It’s a great move, I 100% support. But I worry too many people don’t realize that it’s a long journey we’re just starting. A multi-years journey, if not decades long. The change, if change there is, won’t be instant. It also won’t be painless, seeing how so many people expect things to ‘just work’ a few may feel a little… frustrated. And this will also have a monetary cost too.
Businesses have been burned by Russia after the war started.
Now you have Trump behaving like a lovesick puppy towards Putin, talking about invading a free territories, the shadow president giving the salute. It can cost a lot to be stuck on the wrong side of the line when things get war-like.
Many will want to reduce that risk.
I hope this brings some return to on-premise. Most businesses can fully operate with a cheap sever instead of sending it all to azure.
Still more expensive in most cases simply because you need someone who manages it.
Well you also need someone that manages the Azure, get them to do it.
I fully accept this is because of lack of experience but i find it easier to deploy to my own linux server then to azure.
For Azure, there are established practices and recipes in place tho - you can hire an azure consultant that sets up the entire thing within 2 days, costs a couple thousand and at that point, it runs.
Don’t get me wrong, I love managing everything myself and I would love it we could go back to the self-hosted business time, but for larger businesses, outsourcing everything to the cloud is just better, not only cost-wise, but also because you’re basically handing the responsibility away.
I’m looking to ditch them in the United States too
Last time I tried an independent data center, IBM snatched them up and the enshittifying commenced.
Try hetzner
Doesn’t any reputable business have a cloud exit strategy ? I’m glad those who don’t are thinking about ways out now.
Cloud exit strategy? Most are eager to get on the cloud and ditch their on prem racks.
Probably wrong use of terminology, but I’m almost certain that they’ve meant plan B in case one cloud provider goes down.
Usually the cloud provider themselves provide back up. The amount of effort it takes to migrate onto a cloud provider usually means you don’t move between them often – maybe once every 5-10 years.
Good. More, smaller cloud providers can only be better for everyone. More providers means it’s more likely we get true standards for how to interact with services, and that being portable will become a default. It’s hard to sell a locked-in product when there’s a dozen competitors who don’t lock people in.
Our datacenter infrastructure is currently mostly hosted on Azure, some on a Fujitsu DC. We used to be 100% in-house many years ago. How funny it would be if we had to go back to that in order to save costs.
What was also funny (to me) is how Azure was absolutely no-go after having tested it because of the lackluster performance (compared to our then-live platform). But as soon as MS sweetened the deal contract-wise, suddenly there were no lingering performance issues anymore.
Those dozens of emails of irate customers with ass-slow systems tell me differently, but ok. I’m not the one making millions in bonuses; the people who do surely know better than I do. I just get paid to tell those poor customers to fuck off in a more polite way.
I remember the “everything has to be cloud” days too.
The fool falls for it everytime.
Wish I had the charisma to have someone shoot themself in their own foot and pay me for it.
Comment saved for later re-use.
Sadly the last few tech departments I worked went all-in on US cloud service - including using proprietary tech over portable standards. None of them at-all took the possibility of divestment seriously, even though the services could easily just ramp up prices once lock-in is achieved and smaller competition is stamped out.
I haven’t found a good EU alternative yet.
Prices are going to be higher, that’s a given. But the flexibility and options something like Azure provides is basically impossible to find anywhere. You’d have to mix and match from a dozen providers. And some of them claim to be an EU company with an EU service, but then it turns out they host their stuff on AWS or Azure (I found this out twice now in my investigation into switching to Europe companies only).
I haven’t found a good EU alternative yet.
Hetzner?
Hetzner is more of a traditional hosting provider, not a cloud services provider. They have regular hosting, collocation, vps and some simple storage solutions. They have only recently added Object Storage to their portfolio. It’s all focused on servers.
This isn’t really the same thing as wat Azure and AWS provide. Those are true cloud providers, where you can design your own infrastructure based on their services. And we’re talking dozens of services. It’s all managed centrally and completely hardware agnostic and if you want even location agnostic. Services are provided on a pay per use basis, although things like reservations can help to prepurchase services and reduce costs as a tradeoff to flexibility.
There are plenty of traditional hosting providers in the EU, but no real cloud services providers. There are some smaller that offer some of the services. But like I said, for a bit bigger of a setup you’d need at least a dozen providers. Just scroll through the list of services provided by Azure or AWS. And especially for Azure, the way everything is managed through the Azure portal and how all the services integrate with each other is second to none.
OVHCloud comes closer in terms of functionality but in the past they were limited in capacity and locations. They are working on that at the moment. They’ve also had some big reliability issues, which they are also working on. It’s probably the most promising alternative, but they aren’t there yet.
Can you give specific examples?
I’ve worked with AWS a couple of years ago, and then it was mostly rebranded opensource stuff they pretended was their own (elasticsearch, cognito, cloudwatch, lambda, …)
I’m not sure what you are trying to ask. Both AWS and Azure have a mix of services they created themselves and services based on software created by others (both open and closed source).
The issue is, besides OVH there isn’t really a cloud service provider in the EU. A cloud service provider is completely different from a traditional hosting provider. The product they provide is a different thing.
