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I think this is good news. Multiple paths to pass information is a good thing for the world, independent of the reasons behind it. But I don't think the econom
by soneca 12y ago
I think this is good news. Multiple paths to pass information is a good thing for the world, independent of the reasons behind it.
But I don't think the economic impact, with American firms losing revenue is nothing more than political PR blablabla.
Market forces (price and quality) still drives a lot of traffic from Brazil to USA. For example, there is no hosting solution or email provider in Brazil that comes close to using dozens of american firms.
Of all the startups here in Brazil I would guess that 80% use servers from american firms (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Softlayer, Digital Ocean and many, many others). Our local host solutions are used mainly for amateursih website hosting (of local restaurants and small non-tech companies).
A possible law forbidding national companies to use data centers out of Brazil is being discussed around here. And the general reaction among national startups is "if this happens, we are all fu". There is simply no local solution in quality and price anywhere near those big american ones.
But, again, despite market forces still going to drive a lotof traffic to USA, I think it is a good idea to have alternatives. For sensitive government and academic data at first, but maybe creating the environment to better infrastrucuture companies rising in Brazil or Europe.
- throwawayaway 12y agoOn the plus side building something like this establishes a capability and track record, and could be of future benefit for contracts abroad. In a similar sense a push to getting more than 20% of your local startups on local hosting - which is already quite a good number - might attract foreign customers. Long term the economic impact might be worth talking about but in the immediate term I agree that it is just noise.
- malvim 12y agoMain problem with local hosting solutions is pricing, I think. I can get a DO VPS machine with a reasonable performance for US$ 5/mo, while most known Brazilian providers would set me back about US$ 20/mo for a similar machine. If latency is not a big issue for you, it just doesn't make sense to host it here, unfortunately.
- throwawayaway 12y agoWith AWS having brazillian hosting and established firms already there operating at a high price, it does seem like the skillset is in place for someone in brazil to do something entrepreneurial.
- marcosdumay 12y agoWhat exactly do you mean? Are you talking about undercutting Amazon's price? The prices are that hight because of taxes, nobody can undercut them on Brazil.
- throwawayaway 12y agoNo I am talking about undercutting the other local Brazillian businesses.
- kuschku 12y agoAnd DO is still more than 2 times as expensive as OVH is. Which is why I host in the EU, getting more security for less money. TL;DR: OVH provides more “fuck murica”[1] on the euro than DO. — [1]: This is not meant against the people of the US, but its government and secret agencies.
- primitivesuave 12y agoAnnouncements like this are a huge incentive for large Brazilian firms to get into the cloud hosting space, reminiscent of one large American e-commerce company (whose name happens to be a river of Brazil) entering the cloud hosting market. The prices offered by hosting services here are largely the result of a massive investment, so the first Brazilian firm that can make such an investment can offer competitive prices and learn from the mistakes that firms here made (e.g. AWS dashboard devolving into an enigma of overlapping tools). In a country that has one of the fastest growing economies of the world, and where the government is publicly wary of American IT companies, affordable and local cloud hosting will certainly happen soon.
- gtirloni 12y agoDo you know a Brazilian company that has the knowhow to face Amazon/Microsoft though? Any time "cloud computing" is mentioned is Brazil it's nothing more than traditional datacenters and virtual machines. Nothing close to the wide range of cloud services that AWS/Azure provides. The Cisco InterCloud initiative might be an option for independent Brazilian datacenters to improve their service and offer something close to AWS/Azure (although much less flexible).
- drivingmenuts 12y ago> Do you know a Brazilian company that has the knowhow to face Amazon/Microsoft though? Doesn't matter if there are contracts or laws forbidding doing business with American entities. Even if they can't compete at first, though, this gives them impetus to learn.
- benologist 12y agoDigital Ocean is pretty encouraging proof that the giants can be beaten, they were only founded 3 years ago and haven't raised much investment.
- gtirloni 12y agoBoth AWS and Azure have local datacenters in Brazil. That would should be enough for the laws being discussed around keeping data geographically within the country. One important point though is that they have been traditionally charging in USD, so the financial processes might not be aligned yet.