4 ms·

I believe Europe needs affordable cloud too, not "enterprise" cloud.

by nottorp 1y ago

sauercrowd 1y ago
there's a lot of affordable examples such as hetzner - what's missing?
- r_lee 1y ago
  proper IAM, networking, object store (maybe they have this now) etc..
- tcldr 1y ago
  Hetzner's great, and I'm a customer, but we're missing lots of stuff there – and some of the stuff that is there isn't reliable. For example: * Object storage: lots of horror stories out there regarding flakey performance so hard to justify sticking mission critical stuff there. * Private networking: Again, too many anecdotes about loss of service. Lots of people just using the public IP6 interfaces to avoid their private networking entirely. And private networks are IP4 only. * Kubernetes CSI: I've had issues with this where a PV gets in some locked state and I can't remove from console. I'd love to see more competition here.
  - adamcharnock 1y ago
    Our experience with Hetzner /Cloud/ is similarly shaky. But Hetzner dedicated servers all altogether a different story. We (lithus.eu) deal with their custom solutions team regularly and often provision private networks in the 10-100G range. On top of that we deploy MinIO and OpenEBS/Mayastor, and the whole thing just hums along very nicely indeed.
  - Y-bar 1y ago
    This is my daily AWS story, so I would probably feel right at home on Hetzner it seems!
- graemep 1y ago
  Branding. Businesses and governments are far more comfortable with the big names. Its not just cloud. There is a lot of reliance on mobile OSes too, also American (and anything that needs updates is effectively controlled by whoever supplies the updates). From past HN stories the EU is developing an age verification app that only works on Google attested Android or on iOS. The NHS relies on AWS. British courts use MS Teams for remote hearings. The majority of my clients (apart from some I guide elsewhere) use AWS - its the safe choice. AWS is the current "nobody ever got fired for buying X" supplier. Gmail holds the same position for email.
- preisschild 1y ago
  Stuff like BYOIP because many of their IP ranges are blocked by lots of services, reliability issues, extremely aggressive abuse team that will threaten to block your account for a network misconfiguration, bad performance, ...
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    Plex blocked Hetzner because people were reselling instances. And it also seems that themoviedb.org also has an IP ban on Hetzner, found this out last week trying to build a tool that would've needed it to enrich its data.
    - preisschild 1y ago
      The worst thing (at least for me) is that many Google Services block lots of Hetzner IPs. Even just running plain kubernetes is a problem, because the default Kubernetes container registry is hosted on Google Cloud Services...
      - adamcharnock 1y ago
        Interesting. This is something I've yet to encounter, and we use Hetzner a lot for our clients (dedicated servers though, not cloud, so maybe that makes a difference).
jpalomaki 1y ago
Few cheaper ones that come into mind: OVH (France), Hetzer (Germany) and Contabo (Germany). At least the two first ones have data centers in few other countries as well.
- nottorp 1y ago
  Yes, so SAP isn't doing much of a favor to Europe. More to their own pocket.
  - tcldr 1y ago
    Scaleway has a broad range of services, but their price competitiveness/reserved instance discount is a bit lacking.
    - theshrike79 1y ago
      Their "development" instances used to be the shit years and years ago. You could get one running on their own custom hardware for like 4€/month, enough for a bunch of small utilities. Tried to get one some time ago, but they've sold all of the capacity and it's not available. Need to check if that has changed.
  - MrDresden 1y ago
    AWS was initially just for Amazon.com. Similar with Google's infrastructure. A big EU business moving to their own cloud infrastructure is a good thing, even though you and I can't immediately take advantage of it.
gjvc 1y ago
Civo (UK) might be of interest
ta1243 1y ago
When I think of affordable cloud, it's all european providers.
xandrius 1y ago
Upcloud (Finland) is great, I'd vouch for them. Supports lots of countries, affordable and the people there are super nice.
ExoticPearTree 1y ago
Europe needs something similar to what the big three hyper scalers offer so a migration of sorts can happen without too much hassle for companies who deem that data sovereignty is a live or die kind of situation. There are a lot of small providers here and there, but they can't offer the scale of even GCP (the smallest of the bunch).