A cloud service provider is completely different from a traditional hosting provider.
My question is: in what way? AWS mostly just seems to install and manage existing opensource projects under a new name. Might as well just use VPSs (or ec2 as AWS calls them) and install it yourself?
A cloud service provider has a couple of benefits compared to a traditional hosting provider:
You don’t have to worry about installing and managing any of the services. They take care of the licenses, installation, updates, auditing, security, monitoring, standard conformity, backups etc. You don’t need to worry about any of that, it’s all taken care of. And the way they have it setup, it’s all hardware agnostic as well. So they will roam their services between all different servers. When a server has an issue or needs maintenance, it’s just taken out of the pool and put back in when it’s ready. And they put in more servers if they see more demand for a service. Another big benefit is a pay per use pricing model. With a lot of the services they provide the software can get pretty expensive to own and operate, whilst most of the time you don’t even need it that much. But when you need it, you really need it. Say for example you need an simple AI translation service, so users of your app can easily translate stuff (a common feature in Europe). If you want to setup your own servers with high end GPUs and have it run the translation software, sure that works. But it will be expensive to buy or rent that hardware, take a lot of time to setup and manage and then just sit idle for most of the time waiting for something to do. With a cloud service provider you just check the box for auto translation, go through a short wizard to get credentials and your up and running. And you pay for every actual use, so if nobody uses the feature, it won’t cost anything. And scalability isn’t an issue, if you suddenly need a lot of a service, the capacity is available when needed. And then scale down again once it’s done. And keep in mind this is just one example, they offer this for dozens of services. Another big upside is the central management, everything is in one place. This makes it very easy for people to work on the setup. You can just train to become an expert in Azure for example (with certification available) and any company can hire you to advice and work on their Azure stuff. It also makes things like auditing very easy, the management tool has builtin tools for auditing, logging, separation of roles etc. And the finance admin is also very easy with a single completely specified invoice at the end of the month. The management tool has tools for managing budgets and costs (present and future) as well. They also have datacenters in all regions, allowing for low latency across the world. It’s very easy to have a single application be available all over the world, with optimal latency and very little effort. This includes auto fail over where if one region has a major issue (say war related for example), it will not result in down time. You can imagine how important this is for government stuff.
There are probably more benefits I can’t think of right now. (for example the complex cloud networking stuff made easy)
There is a reason AWS and Azure have become so popular and big. We all like to joke ha ha cloud is just servers. But at the end of the day that’s simply not true. It allows for very low TCO for a very high service level. In short the cloud service provider takes care of a whole lot of headache, for a price that’s lower than it would be if anybody tried to do it themselves.
Well, agree to disagree. Where I work we have all those things with one central management (ansible), running on VPSes at 2 providers.
If we want translation, as an example that we also use, it was as simple as finding a container on docker hub.
A load balancer auto scales the VPSes, payment is by minute, for a price cheaper than going with a cloud provider.
The only thing we have on-prem is data backups, as you never know when a third party (by error or not) locks you out.
To each their own, but cloud is still just someone else’s computer :)
3dexperience by Dassault systems? ( but it’s aimed at corporations).
A lot of us were warning them against putting their data and having their infrastructure rely on 3rd party suppliers years ago when the cloud mania was taking of.
At the very least, if you must contract computing power because of having spiky needs, only use clouds with open protocols so that you can move much more easilly to a different supplier if you need to, rather than being tied down to a single provider because your codebase was made on top of their libraries.
It’s about time! Better late than never 🥳
I wish them luck, honestly, but it’s tough to compete with American venture capital and it takes metric truckloads of capital to build things like AWS / Azure / GCP. The lack of VC and the lack of unity among the various countries and companies means that any initiatives like this are unlikely to go very far.
It’s fascinating how those two things combined have kept European based technology and technology firms struggling for life since the dawn of the computing era. Asianometry has an incredibly informative series of videos about this.
those two things combined have kept European based technology and technology firms struggling
The problem in EU is cultural: they think industry should be decided on and controlled in a political top-down manner. Just look at Draghi’s 2024 report to make EU “competitive”. It’s a laugh: let’s keep doing our failing strategy, but do more of it.
It works when you want cars to be 10% more safe in a crash in 15 years time. But it doesn’t work on innovation, as concensus is the antonym of novelty.
If you or a loved one is affected by this predicament, I can vouche for going provider agnostic, or even multi-provider, with (ansible or pyinfra) + podman.
Usefull, not only in times of mercantillism, but makes it easy to migrate when pricing changes, as well.
Ive been trying to ditch Amazon by going straight to vendor websites I love. But then in the checkout screens they are all using Amazon delivery services.
Fucking finally. Crazy how it took some jingoistic bullshit to ditch these fuckers.
But hey, it’s the UE, they’re in favor huge corporations doing shitty things. They’re just nationalists.
Why Microsoft? Sorry, possibly out of the loop unless it’s solely to go local
Because, being an American company they are bound by US rules. Meaning in an embargo, it’s lights out.
Ahh ty
Solely to go local. Given the Trump administration has been acting in bad faith there has been a push to find goods and services internal to the EU.
Aye. Thanks
Not only are they a piece of shit, they are American
