6 ms·

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 con

• 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.