5 ms·

Yes. We free ourselves from the US dependency by... letting Microsoft, Amazon and Google build them. I don't see anything changing, still more and more companie

Yes. We free ourselves from the US dependency by... letting Microsoft, Amazon and Google build them. I don't see anything changing, still more and more companies and projects are moving to the US cloud providers. There are discussions and worries but the conclusion is always the same: it's too expensive to move away or not moving to the cloud and there is no non-US alternative. Not generally true IMHO, but many companies are structured in a way that makes a good internal IT nearly impossible.

kristianc 1y ago
Yes - what this will mean in most if not nearly all situations is using a hyperscaler’s services in a data zone that you or your customers are more comfortable with, not switching off them wholesale.
spwa4 1y ago
This is how it always goes in the EU. "The US becomes less reliable/invests less/... so we'll do it and put in a BIG effort" big announcement from Brussels. Usually repeated 5 times or so by some head of state of France and/or Germany. Then you check the "BIG effort" the EU makes and it's, 10 years of 0 budget + 5% of the budget US invests yearly for 3 years + never looking at it again. To make it worse from that point, they mostly don't divide such budgets across a million small proposals like the US does. No, the politicians in the Brussels find 2 or 3 companies or institutions they like and sign a contract with them. Which results in the many (usually small) companies that actually have accomplishments not getting their business, but big consultancies or institutions or ... getting the contracts by promising to divide the business among pre-agreed subcontractors (doing the EU's job for them, or at least the administration/checking job the US government does in the US, and the subcontractors especially have to be in the right countries). Afterwards, they don't even check what was actually accomplished, and intervening is just unheard of. Meanwhile you look at it, and you're forced to conclude: 1) scientists will not be leaving the US under Trump. Yes the difference between the EU and US will become smaller, but still heavily in favor of the US (as in >100% difference, factors, not percentage points). In pay, in budget (ie. for research equipment), in infrastructure, in existing knowledge, and of course in future job prospects after research. Also: it's not just the US universities that are coming under increasing pressure. 2) the EU brain drain towards the US will continue in other sectors too (IT, medicine, pharma, ...) 3) cloud business will continue migrating to the US (whether we're talking Salesforce or AWS EC2) 4) factories will keep migrating to the US (already started long before Trump, so it's not his accomplishment, and they won't be providing the jobs hoped for, but they'll keep migrating to the US)
- pjmlp 1y ago
  This is basically how Southern Europe goverments work, but at continent scale. Hence why Nothern countries have such a hard time understanding why we usually have some issues caring to follow all regulations, and are somehow flexible in what to follow. We have been throughout this way of working across centuries. You could re-publish the famous Portuguese writer, Eça de Queiroz, books critizing the society from 19th century updated to a modern setting, and most of it would still apply.
  - rcarmo 1y ago
    Yep.
- FranzFerdiNaN 1y ago
  Really, peak HN reply this: fully confident about something you know zero about.
vbezhenar 1y ago
It was the same in Russia, until West pulled the plug. Well, not exactly the same, there are good clouds in the Russia, but dependency on western services was huge. Now they migrate to Chinese suppliers even for things which could be produced domestically. People never learn.
- paganel 1y ago
  > It was the same in Russia, until West pulled the plug The thing is that the EU is not a political monolith, just look at Poland which has just elected a pro-US and anti-EU president. The anti-US policy comes mostly from France, part of Germany (I'm pretty sure a big chunk of the CDU still sides with the Americans out of the public eye) and from the Nordics, maybe the Dutch, too, but I don't follow them all that closely. Also, Italy has got Meloni who's a lot more buddy-buddy with Trump than with any bureaucrat in Brussels. People here in Eastern- and Central-Europe are fully aware that if push were to come to the proverbial stove and a hot-war against Russia were to start then none of the Western-Euros would do anything consequential to make it go our (Eastern Europeans' way), just look at Poland in '39, for the simple reason that said Western-Europeans don't have the means of doing that anymore and will probably never be able to do it ever again. So the Americans are the only reliable counter-weight against Russia.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >just look at Poland which has just elected a pro-US and anti-EU president Same with Romania, and why wouldn't they be? The US ensures our defense from Russia, not France, not Germany, not the EU. Their nuclear shield, troops, land and air bases in our country ensured our defense even before we joined the EU so of course we'd grateful for that. The US companies opening well paid tech jobs here is another icing on the cake making us wealthier and also giving the US some assets they might want to defend. We're too small and poor to have armies that can compete with Russia and we saw how weak and toothless the western European powers are when push comes to shove, ever since they threw us under the Soviet bus in WW2. Polish people know what I'm talking about. What help would western EU countries be to us in an actual war when in the not too distant past, under Ursula v.d. Leyen, German military couldn't even provide underwear and dog tags to their own conscripts? And besides the sorry state of their military, Germans aren't patriotic enough to stand up for their own people, how can we expect them to care about some Slavs and Eastern Europeans, when they could gladly just cut a deal with Russia for cheap gas to throw us under the bus again? So of course we're gonna support the US.
mschuster91 1y ago
> There are discussions and worries but the conclusion is always the same: it's too expensive to move away or not moving to the cloud and there is no non-US alternative. That's due to a combination of multiple factors: - owning hardware is capex and means assets that depreciate on the balance sheet, which is bad for finance bros. Outsourcing that means opex and no responsibility for assets. - there are European cloud service providers but they lack the comprehensiveness of AWS/GCE/Azure and in many cases integration into Terraform or other IaC solutions, on top of that they are more expensive than American counterparts - in the office suite space, there is no "one stop shop" solution like Office 365 offers - it's in the best case a collection of different open source tools that don't have even close to the level of integration that Microsoft offers, there is barely any commercial vendor offering support for all of them (so you have to coordinate with a bunch of vendors). - On top of that, it's very difficult for open-source solutions to check the "auditability" / "recordkeeping" checkboxes that companies with an exposure to the US stonk market demand, whereas Microsoft does all of that as an integrated and "standard practice"-conformant service

kristianc 1y ago

Yes - what this will mean in most if not nearly all situations is using a hyperscaler’s services in a data zone that you or your customers are more comfortable with, not switching off them wholesale.

