4 ms·

This is great. While i dont agree with the vast majority of conservative viewpoints, a nation investing in itself is definitely something we need more of Peopl

by samrus 1y ago

This is great. While i dont agree with the vast majority of conservative viewpoints, a nation investing in itself is definitely something we need more of People might raise the point that these native tech service providers arent as mature as the american giants. But that maturity can only be acheived through healthy local consumption. Once the EU uses them, and makes it lucrative for local competition to pop up, then they will rise to the challenge. This is great

andy99 1y ago
While I agree with your sentiment, it seems you've never used OVH.
- ahofmann 1y ago
  Ovh has a lot of products. Some of them are cheap and the services quality acts accordingly. OVH is mostly pretty good.
- lossolo 1y ago
  Care to elaborate? I've been using their different products for around 20 years.
- tux3 1y ago
  OVH has been getting a lot better. They recently discovered that Terraform exists and have a usable infra as code provider now. They're starting to take multi-AZ seriously. Sometimes their network is UP and working normally, which compares favorably with us-east-1. It's starting to look like a real cloud.
  - neepi 1y ago
    [flagged]
- tetha 1y ago
  There is also this weird question: What do you get from your hoster? For example, I've had endless discussions with people about the reliability of Hetzner Dedicated Servers. At the end of the day, you have to realize: You get a physical server, with fans (we had performance degradations because a cable binder degraded and parts fell into a fan and the CPU throttled), a PSU, drives (HDDs and SDDs fail differently, but both fail. SDD failure can be much more evil). It's just a little box that can run for years, or it can choose to go kapeister whenever it wants. Maybe it will take it's friends along the way too. There have been outages of servers catching on fire and frying the systems on top of them as well. Then the fire suppression goes off and shatters some drives plates on top of that. Naturally only in the archiving servers, who'd be using spinning rust in other systems this day and age? And that's the operational technique and experience that has been hoovered up by very large PaaS offerings and hosters. You need to plan for, deal with and mitigate the situation that every server and VM hosted on a server (read: all of them) are a somewhat useful crew of saboteurs that are trying to figure out when the right failure of 3-4 systems are going to cause you a lot of overtime, stress, and maybe impact and cripple the business as well. If you plan for this, Hetzner Cloud + Dedicated can be a great hoster, with great support and really good value for money. If you assume that a single Hetzner Dedicated Server or Cloud VM has the same manpower behind it to give it the staggering uptime of EC2 instances, and you bet all of your company and all of your money on this VM never going down... well, you can do this on AWS. We've had a prolonged outage of an EC2 instance once in like 7 years. But don't do this. Fix your failovers and architecture and embrace the fun of european hosters. After some grief with the early stages of the Cloud-Dedicated-VSwitch infrastructure, we're seeing great uptime with them.
- silisili 1y ago
  While not using it on a huge scale, I've got a few projects in OVH cloud(US) and can't remember them having ever gone down in the last couple years. I get maintenance notices from them often that explain what they're doing and that it shouldn't be impacting, and so far they've been right. Is your experience different?
jorgenveisdal 1y ago
A lot of "mature" American software is garbage as well. Epic Systems has (thus far) been a disaster in the UK, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland and Norway.
- mathgradthrow 1y ago
  It has also been a disaster in the US, to be fair.
  - Alupis 1y ago
    I'm fairly certain it's a natural law carved into stone that the "Bigger" the Enterprise, the more their software is held together with duct tape, shoe string, and band-aides. Even domestically - if you interface with a big Enterprise software vendor - you're in for a massively expensive bad time. The sweet spot seems to be smaller, not-yet enterprise tech companies that focus on doing one product very well.
    - nine_k 1y ago
      This likely happens when internal politics completely replace whatever somehow objective quality metrics, and the sales force becomes persuasive beyond reason. «The engineer wants to build a thing cheaply enough that it functions, and then cheaply as can be while maintaining function. The MBA wants to build a thing as cheaply as can be while extracting maximum value from the process. Maintaining function is only relevant inasmuch as is necessary for marketing. Enshittification is offensive to the engineer, and is a deliberate calculated tactic for the MBA.» (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43367281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43367281)
      - Alupis 1y ago
        Additionally, it seems the big enterprise vendors will cook up any solution to whatever problem (perceived or real) a customer says they have - no matter how out-of-domain it might be for the expertise of the enterprise vendor. We can observe this with the old-school enterprise juggernauts such as IBM. "What does IBM actually do?" is a hell of a great question today - and the answer pretty much is "whatever you pay them to do". We also see this with our own domestic governments - where every single problem looks like a Microsoft solution - and the sales people rejoice.
Alupis 1y ago
> a nation investing in itself is definitely something we need more of It's always made me curious why foreign governments allow their critical technical infrastructure to come from other nations - even friendly ones. It seems like something you obviously cannot allow yourself to become dependent on for a vast number of reasons. Yes, the EU and it's member nations should invest heavily in their own domestic technical companies and capabilities. However, I suspect part of the reason there is no present-day "FAANG" in the EU is in no small part due to their relatively anti-business/startup policies, which while well-intentioned, obviously have had a tangible impact on their tech business field. Maybe some technical founders in the EU can chime in on some of the challenges they face when building within the EU versus the US.
- samrus 1y ago
  globalism the idea that forming a tight reciprocal network of economic dependency will prevent petty politics and align everyone towards cooperation, or starving. it seemed like a good idea but now its seeming more and more like an economic version of bismarck's pre-WW1 "balance of power" strategy. why did that fail to prevent WW1? my guess is that its an unstable equilibrium in the short term, a prisoners dilemma where, in the short term, one party can benefit more from betrayal than from cooperation. why do humans tend to go for the short term gain of betrayal versus the long term gain of cooperation? idk, but it seems intrinsic to us because i think the "thrown out of eden" parable is folk wisdom about this same thing
- nicoburns 1y ago
  It depends how big you are. If you're the UK or France or Germany, then sure, it makes sense (but you still have less scale than the US). If you're Luxembourg or Macedonia then you probably dont have the resources and at least need to collaborate with your neighbours.
- nextos 1y ago
  > no present-day "FAANG" in the EU is in no small part due to their relatively anti-business/startup policies Draghi's report claimed a big factor was the lack of a true financial union, which made it hard to mobilize and raise capital.
belter 1y ago
They also use a lot of AWS...
nhanhi 1y ago
Interesting, when was the last time an AWS DC burned down? I’m all for reducing reliance on big US cloud vendors, but OVH is certainly another extreme.
- Alupis 1y ago
  I'm unsure if this is fair to OVH. Yes, they had a pretty epic fire not long ago - but their "bread and butter" has been low cost, from what I've gathered (never used them before). I assume OVH will be building a private "EU Government" cloud of sorts, which may even include new private data centers. Even if they re-use their existing cloud - the government cloud isn't likely to be all in one region etc. I guess I'm saying, it's better to give OVH (or another major cloud provider within the EU) a chance, even if they're not on-par with AWS et al today.
  - everfrustrated 1y ago
    Wasn't it worse than that too - their supposedly independent data centres were all sitting literally next to each other
- blibble 1y ago
  still a lower risk than having your entire country's internet services turned off by the US regime to gain political leverage

