenters (pretty trivial) and hire contractors to build cloud computing environments (more challenging). Open source cloud isn't too hard. There's OSS for about 80% of software needed for a cloud computing service provider, and you fill in the rest with proprietary and custom stuff. There's already several providers (one in the US, several in the EU/other countries) that offer "public cloud" using OpenStack. They literally give you, the customer, your own OpenStack cluster, and bill you for what you use. It's insanely easy and powerful. Yet everybody still uses the more popular providers (DO, Hetzner, Scaleway, etc), despite the fact that they all have proprietary interfaces, without anything close to feature parity with OpenStack. I guess people really like vendor lock-in and lack of features. The hardware is more challenging to source; the chips all come from Taiwan or China, and the US and China make most of the good hardware. For private business in their country, they might offer grants and tax incentives to EU companies to build out more local cloud hosting services. But since it's the EU I'm sure it's massively more complicated than that.
- Mossy9 2y ago
  Interesting, thank you! Care to link any OpenStack providers? Do you have experience working with any of them?
  - matt-p 2y ago
    Rackspace where the archetypal provider and they sucked. The irony is I've only actually ever really seen internal open stack instances, providers for whatever reason seem to prefer to roll thier own
    - junto 2y ago
      They were great early on until they got bought and then they sucked. All of the talented people left around 2013 if memory serves me right.
  - gilPiHlq 2y ago
stego-tech 2y ago
> but what to do with the cloud specific apps Coming from IT land, the answer is simple: you don't use them in the first place, and you grit-and-bear the replacement cost if and when the time comes. This is a negative on my research notes, slide decks, and papers when it comes to evaluating various cloud platforms for our workloads, and yet it's also the number one reason we're forced into a specific provider (some leader loves their proprietary tooling, and forces us to use it). Look, I'm not saying these proprietary tools are bad, per se, just that they have a steeper cost than initially presented to the consumer in terms of architecture complexity and inevitable migration. The very first question you should be asking before consuming niche or proprietary products from vendors is, "Can I do this in a standard way that's more portable?" For stuff like Azure Functions, the answer is emphatically yes - but it comes at the cost of managing additional infrastructure, which is often the main reason companies want to use those tools in the first place (a misguided notion about throwing out infrastructure to save money). As for the solved problem of compute (VMs and Containers), well, literally any cloud provider should have that ready to go. The question is whether or not your org is willing to retain the talent needed to build and support your clouds internally, or if they'd rather pay higher outsourcing costs with vendor lock-in instead.
- smackeyacky 2y ago
  One thing that isn't so simple, even if you stuck to VMs or docker containers, is the networking. The networking stack in Azure or AWS are so different that they require a different mindset to work, especially securely. If your networking needs are simple you are very lucky.
  - raxxorraxor 2y ago
    You can have a very complex networking infrastructure with very simple proxies and network segmentation. What specific feature do you have in mind. Load balancing and resource synching? Often there are proprietary solution to proprietary problems you would otherwise not have in the first place. I used AWS for a long time but I am back to hosting myself. What arcane network requirement would that entail? I don't think there are benefits even for government scale problems.
sreekanth850 2y ago
People who build vendor locked applications are making a short-sighted decision. Call me old-school, but vendor lock-in benefits developers more than businesses. Agree that they can learn new shuny things. A well-built application should run seamlessly on any Linux-based system without unnecessary dependencies on proprietary ecosystems.
Tarq0n 2y ago
The real moat is Azure AD and Exchange. The government IT teams I know can operate a fleet of VMs just fine, but they need email and identity management handled for them.

jasonvorhe 2y ago

I've been interviewing candidates using questions targeted at getting them to talk about experience instead of skill. Like asking about their involvement during production incidents, then drill down to see if there's anything interesting to focus on. Can probably also be gamed by AI but people are usually surprised about my approach and they often provide good feedback after the call, even if I have to decline their application so I guess it works somewhat well for both since it doesn't force anyone to just recite the same phrases.

