Comment by adrianN
18 hours ago
I kind of share the opinion of the FSF Europe that it is less important where software comes from compared to whether it’s libre, but for cloud hardware I really hope that we manage to create competitive European offerings. Maybe we’re lucky and this European initiative will produce more than five Fraunhofer institutes and a gift to SAP.
I would say there’s even less chance nowadays to generate a fully private set of European alternatives to American cloud offerings.
Europes bureaucratization and the growth of the size of states has increased the last 10 years. I have less and less hope that we’re able to set the right free market conditions for real competition to happen.
That doesn’t mean that won’t be alternatives to American offerings, but most probably will come from somewhere else (Singapore, China, Taiwan…)
> set the right free market conditions for real competition to happen
Just as a curiosity, what exactly are those "right free market conditions" and where have those been successfully implemented before? Because I think most of us (Europeans) are desperately trying to avoid replicating the American experiment, so if that's the "right free market conditions" I think we're trying to avoid those on purpose.
But maybe you're thinking of some other place, then I'm eager ears to hear what worked elsewhere :)
If the size of state and bureaucratisation are the main issues, one wonders how China got so far :-)
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Contradictory regulations is one of the symptoms of overregulation.
I.e., complying to GDPR means you can’t comply to cybersecurity laws.
US has less of those.
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> Europes bureaucratization and the growth of the size of states has increased the last 10 years.
None of these things matter. They're trivially set aside. All that matters is how many insane threats the US Gov keeps making. Hopefully as many as possible. This is what creates demand, and from demand, everything else follows automatically.
Like, how can you not see this based on recent events? I'm willing to bet a house that in Feb 2026 there will be much more relative movement from US to EU clouds than in Feb 2015. Despite all of that "increased bureaucracy".
Ok, but it's not like nothing was done after Draghi report - EU formed at least 5 committees and commissioned multiple think-tanks to develop reports about possible development of the pathway to the programme that will work on bureaucracy and overregulation.
You mean late scale capitalism that treats employees like serfs?
We already have excellent cloud providers in Europe. But most importantly, most businesses using the cloud would be better off with simple on-prem solutions. So much cheaper to operate and control.
> So much cheaper to operate and control.
Until you factor in the salaries of the new employees you have to hire now, the cost of that hiring process, the compliance and security implications of operating servers on your premises, the ongoing maintenance of the software and operating systems, the new infrastructure to maintain, including but not limited to backup power supply and overall redundancy, the need to manage the lifecycle of the new hard- and software, the documentation for all of this… I could go on for a while.
It's not like these cloud solutions are just solving laziness.
A lot of this could be standardized and packaged into a product, a modern take on the 'server appliance.' Unpack some gear, plug it together according to a nice diagram, connect to a management console that feels familiar to anyone who's deployed to the cloud.
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Listened to a story about a fairly large company that switched to cloud and then back to on-premise. When they went cloud they quickly found out that they needed employees to manage the cloud infrastructure. The employee costs were similar for both setup.
Compliance and security testing does not go away just because you use cloud. The steps and questions will be different, but regulations like NIS and GDPR have extensive requirements regardless if you implement it yourself or buy it from an external supplier.
I would also not recommend to go with a single cloud solution with no backup solution and overall redundancy, unless a $5 voucher is good enough compensation for the service being down a whole day. The general recommendation after the latest waves of outages was for cloud users to use multiple cloud providers and multiple backup solution. It is just like how on-premise solutions need off-premise backups.
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But you can rent on-prem servers in some datacenter near you where all that is done for you.
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Most European "cloud" providers sell "wood": https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/dear-hosting-providers-you...
Thanks for the link!
I'm not sure it will convince the "haters" nor they'll get it, but I'll keep it close to share with some people that are confused but open enough to understand the nuance.
No, most wouldn’t. Too much risk and overhead for most companies to do so… most companies should and do just focus on the business value they add, rather than the underlying physical infra
Exactly. People used to think that aws is somehow convenient(partially true) and much cheaper which it absolutely isn't. Hooking on anything trendy and pretending it solve all the issues is tech illness.
For example micro services. You do not need infrastructure heavy software paradigms for large majority of use cases but it was just blindly accepted as new standart which we are now, again, moving away.
Right, but have you tried recruiting someone recently who is capable of running a pair of local servers (including organizing redundant power feeds), upgrading the OS on them with no downtime, and arranging for off-site backups of the enterpris's data?
These used to be the skills of a generalist sysadmin for a small-site with on-prem services.
Those skills are no longer available on the market. Students in the local apprenticeship program have one class about hardware, and they don't even touch it, just talk about it.
Offer just half of the typical AWS cloud bill and you'll magically have lots of candidates! But greed often doesn't let companies pay any more than "market rate" even if it means paying twice that to AWS or a vendor instead.
