Comment by bambax

18 hours ago

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.

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bambax

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9dev  18 hours ago

> 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.

  • no_op  18 hours ago

    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.

  • belorn  17 hours ago

    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.

    • 9dev  16 hours ago

      > 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.

      That’s a bit disingenuous. If I don’t operate a physical server rack, I also do not need to take care of physical access control, fire suppression policies, camera monitoring, key handling, and a wide range of other measures I would be otherwise obliged to take care of under GDPR. You can absolutely outsource classes of problems. What’s true is that that doesn’t lift the responsibility from you to check your cloud provider fulfils these obligations, but that’s very different from having to fulfil them yourself.

      4 replies →

  • Black616Angel  18 hours ago

    But you can rent on-prem servers in some datacenter near you where all that is done for you.

    • 9dev  17 hours ago

      First off, servers on someone else's premises are by definition not on-prem; and second, it still leaves you with a lot of the maintenance, management, and documentation overhead that comes with operating infrastructure equipment.

    • hsuduebc2  18 hours ago

      Do not forget that it is also cheaper. Main difference would be scalability which you do not inherently need. Not for ordinary bau.

nxm  17 hours ago

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

hsuduebc2  18 hours ago

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.

jeffrallen  18 hours ago

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.

  • Nextgrid  17 hours ago

    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.

  • gtech1  14 hours ago

    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

lucasRW  18 hours ago

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.

ExoticPearTree  17 hours ago

> 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.

  • daneel_w  17 hours ago

    > 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?

  • arter45  17 hours ago

    Ok, I'll bite. Why is it not a cloud provider? Most importantly, what is a cloud provider in your definition?