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As usual, another great write up by Berthub. A big issue I've noticed is a lot of the players pushing for a new "European cloud" are glorified DC hosters who

As usual, another great write up by Berthub. A big issue I've noticed is a lot of the players pushing for a new "European cloud" are glorified DC hosters who do not have Product or Development experience with cloud tools or technologies, and continue to underpay their employees. I saw this at an attempted version of AWS by a major retailer in DACH - they are trying to build their own competitive hyperscaler, but their internal teams still preferred one of the big 3 CSPs (AWS, Azure, GCP) due to reliability and the talent gap in their internal CSP team. European software only does great when those vendors pay regionally competitive (doesn't have to be SV level) salaries. Look at DIPT in France, Gov.uk in the UK, and Datadog in France as examples of well made European stacks that also paid employees competitively. European companies will also HAVE to be product first - only selling on "European First" sentiment doesn't close RFPs when the CSPs have created EU staffed and managed landing zones, and companies like Google Cloud and AWS expand EU specific offerings in EU megaoffices like Warsaw and Cluj respectively. The other issue is most EMEA customers have much smaller budgets, so discounting and bundling becomes critical - and it's hard to beat vendors who can sell in the US (which is what a French vendor like Datadog has done). Finally, the growth of the cloud software ecosystem in the US, China, and India was also thanks to 5G rollouts, as much of the 5G stack is virtualized and is essentially VOIP. This meant telecom players helped spark a generation of vendors or OSS ecosystems.

everfrustrated 2y ago
I slightly agree but my take is less salaries and more that most companies in Europe have been totally captured by the management/academic classes [1]. You can't create what is fundamentally a highly technical product using management to tell engineers what to do. European management structures tend to keep the technical people isolated to their own lower strata and don't listen to them. AWS' success is it enabled its _engineers_ to launch products. Which is why Azure sticks out like a sore thumb. [1] This is why you generally only see innovation in Europe coming from small companies, but they don't have the capital to keep investing at pace - AWS was able to build ahead of where its customers were and those customers eventually caught up.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > my take is less salaries and more that most companies in Europe have been totally captured by the management/academic classes I agree, but that's not too bad if management was ex-Engineers or ex-Product sales. In most cases I've seen in Europe, they're just consultants or alumni of LDPs from a handful of elite programs, and line level Engineers or Sales Engineers don't get their due. Inevitabely, the best European technical minds either migrate to the US or become Sales Engineers or Solutions Architects for American vendors. > ou can't create what is fundamentally a highly technical product using management to tell engineers what to do Amen to that. > AWS' success is it enabled its _engineers_ to launch products. Which is why Azure sticks out like a sore thumb. Azure's issues are due to their GovCloud compliance needs - almost all Fed cloud spend is Azure because they are almost always the first hyperscaler to guarantee FedRAMP compliant products for any cloud segment. This has the downside of features being hacky, because a significant portion of a team's effort is spent on FedRAMP related tasks.
  - jajko 2y ago
    > Inevitabely, the best European technical minds either migrate to the US or become Sales Engineers or Solutions Architects for American vendors. There is always Switzerland for overall higher quality of life. Sums on paychecks themselves are meaningless if there is no underlying quality of life.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      It's still American or Israeli companies though. Working for Google Zurich still means you're working for an American employer (though Google and other employers are increasingly shifting to Warsaw, Praha, and Romania due to tax incentives and employees with less of an ego). Why work for SAP as a Cloud Engineer earning $45-60k in Waldorf and required to go in-person when Wiz or AWS can pay you $90-110k as a Partner Cloud Architect while letting you work remotely in Waldorf and travel may 10-20% to customer onsites in Frankfurt or Berlin or EMEA partner conferences in Praha or Amsterdam. The point is one way or the other, you don't have a choice other than to work for an American or Israeli company in some way or the other in most of Europe's tech scene, and incorporation remains extremely difficult. I've met so many French and Germans who committed aliyah explicitly because they could earn 2x in TLV what they could in Paris or Berlin, or because it was easier to create a startup. And for non-Jewish Europeans America has remained somewhat easier (unless your Polish, Romanian, or Czech/Slovak - in which case Eastern Europeans have a similar hustle and founder culture, as most operators worked in American bigtech or VCs)
nottorp 2y ago
> As usual, another great write up by Berthub. It would be great if it would also include links to all those studies showing how $random_company saved tens of millions by weaning themselves of these "cloud services" and rolling their own. And a mention of the risks of lock in...
- alephnerd 2y ago
  In aggregate, there aren't that many companies. Cloud costs are higher than DC costs, but you can also hire fewer engineers (who are cost centers if you aren't a tech company) and you don't have to deal with asset depreciation (impacting Capex) so your overall infra spend becomes much less. Looking at technology in isolation is one of those pitfalls I've mentioned in my comment - you need to understand the technical AND business usecase. Sadly, most Europeans who understand both are inevitably poached to become Sales or Solutions Architects for American or Israeli vendors.
  - notpushkin 2y ago
    > Cloud costs are higher than DC costs Those aren’t the only options. VPS are a thing, cost less and are pretty easy to operate (even easier than cloud, I’d argue). You can, of course, use cloud services for some stuff (databases? S3?) that are high maintenance, but some things (like the Cognito example from the OP article) just don’t make sense from the point of reducing costs – you trade some complexity for more complexity with a vendor lock-in and some additional costs on top.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    > don't have to deal with asset depreciation Rolling your own doesn't mean only building your own data center. It can mean renting beige boxes or even virtual beige boxes without being locked in to the "cloud services". You tend to pay fixed costs for those beige boxes instead of per api call costs that aren't predictable and tend to exponentially compound each other. Edit: and just as a reminder, unless you work at Google or Facebook you won't have their scaling and dynamic resource allocation needs.
- notpushkin 2y ago