I believe Europe needs affordable cloud too, not "enterprise" cloud.

sauercrowd 1y ago

there's a lot of affordable examples such as hetzner - what's missing?

r_lee 1y ago
proper IAM, networking, object store (maybe they have this now) etc..
tcldr 1y ago
Hetzner's great, and I'm a customer, but we're missing lots of stuff there – and some of the stuff that is there isn't reliable. For example: * Object storage: lots of horror stories out there regarding flakey performance so hard to justify sticking mission critical stuff there. * Private networking: Again, too many anecdotes about loss of service. Lots of people just using the public IP6 interfaces to avoid their private networking entirely. And private networks are IP4 only. * Kubernetes CSI: I've had issues with this where a PV gets in some locked state and I can't remove from console. I'd love to see more competition here.
- adamcharnock 1y ago
  Our experience with Hetzner /Cloud/ is similarly shaky. But Hetzner dedicated servers all altogether a different story. We (lithus.eu) deal with their custom solutions team regularly and often provision private networks in the 10-100G range. On top of that we deploy MinIO and OpenEBS/Mayastor, and the whole thing just hums along very nicely indeed.
- Y-bar 1y ago
  This is my daily AWS story, so I would probably feel right at home on Hetzner it seems!
graemep 1y ago
Branding. Businesses and governments are far more comfortable with the big names. Its not just cloud. There is a lot of reliance on mobile OSes too, also American (and anything that needs updates is effectively controlled by whoever supplies the updates). From past HN stories the EU is developing an age verification app that only works on Google attested Android or on iOS. The NHS relies on AWS. British courts use MS Teams for remote hearings. The majority of my clients (apart from some I guide elsewhere) use AWS - its the safe choice. AWS is the current "nobody ever got fired for buying X" supplier. Gmail holds the same position for email.
preisschild 1y ago
Stuff like BYOIP because many of their IP ranges are blocked by lots of services, reliability issues, extremely aggressive abuse team that will threaten to block your account for a network misconfiguration, bad performance, ...
- theshrike79 1y ago
  Plex blocked Hetzner because people were reselling instances. And it also seems that themoviedb.org also has an IP ban on Hetzner, found this out last week trying to build a tool that would've needed it to enrich its data.
  - preisschild 1y ago
    The worst thing (at least for me) is that many Google Services block lots of Hetzner IPs. Even just running plain kubernetes is a problem, because the default Kubernetes container registry is hosted on Google Cloud Services...
    - adamcharnock 1y ago
      Interesting. This is something I've yet to encounter, and we use Hetzner a lot for our clients (dedicated servers though, not cloud, so maybe that makes a difference).

jpalomaki 1y ago

Few cheaper ones that come into mind: OVH (France), Hetzer (Germany) and Contabo (Germany). At least the two first ones have data centers in few other countries as well.

nottorp 1y ago
Yes, so SAP isn't doing much of a favor to Europe. More to their own pocket.
- tcldr 1y ago
  Scaleway has a broad range of services, but their price competitiveness/reserved instance discount is a bit lacking.
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    Their "development" instances used to be the shit years and years ago. You could get one running on their own custom hardware for like 4€/month, enough for a bunch of small utilities. Tried to get one some time ago, but they've sold all of the capacity and it's not available. Need to check if that has changed.
- MrDresden 1y ago
  AWS was initially just for Amazon.com. Similar with Google's infrastructure. A big EU business moving to their own cloud infrastructure is a good thing, even though you and I can't immediately take advantage of it.

gjvc 1y ago

Civo (UK) might be of interest

ta1243 1y ago

When I think of affordable cloud, it's all european providers.

xandrius 1y ago

Upcloud (Finland) is great, I'd vouch for them. Supports lots of countries, affordable and the people there are super nice.

ExoticPearTree 1y ago

Europe needs something similar to what the big three hyper scalers offer so a migration of sorts can happen without too much hassle for companies who deem that data sovereignty is a live or die kind of situation. There are a lot of small providers here and there, but they can't offer the scale of even GCP (the smallest of the bunch).