Just hired a 45yo who excels and loves and thrives doing this stuff. Proxmox, local storage, local backups + offsite backups. 1Pb of data, colocation costs are 5k/month. Guess AWS costs for similar
They are not European. They are French, or Swiss, or Scandinavian, each of those countries who may sooner or later not align anymore with your strategic interests. Countries should only trust themselves for sensitive stuff.
I mean, the Euro-zone is way more interconnected than that..
Why stop at countries? /s
> We already have excellent cloud providers in Europe.
Please provide a list, no sarcasm. And please don’t put Hetzner on it, as it is not a cloud provider.
> Please provide a list, no sarcasm. And please don’t put Hetzner on it, as it is not a cloud provider.
In what way are they not a "cloud" provider? Because their managed services portfolio isn't as wide as AWS or Azure? What about Scaleway's services then?
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Ok, I'll bite. Why is it not a cloud provider? Most importantly, what is a cloud provider in your definition?
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I thought I heard that hetzner was pretty cheap, haven't looked myself though...
I have used Hetzner off and on for years, nice products and services.
I don’t care what provider you use, if your business or app use case needs any sort of reliability have a plan for reinstalling code and data on alternate providers quickly as possible.
There are horror stories of people and companies being cut off because of pressure from the US government, or having one of the Google/Microsoft/Amazon tech giants cancelling accounts.
Really, in today’s world, why totally rely on anyone?
EDIT: it seems prudent to maintain a cloud account in Europe, US, and Asia and have a plan for moving application code and data around if required. Outside the US I have mostly only used Hetzner, but Alibaba has impressive looking services.
Price is probably not the only factor in competitiveness.
They are OK but I would not have them as my /only/ cloud.
Well Hetzner's support's phenomenal too.
Sure they might not have all the same offerings but they are really easy to abstract upon and personally I feel like hetzner is seriously one of the best cloud providers.
Hetzner is absolutely 10x more competitive than AWS. It's actually hard to match the competitiveness of hetzner with their scale actually. I seriously can't understate this enough but AWS being competitive is really somewhat of a mass delusion or maybe the fact that Companies don't know other alternatives exist but I genuinely find it absolutely strange.
Also, just go ahead and try hetzner and see their competitiveness out for yourself. Seriously, one of the best (netcup another german hosting is really great too and they can be even cheaper at times and its something I personally use and can vouch for both netcup/hetzner)
Without a viable MS Office/Google Docs alternative it's all rather performative. If those get blocked the entire bureaucratic machine stops dead. Hell block just excel and entire countries might actually collapse.
The dependence on US companies is deep and multifaceted. I don’t think we should attempt nothing until a perfect solution is available.
I have seen transitions from MS suite at universities and I don't think what you are saying is true.
First assumption is that there are no alternatives so you can't replace Excel as a software. Obvious ones for Excel - LibreOffice, Collabora, OnlyOffice or Grist (which i highly recommend). The paradoxical problem is there is no clear THE ONE so organizations get into decision paralysis and never move anywhere.
The other assumption is that even if there were alternatives people will not adopt them. In reality this is rarely issue. Turns out users/employees/students actually don't care much what software they have to use. They just use what is available or what they are told to use. So the reason why people use MS Office is actually because it's mandated from the top. Lawyers use it because state/gov/court communication requires it. Students use it because they need to submit thesis in MS Word. It's socially locked in.
I've been at a university which switched over the summer from MS Office to LibreOffice. The results were boring. 40k people just adopted it, no drama, some liked it more (works on linux yay), took some people few weeks to learn/adjust. People are used learning new things.
So can we stop with that story that 40 year old software which barely changed in last 20 years can't be replaced?
This whole digital sovereignty is i think extremely scary proposition for Microsoft because just as they are now mandated solution by most western world... they are one law away (all state/university communication must be with libre software) to be on the other side of their current mandate / lock in.
Well I hope you're right, the transitions I've seen proposed were mostly shot down because people refused to learn anything new and due to nebulous certification requirements that Microsoft of course has.
Speaking of OnlyOffice, I've seen it crop up more and more lately and apparently it's Latvian, so maybe that will be the one eventually. Though my experience with it has been that it's not very stable (lots of crashing around embedding video anyway) and has a smaller feature set.
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Rome wasn't built in a day.
Software is a challenge but try replacing hardware. There isn’t a replacement for AMD, Intel or nVidia.
Proton.
Also, Collabora office looks really great too.
Proton drive is fine, their docs service is usable but could use improvement. Their secure and private file and docs sharing with other Proton users could be a great feature, if you need it.
EDIT: I just re-tried Proton docs and spreadsheets - much improved docs, and I think the spreadsheets are a new feature; looks OK but I am on mobile right now so minimal testing.
Proton, only as transition technology.
Fucking Libre Office!
Yeah if only.