everfrustrated 2y ago

I slightly agree but my take is less salaries and more that most companies in Europe have been totally captured by the management/academic classes [1]. You can't create what is fundamentally a highly technical product using management to tell engineers what to do. European management structures tend to keep the technical people isolated to their own lower strata and don't listen to them. AWS' success is it enabled its _engineers_ to launch products. Which is why Azure sticks out like a sore thumb. [1] This is why you generally only see innovation in Europe coming from small companies, but they don't have the capital to keep investing at pace - AWS was able to build ahead of where its customers were and those customers eventually caught up.

alephnerd 2y ago
> my take is less salaries and more that most companies in Europe have been totally captured by the management/academic classes I agree, but that's not too bad if management was ex-Engineers or ex-Product sales. In most cases I've seen in Europe, they're just consultants or alumni of LDPs from a handful of elite programs, and line level Engineers or Sales Engineers don't get their due. Inevitabely, the best European technical minds either migrate to the US or become Sales Engineers or Solutions Architects for American vendors. > ou can't create what is fundamentally a highly technical product using management to tell engineers what to do Amen to that. > AWS' success is it enabled its _engineers_ to launch products. Which is why Azure sticks out like a sore thumb. Azure's issues are due to their GovCloud compliance needs - almost all Fed cloud spend is Azure because they are almost always the first hyperscaler to guarantee FedRAMP compliant products for any cloud segment. This has the downside of features being hacky, because a significant portion of a team's effort is spent on FedRAMP related tasks.
- jajko 2y ago
  > Inevitabely, the best European technical minds either migrate to the US or become Sales Engineers or Solutions Architects for American vendors. There is always Switzerland for overall higher quality of life. Sums on paychecks themselves are meaningless if there is no underlying quality of life.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    It's still American or Israeli companies though. Working for Google Zurich still means you're working for an American employer (though Google and other employers are increasingly shifting to Warsaw, Praha, and Romania due to tax incentives and employees with less of an ego). Why work for SAP as a Cloud Engineer earning $45-60k in Waldorf and required to go in-person when Wiz or AWS can pay you $90-110k as a Partner Cloud Architect while letting you work remotely in Waldorf and travel may 10-20% to customer onsites in Frankfurt or Berlin or EMEA partner conferences in Praha or Amsterdam. The point is one way or the other, you don't have a choice other than to work for an American or Israeli company in some way or the other in most of Europe's tech scene, and incorporation remains extremely difficult. I've met so many French and Germans who committed aliyah explicitly because they could earn 2x in TLV what they could in Paris or Berlin, or because it was easier to create a startup. And for non-Jewish Europeans America has remained somewhat easier (unless your Polish, Romanian, or Czech/Slovak - in which case Eastern Europeans have a similar hustle and founder culture, as most operators worked in American bigtech or VCs)

nottorp 2y ago

> As usual, another great write up by Berthub. It would be great if it would also include links to all those studies showing how $random_company saved tens of millions by weaning themselves of these "cloud services" and rolling their own. And a mention of the risks of lock in...

alephnerd 2y ago
In aggregate, there aren't that many companies. Cloud costs are higher than DC costs, but you can also hire fewer engineers (who are cost centers if you aren't a tech company) and you don't have to deal with asset depreciation (impacting Capex) so your overall infra spend becomes much less. Looking at technology in isolation is one of those pitfalls I've mentioned in my comment - you need to understand the technical AND business usecase. Sadly, most Europeans who understand both are inevitably poached to become Sales or Solutions Architects for American or Israeli vendors.
- notpushkin 2y ago
  > Cloud costs are higher than DC costs Those aren’t the only options. VPS are a thing, cost less and are pretty easy to operate (even easier than cloud, I’d argue). You can, of course, use cloud services for some stuff (databases? S3?) that are high maintenance, but some things (like the Cognito example from the OP article) just don’t make sense from the point of reducing costs – you trade some complexity for more complexity with a vendor lock-in and some additional costs on top.
- nottorp 2y ago
  > don't have to deal with asset depreciation Rolling your own doesn't mean only building your own data center. It can mean renting beige boxes or even virtual beige boxes without being locked in to the "cloud services". You tend to pay fixed costs for those beige boxes instead of per api call costs that aren't predictable and tend to exponentially compound each other. Edit: and just as a reminder, unless you work at Google or Facebook you won't have their scaling and dynamic resource allocation needs.
notpushkin 2y ago