Companies in the EU are starting to look for ways to ditch Amazon, Google, and Microsoft cloud services for European ones
Companies in the EU are starting to look for ways to ditch Amazon, Google, and Microsoft cloud services for European ones
41 comments
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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.
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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.
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I'm looking to ditch them in the United States too
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Last time I tried an independent data center, IBM snatched them up and the enshittifying commenced.
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Try hetzner
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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.
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Good. More, smaller cloud providers can only be better for everyone. More providers means itโs more likely we get true standards for how to interact with services, and that being portable will become a default. Itโs hard to sell a locked-in product when thereโs a dozen competitors who donโt lock people in.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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I havenโt found a good EU alternative yet.
Hetzner?
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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.
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3dexperience by Dassault systems? ( but it's aimed at corporations).
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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.
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Doesn't any reputable business have a cloud exit strategy ? I'm glad those who don't are thinking about ways out now.
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It's about time! Better late than never ๐ฅณ
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Why Microsoft? Sorry, possibly out of the loop unless itโs solely to go local
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Because, being an American company they are bound by US rules. Meaning in an embargo, itโs lights out.
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Ahh ty
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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.
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Aye. Thanks
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Not only are they a piece of shit, they are American
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41 comments