spwa4 1y ago

This is how it always goes in the EU. "The US becomes less reliable/invests less/... so we'll do it and put in a BIG effort" big announcement from Brussels. Usually repeated 5 times or so by some head of state of France and/or Germany. Then you check the "BIG effort" the EU makes and it's, 10 years of 0 budget + 5% of the budget US invests yearly for 3 years + never looking at it again. To make it worse from that point, they mostly don't divide such budgets across a million small proposals like the US does. No, the politicians in the Brussels find 2 or 3 companies or institutions they like and sign a contract with them. Which results in the many (usually small) companies that actually have accomplishments not getting their business, but big consultancies or institutions or ... getting the contracts by promising to divide the business among pre-agreed subcontractors (doing the EU's job for them, or at least the administration/checking job the US government does in the US, and the subcontractors especially have to be in the right countries). Afterwards, they don't even check what was actually accomplished, and intervening is just unheard of. Meanwhile you look at it, and you're forced to conclude: 1) scientists will not be leaving the US under Trump. Yes the difference between the EU and US will become smaller, but still heavily in favor of the US (as in >100% difference, factors, not percentage points). In pay, in budget (ie. for research equipment), in infrastructure, in existing knowledge, and of course in future job prospects after research. Also: it's not just the US universities that are coming under increasing pressure. 2) the EU brain drain towards the US will continue in other sectors too (IT, medicine, pharma, ...) 3) cloud business will continue migrating to the US (whether we're talking Salesforce or AWS EC2) 4) factories will keep migrating to the US (already started long before Trump, so it's not his accomplishment, and they won't be providing the jobs hoped for, but they'll keep migrating to the US)

pjmlp 1y ago
This is basically how Southern Europe goverments work, but at continent scale. Hence why Nothern countries have such a hard time understanding why we usually have some issues caring to follow all regulations, and are somehow flexible in what to follow. We have been throughout this way of working across centuries. You could re-publish the famous Portuguese writer, Eça de Queiroz, books critizing the society from 19th century updated to a modern setting, and most of it would still apply.
- rcarmo 1y ago
  Yep.
FranzFerdiNaN 1y ago
Really, peak HN reply this: fully confident about something you know zero about.

vbezhenar 1y ago

It was the same in Russia, until West pulled the plug. Well, not exactly the same, there are good clouds in the Russia, but dependency on western services was huge. Now they migrate to Chinese suppliers even for things which could be produced domestically. People never learn.

paganel 1y ago
> It was the same in Russia, until West pulled the plug The thing is that the EU is not a political monolith, just look at Poland which has just elected a pro-US and anti-EU president. The anti-US policy comes mostly from France, part of Germany (I'm pretty sure a big chunk of the CDU still sides with the Americans out of the public eye) and from the Nordics, maybe the Dutch, too, but I don't follow them all that closely. Also, Italy has got Meloni who's a lot more buddy-buddy with Trump than with any bureaucrat in Brussels. People here in Eastern- and Central-Europe are fully aware that if push were to come to the proverbial stove and a hot-war against Russia were to start then none of the Western-Euros would do anything consequential to make it go our (Eastern Europeans' way), just look at Poland in '39, for the simple reason that said Western-Europeans don't have the means of doing that anymore and will probably never be able to do it ever again. So the Americans are the only reliable counter-weight against Russia.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >just look at Poland which has just elected a pro-US and anti-EU president Same with Romania, and why wouldn't they be? The US ensures our defense from Russia, not France, not Germany, not the EU. Their nuclear shield, troops, land and air bases in our country ensured our defense even before we joined the EU so of course we'd grateful for that. The US companies opening well paid tech jobs here is another icing on the cake making us wealthier and also giving the US some assets they might want to defend. We're too small and poor to have armies that can compete with Russia and we saw how weak and toothless the western European powers are when push comes to shove, ever since they threw us under the Soviet bus in WW2. Polish people know what I'm talking about. What help would western EU countries be to us in an actual war when in the not too distant past, under Ursula v.d. Leyen, German military couldn't even provide underwear and dog tags to their own conscripts? And besides the sorry state of their military, Germans aren't patriotic enough to stand up for their own people, how can we expect them to care about some Slavs and Eastern Europeans, when they could gladly just cut a deal with Russia for cheap gas to throw us under the bus again? So of course we're gonna support the US.

mschuster91 1y ago

> There are discussions and worries but the conclusion is always the same: it's too expensive to move away or not moving to the cloud and there is no non-US alternative. That's due to a combination of multiple factors: - owning hardware is capex and means assets that depreciate on the balance sheet, which is bad for finance bros. Outsourcing that means opex and no responsibility for assets. - there are European cloud service providers but they lack the comprehensiveness of AWS/GCE/Azure and in many cases integration into Terraform or other IaC solutions, on top of that they are more expensive than American counterparts - in the office suite space, there is no "one stop shop" solution like Office 365 offers - it's in the best case a collection of different open source tools that don't have even close to the level of integration that Microsoft offers, there is barely any commercial vendor offering support for all of them (so you have to coordinate with a bunch of vendors). - On top of that, it's very difficult for open-source solutions to check the "auditability" / "recordkeeping" checkboxes that companies with an exposure to the US stonk market demand, whereas Microsoft does all of that as an integrated and "standard practice"-conformant service