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Comment by Synaesthesia

1 day ago

We need more like this. Europe is totally dependent on US companies for cloud computing.

Until now nobody thought it was a problem. At least not a big one. The EU made some moves to define a "cloud computing" platform for Europe, and very little people paid attention because business-wise it was very difficult to compete with US corporations that have vast amounts of money in cash and find easy to get funding.

But now there are some (small) alternatives.

LIDL has its own cloud for retail.

And I believe T-Systems sells some cloud computing for goverments based on OpenStack...

Small steps, but steps.

  • >Until now nobody thought it was a problem.

    I've seen these "EU digital sovereignty is around the corner!!" articles weekly for the past 10 years

The cost to bootstrap a sovereign cloud offering in Europe that can even begin to compare to the big ones in the US would be humongous. There would need to be a solid, multi-year incentive for a company/startup to even want to attempt it. It has to come from the top. Else force the big US clouds operating in Europe to be ready to effectively detach from their US counterparts if shit hits the fan, though this one's probably not realistic.

I don't think a cloud provider that is _just_ a cloud provider exists. All of the cloud providers I can think of (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, Baidu, etc) are subsidiaries of larger corporations whose profit centers are elsewhere.

The capital requirements needed to spin up a public cloud and the services that come with that are absolutely massive. It makes me think that cloud computing, despite the gigantic profits it brings in, is not sustainable on its own.

  • For what it’s worth, Amazon’s largest profit center is AWS. Likewise for Microsoft and Azure.

As a dual US/EU national who would love to move to Europe, I, for one, welcome the increase in tech demand on that side of the pond.