NomDePlum 2y ago

The concern isn't new. I've been involved in several UK government projects that considered moving to AWS. Each time the discussion on moving to a US based provider was a big consideration, particularly the use of managed services that involve data was a hot topic. Part of the risk assessment was considering what the consequences might be if the US government became a bad actor. It was seen as high impact but extremely low probability. Starting to look like we got that part of the assessment wrong. I think it will take time for the impetus to move to US clouds providers to slow and reverse but I'm not sure I'd be surprised if it does happen now.

int_19h 2y ago
> if the US government became a bad actor. It was seen as high impact but extremely low probability. Was that before or after 2016?
- NomDePlum 2y ago
  Both. eu-west-2 on AWS may be looked at now as a false dawn.

grandempire 2y ago

By that do you mean influential with the Obama/biden administration?

skrebbel 2y ago
I said the word "Dutch" multiple times. The article itself says it a million times. So, no, not the "Obama/biden administration".
- grandempire 2y ago
  My confusion came from this line: > To all the people saying that this is nothing new An EU state wants to boycott or regulate American business? I don’t know how that’s new.

svilen_dobrev 2y ago

heh. by the course of looking for programming job, i have scanned hundreds of job-ads, incl. governmental. everybody-and-his-dog requires AWS/Azure/GCP knowledge as if it matters thaaaat much. These cloud-y things have become a mandatory buzzword, and i am not talking about sysadmin/devops. In my last gig the system was kept cloud-agnostic, so moving between providers or on-prem be possible at any time. And i as CTO kept that good thing, although had to resist some pushes. But seems such cases are few - most places now dream of hyper mega-giga-scale and Lambdas and Big-queries.. while doodling few thousands of requests. Lets see if there's any wind change.. vendor-lock is a real thing, with much deeper (architectural or life-cycle) consequences than usually perceived.

cavisne 2y ago

The thing that gets me is the disingenuous parallel construction. Just say the truth. Europe wants to improve its economy by growing their consumer tech industry. Some of these products like Google Analytics (the example he is upset about) are really hard to replicate (writing to a database on every visit to your website is an expensive thing to do, significantly more expensive than hosting the website!). So they've been slowly increasing the tariffs (disguised as privacy regulations) on US tech firms. It's gone poorly, even EU governments (let alone EU businesses) still use products like Google Analytics, and US tech firms have been able to engineer their way around the regulations, again doing a better job than EU governments who have been busted countless times for breaking GDPR with their own systems. No one cares about any "data sharing agreement" or a "Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board" no one has ever heard of that has never done anything. Its a tariff with various ways to pick winners and losers. The only thing thats changed is there is a higher chance these privacy regulations will be recognized as tariffs by the US.

pm3003 2y ago
What you describe is true, and it can also be counterproductive vecause to be competitive you need the best and cheapest services, and raising the prices doesn't often result in a healthier tech ecosystem. Typical Eurocrat thinking. But EU citizens genuinely care about privacy, in part because of decades of totalitarian and near-totalitarian regimes. There is another risk underpinning this, I'm not familiar with this so it's mostly hearsay on my part, but foreign firms in the US routinely get completely screwed in US courts, and fear the seizing of their data in discovery processes or other ways. The data sharing agreement was made to provide some degree of clarity or assurances in this regard. I've met managers who are convinced that if they're not careful, their IP and business data will get stolen by their US competitors through various legal or less-legal means. EU executives have been detained for days at the border on suspicions of terrorism to coerce them into selling US assets. I can't judge if this is paranoia, and maybe those companies could make use of better protection against Chinese hackers but there's certainly some truth to that.
- cavisne 2y ago
  Are there any news stories about these specific claims (executives held by the US until they divest assets, EU companies losing their data in discovery and being copied)? The EU's biggest exports to the US are cars & pharma. I guess the VW diesel situation could be seen through that lens, or the GLP1 compounding rules.