by samrus 1y ago

andy99 1y ago

While I agree with your sentiment, it seems you've never used OVH.

ahofmann 1y ago
Ovh has a lot of products. Some of them are cheap and the services quality acts accordingly. OVH is mostly pretty good.
lossolo 1y ago
Care to elaborate? I've been using their different products for around 20 years.
tux3 1y ago
OVH has been getting a lot better. They recently discovered that Terraform exists and have a usable infra as code provider now. They're starting to take multi-AZ seriously. Sometimes their network is UP and working normally, which compares favorably with us-east-1. It's starting to look like a real cloud.
- neepi 1y ago
  [flagged]
tetha 1y ago
There is also this weird question: What do you get from your hoster? For example, I've had endless discussions with people about the reliability of Hetzner Dedicated Servers. At the end of the day, you have to realize: You get a physical server, with fans (we had performance degradations because a cable binder degraded and parts fell into a fan and the CPU throttled), a PSU, drives (HDDs and SDDs fail differently, but both fail. SDD failure can be much more evil). It's just a little box that can run for years, or it can choose to go kapeister whenever it wants. Maybe it will take it's friends along the way too. There have been outages of servers catching on fire and frying the systems on top of them as well. Then the fire suppression goes off and shatters some drives plates on top of that. Naturally only in the archiving servers, who'd be using spinning rust in other systems this day and age? And that's the operational technique and experience that has been hoovered up by very large PaaS offerings and hosters. You need to plan for, deal with and mitigate the situation that every server and VM hosted on a server (read: all of them) are a somewhat useful crew of saboteurs that are trying to figure out when the right failure of 3-4 systems are going to cause you a lot of overtime, stress, and maybe impact and cripple the business as well. If you plan for this, Hetzner Cloud + Dedicated can be a great hoster, with great support and really good value for money. If you assume that a single Hetzner Dedicated Server or Cloud VM has the same manpower behind it to give it the staggering uptime of EC2 instances, and you bet all of your company and all of your money on this VM never going down... well, you can do this on AWS. We've had a prolonged outage of an EC2 instance once in like 7 years. But don't do this. Fix your failovers and architecture and embrace the fun of european hosters. After some grief with the early stages of the Cloud-Dedicated-VSwitch infrastructure, we're seeing great uptime with them.
silisili 1y ago
While not using it on a huge scale, I've got a few projects in OVH cloud(US) and can't remember them having ever gone down in the last couple years. I get maintenance notices from them often that explain what they're doing and that it shouldn't be impacting, and so far they've been right. Is your experience different?

