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
> 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.
> It's always made me curious why foreign governments allow their critical technical infrastructure to come from other nations
That was part of "end of history" politics, that we've reached a stable democratic state nothing particularly revolutionary is going to happen, just steady prosperous growth. Once upon a time it was possible to believe that, however unlikely it seems nowadays.
Until recently, the United States was seen as a reliable friend. So the benefits of aggregation from a cost and interoperability perspective outweighed the risk.
Now, the US is going in a direction that makes it increasingly risky. I think we’ll see global companies diversifying outside of the US in addition to governments.
I think a big big reason for that there is no Big tech companies in Europe is really that the landscape is so much more diverse then in the US.
If you are big in one state in the US. You have the same lang and most likely the same regulations. In Europe its so many languages and its no more likely that we choose a company from another country in the EU vs the US.
I think that is not true for the US. So its easier to get big in the US, and then you are so big its actually likely the a company in the EU would choose you. Maybe not over another company from the same country (everything else beeing equal), but over a company from another country in the EU/Europe
> founders in the EU can chime in on some of the challenges they face when building within the EU versus the US.
the answer is very simple, raising capital. It has nothing to do with regulations, filling out paperwork in Germany is annoying but doesn't stop you, not having money or a market does.
Internal barriers of trade in the EU, the heterogenity of the countries and users and the lack of a deep financial sector across the union is what does most businesses in.
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
Sure but you can ask that at different scales, in a reductio ad absurdum: Why should EU use American tech company? But also why should Germany use French tech company? Why should one region of France use tech company from other region? Why should one person use tech from another person?
Which ones, exactly? I heard this phrase tossed around but on close examination it always turns out it something related to protecting the citizen. Which I believe, is a conscious choice on this side of the ocean.
> It's always made me curious why foreign governments allow their critical technical infrastructure to come from other nations - even friendly ones
Cost and quality. Economies of scale and comparative advantage mean you can usually buy something better for cheaper from the specialists versus NBH’ing everything.
The EU didn’t even exist by the time the last FAANG company was founded, Apple predates the fall of the iron curtain, so I doubt the EU is to blame for this (especially because Europe dominates in markets where integration has been going on for longer such a precision manufacturing)
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.
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.
An open source electronic healthcare system is well within scope of a union providing healthcare for ~449M people collectively. Epic does ~$5B/year in revenue, certainly the EU can do better with the same spend or a bit less.
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.
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.
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.
For what it's worth, said client could never articulate a reason for why their two 2U servers needed to be in AWS at ~3x the price, only that it had to be done. I've seen dozens more moves since, blindly surrendering sovereignty over their own enterprise in the process.
Best of luck with the EU in their migration journey. I'd love to help (and get me and my loved ones out of the US), but at the very least I'm eager to see more competition from a regime more friendly to (most) human rights.
I asked specifically about this threat, to two employees of AWS and they laughed on my face. To quote Nigel Farage...I guess they are probably not laughing now....
> could never articulate a reason for why their two 2U servers needed to be in AWS at ~3x the price
specifically, to dis-empower you and others in your guilds ? AWS will turn on and turn off with no labor negotiations, at a known market price. Admins and devs are competition to the decision makers and an unknown entity, asking market prices or more. This is predictable and it is playing out now.
It already was before, and it's doubly true now. There's always been tension between the EU's and the US's view on privacy and data protection, and it's only getting worse.
Azure Europe is located in data centers in Norway, Germany, Netherlands, France and others.
The only US sovereign services in Azure is Azure US Government. Microsoft isn’t rolling out Azure US Government in Europe. It does offer like Azure Germany in the past which is sovereign.
There typically is a delay in rollout of features from US to Europe though.
But you could make the same nationalist argument for their dependence on all sorts of things like Microsoft Office. They could go to LibreOffice which some places have but it doesn’t have parity with Microsoft Office
Another argument could be made that Europe shouldn’t rely on places like Dell either for corporate or business PCs such as how in many sectors years ago the US stopped using Lenovo.
Microsoft is still subject to US laws like the CLOUD Act. That’s the real issue policymakers are reacting to. They’re not necessarily anti-Azure; they’re pro-control over sensitive systems
You’re trusting that Microsoft is maintaining meaningful segmentation for their dozen different clouds. History suggests they do not. At best, you’re getting data residency from Microsoft. Key components, like Entra, are globally shared services.
I don't think OVH is anywhere near the level of AWS/GCP/Azure in terms of the quality of the infrastructure and networking. They seem to cut all the corners they can cut in pursuit of lower prices.