fasbiner 2y ago

I certainly don't blame the activists for governments refusing to listen, but this threat was clear at least 15 years ago and I would expect someone as knowledgeable as Bert Hubert to have perceived it at the time. Is the idea that they're more ready to listen and take action because of recent executive changes in the US, even though the cost of doing so has gone up by 100-1000x and the possibility of a joint retaliation from US tech giants and the government working in concert is now much higher? I hope you're right, but one of the rough dislocations of the present moment is the disconnect between how europeans conceive of their sovereignty and the reality of their economic, military, and cultural fragility in their relationship with the US and US companies. No amount of grandstanding rhetoric and appeals to "courage" changes that if there are any serious economic consequences (caused by US/corporate coercion or otherwise), the government would likely fall and be replaced by someone more amenable to the status quo. What feels like a small price to pay for someone focused on security long-term may be an unacceptable price for someone focused on short-term outcomes in their political fortunes.

Recurecur 2y ago
The concerns expressed seem a bit silly, unless the various Euro systems didn't take the very basic approach of using open standards and avoiding lock-in. Oh, and they should be backing up their data somewhere besides "in the cloud". If those very basic precautions had been taken, migrating to a Euro cloud, or a private environment (open cloud stack) would be trivial. If not, a lot of people should be fired...but granted, there are a lot of stupid people out there... All that said, I'd say the concerns around this are vastly overblown.
- dijit 2y ago
  “the very basic step” is a lot less basic than you imply. There’s a million little proprietary APIs and the temptation to glue one to another, especially circumstances like AWS where they use lambdas for basic functionality that should have been just provided by the cloud provider itself.
skrebbel 2y ago
> Is the idea that they're more ready to listen and take action because of recent executive changes in the US, even though the cost of doing so has gone up by 100-1000x and the possibility of a joint retaliation from US tech giants and the government working in concert is now much higher? I believe so, yes. I don't think Americans realize how profoundly the last few weeks have affected European political thought. It'll take a while before you see concrete changes. Europe is like a mammoth tanker, slow to change direction, but practically unstoppable. I believe that it's more likely now than ever before for European governments and businesses to sever their dependency on American technology. Lots of comments in this thread explain how hard this is, how big the feature gap between, say, AWS and OVH is, but as a European entrepreneur I gotta say, this looks a lot more like an opportunity than a problem to me.

speleding 2y ago

I understand the sentiment, but as a Dutch person: The only thing I am more worried about than the government moving all our data to US clouds, is the government trying to do anything IT related themselves. They do not have the skill and have proven that over and over again in a long list of bungled projects. I'd rather have my data end up with Google/Amazon/CIA than it ending up everywhere on the internet due to poorly configured DIY servers (and at twice the cost probably).

28304283409234 2y ago
That is because you only hear about the failures.
- 28304283409234 2y ago
  Besides: this is not a problem of competence or incompetence of either US companies or Dutch government. It is about the very real threat of US government no longer allowing US companies to provide us with services. It is Russian gas all over again.
  - skrebbel 2y ago
    Or stealing and abusing all the data. It's like Russian gas except also the gas pipelines let Putin spy on every government agency and every household.
jononor 2y ago
If there really is no organizations competent to run government application in the Netherlands, then that is even bigger reason to start doing more of that in the country. I mean, computers are not going away! The competence and infrastructure does not magically appear. It requires consistent investment over time. Not being able to maintain computer based infrastructure is like not being able to maintain water supply of a country. Completely unacceptable. Heck these days maintaining water supply at city scale is difficult without computers and networking...

raxxorraxor 2y ago

The dependence was established sooner by using external infrastructure. The premises that this infrastructure is not under your control is exactly what he now derides. Someone knowledgeable should have seen this before, this is a core issue when setting up a strategy for digital systems. And this isn't an issue between "purists" and the rest, that is a false dichotomy. The decision was simply to outsource infrastructure to systems you have significantly less control over. Might work for 15+ years or it might not. I doubt anything will be done now, investments are probably too high. But it is an issue with lacking foresight. Between countries and the main task for intelligence agencies is industrial espionage. The Dutch government, like many others, decided that exposing themselves is no issue. I disagree that it has become a problem only now, this is due to his narrow view on politics and a bit naive in my opinion.