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Comment by pyrale

18 hours ago

> I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is some combination of

Just mandate EU countries' public administration to rely exclusively on EU cloud solutions. That doesn't need to be done at once.

This would create enough of a captive market to start the homegrown industry.

> Europeans have to use lower-level infra and do a lot more ops in-house

To be honest, every large enough company would benefit from doing a little bit of that.

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pyrale

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ExoticPearTree  18 hours ago

> Just mandate EU countries' public administration to rely exclusively on EU cloud solutions.

This happens already in some areas and it is not cheaper or better. The EU funds national clouds where public institutions use them. What does it mean? VMware with Tanzu or OpenStack. And then some services thrown in to offer some S3 like buckets and that's it. The rest has to be built by the beneficiaries. Servers? Brand names like Lenovo/HP/Dell. Storage? Brand names like NetApp, HP, Dell, Lenovo, 3Par, IBM and the list goes on. Networking? Cisco (mostly), HP/Juniper. Firewalls? Cisco/Fortinet/PaloAlto/CheckPoint/etc.

Basically an enterprise setup masquerading as a cloud offering.

And even if there would be EU wide offerings for such cloud, there's too much money at stake to let institutions from one country buy services from another.

  • bjackman  17 minutes ago

    > not cheaper or better

    Yeah. The EuroCloud will always be dramatically more expensive and much much worse. Anyone who's claiming otherwise is living a fantasy. The only argument that makes sense is "but it's worth it".

    (One detail: it will be much worse at the margins where current clouds actually compete. But actually I suspect only a small number of our customers actually exist at that margin. I think a lot of people are just massively overpaying for their cloud platform and so they might be fine with a EuroCloud anyway. This is why you hear stories today like "we switched to Hetzner, halved our bill, and it works exactly as well as the AWS products we used to use).

    > And then some services thrown in to offer some S3 like buckets and that's it. The rest has to be built by the beneficiaries.

    Ditto, a fully featured EuroCloud is not gonna happen. Again, it has to be worth this cost.

    > Brand names like NetApp, HP, Dell, Lenovo, 3Par, IBM and the list goes on.

    This is the only part where I disagree. I think it's OK if the EuroCloud is built out of US hardware (like how the AmeriCloud is very far from free of Chinese hardware). Obviously presents a significant risk re supply chain security but still, the _really_ important thing is actually sovereign operations. The most important thing is who has the keys to the DC.