They built a data center out of wood, with no fire suppression, and it burned down, taking businesses with it: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/opinions/ovhclouds-dat...
I remember losing access to azure devops, even though it was hosted in Canada, because Microsoft didn't have a backup domain controller elsewhere than in their datacenter in Texas.
I'm sure OVH learned from this event and will use EU's investment to improve everything.
Their recovery process was terrible as well. Wash everything, drop a load of PR stuff out about how good they were washing stuff, then hope it worked. What a shit show. I would never even go near them after that.
This is a direct result of the current administration's overt animosity with Europe and every other democratic nation. EU saw that the tech CEOs are cozying up to him and probably it as a direct sign that they will be bend the knee and do whatever is asked of them. It is enough motivation to move things out. Wonder how many more countries follow suit. At the very least countries that don't have the resources/infra will want to diversify, may be.
I wonder if the US tech execs are going to start regretting cosying up to the trump admin. The US is soon to isolate itself, and take them along with it which is essentially soon to be their own fault.
Without intel/amd/nvidia/ampere/qualcom what servers can one deploy? What client devices can the EU buy? Without sovereign supply chains, I personally will take US hegemons above chinese hegemons any day.
> Without intel/amd/nvidia/ampere/qualcom what servers can one deploy?
Without memory or storage chips from Asian manufacturers what servers can one deploy? I think Micron is the last (?) major US-headquartered maker of these types of chips.
> What client devices can the EU buy?
Who makes the screens for client devices (phones, tablets, laptops, etc)? How many are American companies?
Arm? But also, thy ere is a big difference in that if Microsoft was somehow forced to hand over data, then they could, even if that data was in the EU. If Europe couldn’t buy US chips things would’t immediately fail, though it would still be a huge problem.
All of this to me says the world needs far more diverse supply chains either a healthy level of alternatives at every stage.
In the short term, Trump could order the immediate shutdown of cloud accounts for the EU, as exemplified in the article. While this won’t completely eliminate the EU’s reliance on American tech, as you rightly pointed out, it does reduce the risk of a sudden disconnect and initiates a long-term commitment to gradually distance itself from US tech. It’s a step in the right direction.
This is something we're [1] seeing a lot of interest in. I wouldn't say it is the driving factor, but it is a driving factor that's giving quite a lot
of companies the incentive to finally push the 'Leave AWS (et al)' button.
Even so, two of the major hurdles we see companies facing are:
1. Skills/Training/Hiring – Converting a staff of engineers familiar with AWS/Azure/etc to a new provider isn't necessarily straightforward.
2. Migration & disruption – Untangling one's integration with AWS/Azure/etc, finding and testing replacement services, planning the migration, executing on the migration. All this can cause disruption and delays in actually working on what's important.
What we do is provide multi-AZ bare-metal Kubernetes deployments onto EU providers (we default to Hetzner, but are flexible, and can do on-prem). As
part of this we: a) include monthly DevOps engineering time dedicated to each client, and b) handle the migration planning and execution.
We're really trying to help companies (particularly SMEs & startups) make the jump. We try to mitigate the skills issue by providing actual engineers
integrated with your team. We try to minimise the disruption by handling the migration in parallel to ongoing development cycles/sprints.
If anyone wants to know more you can reach me at adam@ domain. I hope this was interesting and not too much of a pitch.
Once I made an account at OVHcloud and decided to rent a server for 400 EUR/mo. My request was rejected, stating that I should try renting cheaper servers first for a few months, before my account would be allowed to rent more powerful machines.
AWS does the same. Try creating a new account and deploying a GPU EC2 instance. You won't be able and need to contact support and explain the project you have in mind and how you want to control spending.
I have had this experience with some EU companies too. They seem oblivious to the idea that renting an inferior service is going to cost the client more in lost productivity or similar. I don't think it's ideological, more they're worried about getting stuck with an unpaid bill; but in my case I couldn't even get thme to accept a deposit or prepayment because they weren't used to that sort of request.
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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
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.
That was part of "end of history" politics, that we've reached a stable democratic state nothing particularly revolutionary is going to happen, just steady prosperous growth. Once upon a time it was possible to believe that, however unlikely it seems nowadays.
Draghi's report claimed a big factor was the lack of a true financial union, which made it hard to mobilize and raise capital.
Now, the US is going in a direction that makes it increasingly risky. I think we’ll see global companies diversifying outside of the US in addition to governments.