jorgenveisdal 1y ago

A lot of "mature" American software is garbage as well. Epic Systems has (thus far) been a disaster in the UK, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland and Norway.

mathgradthrow 1y ago
It has also been a disaster in the US, to be fair.
- Alupis 1y ago
  I'm fairly certain it's a natural law carved into stone that the "Bigger" the Enterprise, the more their software is held together with duct tape, shoe string, and band-aides. Even domestically - if you interface with a big Enterprise software vendor - you're in for a massively expensive bad time. The sweet spot seems to be smaller, not-yet enterprise tech companies that focus on doing one product very well.
  - nine_k 1y ago
    This likely happens when internal politics completely replace whatever somehow objective quality metrics, and the sales force becomes persuasive beyond reason. «The engineer wants to build a thing cheaply enough that it functions, and then cheaply as can be while maintaining function. The MBA wants to build a thing as cheaply as can be while extracting maximum value from the process. Maintaining function is only relevant inasmuch as is necessary for marketing. Enshittification is offensive to the engineer, and is a deliberate calculated tactic for the MBA.» (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43367281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43367281)
    - Alupis 1y ago
      Additionally, it seems the big enterprise vendors will cook up any solution to whatever problem (perceived or real) a customer says they have - no matter how out-of-domain it might be for the expertise of the enterprise vendor. We can observe this with the old-school enterprise juggernauts such as IBM. "What does IBM actually do?" is a hell of a great question today - and the answer pretty much is "whatever you pay them to do". We also see this with our own domestic governments - where every single problem looks like a Microsoft solution - and the sales people rejoice.

Alupis 1y ago

> a nation investing in itself is definitely something we need more of It's always made me curious why foreign governments allow their critical technical infrastructure to come from other nations - even friendly ones. It seems like something you obviously cannot allow yourself to become dependent on for a vast number of reasons. Yes, the EU and it's member nations should invest heavily in their own domestic technical companies and capabilities. However, I suspect part of the reason there is no present-day "FAANG" in the EU is in no small part due to their relatively anti-business/startup policies, which while well-intentioned, obviously have had a tangible impact on their tech business field. Maybe some technical founders in the EU can chime in on some of the challenges they face when building within the EU versus the US.

samrus 1y ago
globalism the idea that forming a tight reciprocal network of economic dependency will prevent petty politics and align everyone towards cooperation, or starving. it seemed like a good idea but now its seeming more and more like an economic version of bismarck's pre-WW1 "balance of power" strategy. why did that fail to prevent WW1? my guess is that its an unstable equilibrium in the short term, a prisoners dilemma where, in the short term, one party can benefit more from betrayal than from cooperation. why do humans tend to go for the short term gain of betrayal versus the long term gain of cooperation? idk, but it seems intrinsic to us because i think the "thrown out of eden" parable is folk wisdom about this same thing
nicoburns 1y ago
It depends how big you are. If you're the UK or France or Germany, then sure, it makes sense (but you still have less scale than the US). If you're Luxembourg or Macedonia then you probably dont have the resources and at least need to collaborate with your neighbours.
nextos 1y ago
> no present-day "FAANG" in the EU is in no small part due to their relatively anti-business/startup policies Draghi's report claimed a big factor was the lack of a true financial union, which made it hard to mobilize and raise capital.

belter 1y ago

They also use a lot of AWS...

nhanhi 1y ago

Interesting, when was the last time an AWS DC burned down? I’m all for reducing reliance on big US cloud vendors, but OVH is certainly another extreme.

Alupis 1y ago
I'm unsure if this is fair to OVH. Yes, they had a pretty epic fire not long ago - but their "bread and butter" has been low cost, from what I've gathered (never used them before). I assume OVH will be building a private "EU Government" cloud of sorts, which may even include new private data centers. Even if they re-use their existing cloud - the government cloud isn't likely to be all in one region etc. I guess I'm saying, it's better to give OVH (or another major cloud provider within the EU) a chance, even if they're not on-par with AWS et al today.
- everfrustrated 1y ago
  Wasn't it worse than that too - their supposedly independent data centres were all sitting literally next to each other
blibble 1y ago
still a lower risk than having your entire country's internet services turned off by the US regime to gain political leverage