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Great question. Technically speaking I might not need both, but I have a gut feeling that one of these cloud providers might not be as hardened as the hyperscal

Great question. Technically speaking I might not need both, but I have a gut feeling that one of these cloud providers might not be as hardened as the hyperscalers, and that Russia is just waiting to put one of these two services down. So for maximal resiliency I chose to design from a multi-cloud setup from the beginning. Scaleway came up but is more expensive. IONOS did not come up in our research. Part of what we tried to do was to make ourselves independent from traditional cloud services and be really good at doing stuff on a VPS. Once you start doing that, you can actually allow yourself to look more at uptimes and at costs. Also, since we wanted everything to be fully automated, Terraform support was important for us, and OVHcloud and Hetzner had that. I'm sure there's many great cloud providers out in Europe, but it's hard to vet them to understand if they can meet demand and if they are financially stable. We would want not to keep switching cloud providers. So picking two of the major ones seemed like a safe choice.

handfuloflight 1y ago
What would Russia's interests be in putting these ISPs down, specifically?
- sksjvsla 1y ago
  Without making it too political and speculating on things I don't know, I, like many other Europeans, have seen plenty of cases of Russia ruining infrastructure projects in Europe, everything from internet cables on the ocean bed, telcos, water supplies, railways and more. Authorities are asking civilians in Scandinavia to be prepare their hiused with. Good and water and are actively hardening security around critical infrastructure, including their software. I won't comment more on this because it's gonna derail this discussion.
  - anticodon 1y ago
    Is there a single proof? Like some Russian citizen was caught ruinining infrastructure project and it was proved that a) he is a citizen of Russia or was paid by Russian authorities, b) that the person in question had indeed done some damage to the infrastructure project. I don't remember a single such case. I remember reading a lot of speculations like "it's highly likely that it was done by Russians" every single time without a trace of evidence.
    - hbnjgf 1y ago
      Does it matter for the average business, if an infrastructure was brought down buy the Russian state or someone blaming it on the Russians? It's undeniable that core European infrastructure is targeted currently
    - rsynnott 1y ago
      Okay, I mean, if you want to give poor ol’ Putin the benefit of the doubt, something that looks like a state actor but might theoretically not be Russia is doing a lot of minor to moderate economic sabotage in Europe. Personally I think the amount of special pleading required to imagine that it is _not_ Russia is a bit much (particularly around the deep sea cable cuts; at that point you’re really claiming that Russia is deniably pretending that it is them, but really it’s someone else), but you do you. It doesn’t change the overarching point; both Hetzner and OVH would be obvious targets for, ah, whoever it is.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  Russia likes causing trouble in Europe generally (and elsewhere; the Internet Research Agency was largely targeted at the US, say).

handfuloflight 1y ago

What would Russia's interests be in putting these ISPs down, specifically?

sksjvsla 1y ago
Without making it too political and speculating on things I don't know, I, like many other Europeans, have seen plenty of cases of Russia ruining infrastructure projects in Europe, everything from internet cables on the ocean bed, telcos, water supplies, railways and more. Authorities are asking civilians in Scandinavia to be prepare their hiused with. Good and water and are actively hardening security around critical infrastructure, including their software. I won't comment more on this because it's gonna derail this discussion.
- anticodon 1y ago
  Is there a single proof? Like some Russian citizen was caught ruinining infrastructure project and it was proved that a) he is a citizen of Russia or was paid by Russian authorities, b) that the person in question had indeed done some damage to the infrastructure project. I don't remember a single such case. I remember reading a lot of speculations like "it's highly likely that it was done by Russians" every single time without a trace of evidence.
  - hbnjgf 1y ago
    Does it matter for the average business, if an infrastructure was brought down buy the Russian state or someone blaming it on the Russians? It's undeniable that core European infrastructure is targeted currently
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    Okay, I mean, if you want to give poor ol’ Putin the benefit of the doubt, something that looks like a state actor but might theoretically not be Russia is doing a lot of minor to moderate economic sabotage in Europe. Personally I think the amount of special pleading required to imagine that it is _not_ Russia is a bit much (particularly around the deep sea cable cuts; at that point you’re really claiming that Russia is deniably pretending that it is them, but really it’s someone else), but you do you. It doesn’t change the overarching point; both Hetzner and OVH would be obvious targets for, ah, whoever it is.
rsynnott 1y ago
Russia likes causing trouble in Europe generally (and elsewhere; the Internet Research Agency was largely targeted at the US, say).