If you are big in one state in the US. You have the same lang and most likely the same regulations. In Europe its so many languages and its no more likely that we choose a company from another country in the EU vs the US.
I think that is not true for the US. So its easier to get big in the US, and then you are so big its actually likely the a company in the EU would choose you. Maybe not over another company from the same country (everything else beeing equal), but over a company from another country in the EU/Europe
the answer is very simple, raising capital. It has nothing to do with regulations, filling out paperwork in Germany is annoying but doesn't stop you, not having money or a market does.
Internal barriers of trade in the EU, the heterogenity of the countries and users and the lack of a deep financial sector across the union is what does most businesses in.
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
Which ones, exactly? I heard this phrase tossed around but on close examination it always turns out it something related to protecting the citizen. Which I believe, is a conscious choice on this side of the ocean.
Cost and quality. Economies of scale and comparative advantage mean you can usually buy something better for cheaper from the specialists versus NBH’ing everything.
same like US not producing their own food and equipment
I’m all for reducing reliance on big US cloud vendors, but OVH is certainly another extreme.
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://green.spacedino.net/software-is-not-the-service/
For what it's worth, said client could never articulate a reason for why their two 2U servers needed to be in AWS at ~3x the price, only that it had to be done. I've seen dozens more moves since, blindly surrendering sovereignty over their own enterprise in the process.
Best of luck with the EU in their migration journey. I'd love to help (and get me and my loved ones out of the US), but at the very least I'm eager to see more competition from a regime more friendly to (most) human rights.
what is this mean??? Are you saying US is lead by dictator???
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specifically, to dis-empower you and others in your guilds ? AWS will turn on and turn off with no labor negotiations, at a known market price. Admins and devs are competition to the decision makers and an unknown entity, asking market prices or more. This is predictable and it is playing out now.
The only US sovereign services in Azure is Azure US Government. Microsoft isn’t rolling out Azure US Government in Europe. It does offer like Azure Germany in the past which is sovereign.
There typically is a delay in rollout of features from US to Europe though.
But you could make the same nationalist argument for their dependence on all sorts of things like Microsoft Office. They could go to LibreOffice which some places have but it doesn’t have parity with Microsoft Office
Another argument could be made that Europe shouldn’t rely on places like Dell either for corporate or business PCs such as how in many sectors years ago the US stopped using Lenovo.
Microsoft is still subject to US laws like the CLOUD Act. That’s the real issue policymakers are reacting to. They’re not necessarily anti-Azure; they’re pro-control over sensitive systems
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Microsoft isn't much better : https://www.geekwire.com/2018/microsoft-releases-details-las...
I remember losing access to azure devops, even though it was hosted in Canada, because Microsoft didn't have a backup domain controller elsewhere than in their datacenter in Texas.
I'm sure OVH learned from this event and will use EU's investment to improve everything.
You might want to contrast with Azure's recent security record. Microsoft is letting it seriously slide
That being said, I'm all for the EU using EU products, and hopefully it only means OVH gets better over time.
― Voltaire
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7390459-lord-protect-me-fro...
Without memory or storage chips from Asian manufacturers what servers can one deploy? I think Micron is the last (?) major US-headquartered maker of these types of chips.
> What client devices can the EU buy?
Who makes the screens for client devices (phones, tablets, laptops, etc)? How many are American companies?
ARM? Something that is increasingly commonplace as a machine type in AWS and GCP
All of this to me says the world needs far more diverse supply chains either a healthy level of alternatives at every stage.
Even so, two of the major hurdles we see companies facing are:
1. Skills/Training/Hiring – Converting a staff of engineers familiar with AWS/Azure/etc to a new provider isn't necessarily straightforward.
2. Migration & disruption – Untangling one's integration with AWS/Azure/etc, finding and testing replacement services, planning the migration, executing on the migration. All this can cause disruption and delays in actually working on what's important.
What we do is provide multi-AZ bare-metal Kubernetes deployments onto EU providers (we default to Hetzner, but are flexible, and can do on-prem). As part of this we: a) include monthly DevOps engineering time dedicated to each client, and b) handle the migration planning and execution.
We're really trying to help companies (particularly SMEs & startups) make the jump. We try to mitigate the skills issue by providing actual engineers integrated with your team. We try to minimise the disruption by handling the migration in parallel to ongoing development cycles/sprints.
If anyone wants to know more you can reach me at adam@ domain. I hope this was interesting and not too much of a pitch.
[1]: https://lithus.eu
I wanted to use their object storage and some on demand compute, so that was a complete blocker.
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