I’ve been working for a few years in the field. All the places I worked at were using those two, getting partnerships, certifications, etc.
The ranges of services they offer is quite crazy. Performance monitoring? Here’s a tool. Certificate management? Here’s a tool. DDoS protection? Here’s a tool. All of them integrated and accessible via command line interface.
AWS and Azure built their expertise over decades, and have financial and technical resources that any European company can only dream of.
Those two platforms are just very good at what they do, it will probably be difficult for a European alternative to emerge. The financial investment would need to be substantial, and the European platform wouldn’t probably reach maturity before a few years.
Thoughts?
Unrealistic near term. Many many billions have been invested over a long time.
But do you need the same? I don’t think so. Most people only use a handful of services: VMs, FAAS, DBs, VPC, CDN, WAF, Object Store, DNS, maybe managed kubernetes.
This level of service is attainable. However what is lacking is the mindset. EU cloud documentation is horrible. Hetzner has core services that are not covered by IaC tooling and are completely deaf to complaints. They just… still don’t really give a fuck.
Good point about the mindset.
I’d start here
Also, for the record: knowing more than a couple people who have worked at AWS over the years, you would be shocked at how much baling wire and duct tape is involved.
Interesting to see Hetzner isn’t listed. But from what I read, it probably makes sense, Hetzner seems to be focused about server hosting more than enterprise cloud
I thought so too, but yeah, you’re likely right.
Thoughts?
Short term? Won’t happen.
Long-term? Three things are required for any change to happen:
- Teach people, aka the users, to redefine their expectations and demands. We won’t get sovereign and on-par services any time soon. Heck, we don’t even have a eu-made computer/smartphone to access it. We won’t get a non-US Google-like panel of services either.
- Teach people to get their fingers out of their ass and start to make do with what they (we will) have available. What’s sure is that if the EU-USA relationships keep going where they’re headed people won’t have much choice anyway.
- Tell the all-mighty EU institutions (as well as the various national ones) to shut the fuck up with their endless pooping of regulations, rules and laws that kills any attempt at innovating.
I was reading a French newspaper a couple days ago, the dude was explaining one of the EU objective, now faced with the fact that the USA are not our best friends anymore and faced with a lack of essential natural resources (100% of our lithium and rare earth as well as other key elements are imported), was to shorten the legal delay for opening a new mine from 10 years to 27 months. 10-fucking-years to just start digging a hole in the ground because of regulations and procedures?! BTW, there are rare earths and a few other valuable items in Ukraine’s soil…
BTW, there are rare earths and a few other valuable items in Ukraine’s soil…
Rare earths are everywhere. They’re called rare because they are spread out instead of clumping into ores. You don’t mine them like you do typical metals, you just dig up a ton of dirt and process the rare earths out of it. It’s the processing that’s troublesome, not locating them.
Nobody in the corner offices, or any the BoD’s of these companies cares about any of that technical stuff. They see this as an existential risk to their companies. Imagine being cut off from your entire computing environment, including your data, without any warning.
Cost and tooling aren’t going to be a factor. I would be very surprised if every CIO in Europe hasn’t been tasked with putting together a plan to get off American cloud services ASAP.
Hetzner and OVH are bigplayers, maybe they’ll wake up.
Isn’t that same applicable for most mega corps? I mean there’s also no equally convenient one-stop-shop for Amazon Shopping, for PayPal, for Social Media. There are alternatives for everything but I guess they always involve some grade of compromise.
Not really. Email can be replaced by European alternatives.
Amazon has local competitors, there was a thread listing them yesterday.
PayPal exists locally, most of the European countries have a national equivalent.
The cloud domain is a bit different due to the infrastructure needed to offer a similar service
There are no monopolies on EU market. It’s a blessing and a curse. 10 mid sized companies will never able to provide as much as one mega corp. Mega corp can throw budget of one company into R&D and it won’t feel it while 10 companies can only do fraction and fear collapsing. There is answer to that - standardization. Which is (mostly) default property of one big solid entity like mega corps but for 10 companies it needs to be enforced. EU doesn’t need 10 PayPals. It needs 10 companies running standardized (federated if you wish), interoperable but independent payment platform.
It’s of course my ignorant opinion with 0 knowledge in legislations and finance. But as developer I have natural hate to copy-paste solutions
EU doesn’t need 10 PayPals. It needs 10 companies running standardized (federated if you wish), interoperable but independent payment platform.
There’s a bunch of DDoS protection services, Fastly, Cloudflare etc.
Big tech cloud services are a bit expensive so you should have some budget for DevOps folks now. Decide on monitoring and CI/CD for the whole organisation. Spend resources on db admin: backup, performance, migration.
The tricky thing is distributing so you don’t go down if the hosting service goes down. But let’s be honest, even though you can do that in big tech cloud most organisations just stick everything in the same location. Backups are always off-site whether it’s big tech or other hosting.
