Comment by ExoticPearTree

It would make me very uneasy to have my company be 100% dependent on another company. It sure is easy and convenient to just go to AWS/Azure/GCP pick all the components I want and plug them together but I'd say leading a company is not always choosing the easiest but sometimes the most sensible option.

Let’s say there’s a balance between the two, and maybe optimising a bit more is currently a good idea for various reasons…

> This takes time and effort, thus, lost opportunity cost.

Why should we assume this for every type of business.

> The thing that makes these providers worth it, is that it lets the business focus on their core competencies and just add-on as they scale without worrying about complexity.

Since when? Mastering the complexity and implementation of infrastructure from US cloud providers is a skill that takes time in itself. Personally I don’t see how Scaleway does not provide the same for example.

At some point we have to question are we choosing AWS, GCP, or Azure out of brand name, convenience, and marketability. Our if they actually enable faster business execution, higher availability, security, and regional compliance that alternatives don’t…

> Companies have this risk adversity when it comes to trusting all their infrastructure to a person that knows it all and can do it on three physical servers.

A person that knows it all and can do it all on AWS, on the other hand...

If those managers currently sold on The Cloud, can instead be sold on how much money they'd save not being on The Cloud, then corporate can do what it does best and change policy hard enough to give the staff whiplash.

I don't know what managers have been reading/hearing, but for the last decade or so as a developer what I've mostly been hearing is that the only people who actually benefit from Big Data architectures are FAANG, that it's much cheaper to run on a single small self-hosted system that's done right, that the complexity of managing the cloud is even higher than a local solution.

This matches my own experience of what people needed to serve millions of users 20 years ago. If you can't handle a chat system or a simple sales system with 100k-1M customers on a server made out of one single modern mobile phone, you're either just not trying hard enough or have too many layers of abstraction between business logic and bare metal. Even for something a bit more challenging than that, you should still be thinking thousands of users on a phone and 10k-100k on a single device that's actually meant to work as a server.

> But managers wants to _buy_ these services, not be directly responsible for them. That's where the problem lies, as I see it.

Why won't they be able to buy them from EU providers?

They don't want to necessarily buy it, but they want to hedge their options from "my $guy can do everything" to "on which cloud platform can I find a competent operator tomorrow".

Marketplace offers can go a long way to fill these void in official managed services.

This matches my experience. I run a pay-per-use VM service (shellbox.dev) entirely on Hetzner auction servers with Firecracker microVMs. Sub-second boot, full Linux environment, SSH-only interface. The entire "cloud" layer is Firecracker + Btrfs reflinks for instant copy-on-write cloning. No managed Kubernetes, no proprietary orchestrators.

The total cost of that stack is remarkably low — cheap enough to offer VMs at $0.02/hr running and $0.50/mo stopped, which undercuts most hyperscalers for bursty workloads. The "billions in investment" framing is exactly the problem. Most of what hyperscalers sell is convenience wrappers around commodity compute, and the lock-in is the product.

Wrote up the economics here if anyone's curious: https://shellbox.dev/blog/race-to-the-bottom.html

We didn’t do it because money was cheap we did it because there are tons of benefits to not having to inventory your own compute. Everything from elastic scaling to financial engineering was improved via the hyper scalar options and it’s ridiculous to act like those options aren’t valuable post hoc because Europe doesn’t have a native one.

I think the Heztners and their ilk are coming along nicely and probably can support a lot of Europes cloud computing needs, but they aren’t in the same league as the hyper scalars when it comes to capabilities currently. It would be great if they got there for everyone though.

> 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.

> Who is gonna chip in tens of billions of dollars to fund "that, but European, and 15 years from now"?

Dieter Schwarz might. At least he has the money and is trying 'something' with stackit. But he probably won't see the result in 15 years.

On the other hand, there is not much office work which could not have been done almost as effective in office 97.

I don't think the right explanation of MS monopoly is technical superiority, but rather the natural forces of monopoly. They are extremely hard to break with free market competition, but can definitely be broken with legislation.

I am convinced that 99% of office use can be replaced with competitors if needed, and it would work out OK.

> My point was that even with Google's money, they're still not on par with MS even if the Office files format has been standardized for a number of years.

The counterpoint is that they don't need to be on par :-/ The problem is that individual procurement decision-makers are incentivised to go with the Microsoft suite, not that the alternatives aren't a good enough replacement.

It is a bit more than "spitting on each other" which now is between the USA and its former allies. I seriously doubt that we will just go back to normal the moment there is a US president from the Democratic party. Possibly in some areas of politics and economy, in others (real) trust is more essential.

This isn't politicking though. This is national security. In matters of national security, you take no chances. There's no going back to the relationship the world had with the USA.

What's different this time is that the US has an extensive system of checks and balances that nearly everyone thought would make the current situation impossible, and now we are learning that they aren't nearly as effective as we thought.

No matter how reasonable the next few administrations are it is hard to see anyone else trusting the US nearly as much as they did before 2024.

> and tomorrow they'll act like they are brothers

That's mostly how it was during the last US presidential term. The president even said that "America is back" (1)

The fact is, it didn't last. America going away was not a one-off. It happened a second time, worse. The lesson that the USA just is a country that does this from time to time. People in the rest of the world who learn that lesson will prepare for the next time.

As another US president accurately said: "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice ... you can't get fooled again."

1) https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/250909...

That's up to you (and the customers) to understand that the location where the compute/data is happening is as important a criteria to consider. As it is today.

If this is in reference to the parent's mention of Hauwei (200,000 employees, ~$120 billion annual revenue), then I'm not sure we all share your idea of a small company

You have to create small companies in order to build big ones

My solution is that sustainable companies are more worthwhile to society, than late scale capitalism companies that always lay off employees when the exponential growth targets set by their C suites aren't met.

Some people do think so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43156785

I’m not sure it’s necessary. Office is bloated with features that very few people use on rare occasion. A much simpler word processor would do, and the next Google Docs doesn’t need to invent a lot of this stuff from scratch.

The tricky part is how many organizations have an enormous amount of business logic programmed into excel sheets.

AWS is often unnecessary but I do hope you had some kind of pre-prod environment in your original setup

> Cost went up at least 25-fold,

I would love to write an email that start with "I can reduce cost 25 times by doing thing X" (the tricky part is hiding the fact that "X" is what you were doing before.)

> I could go on with the list of services currently used by the people that pay to push buttons

I too can build an engineering playground where every ingress byte traverses as many AWS services as I can find. But if you're building a business application, how many of these do you actually need?

Once you have the basic primitives you can fill in the gaps yourself if needed. But in the list you provided, Pub/Sub, CDN and GLB is already covered actually.

I'm sure in due time other services will be covered if there's enough demand, but to claim there is no EU alternative while the basics (app server + DB + S3, aka the most difficult to scale/operate yourself) are covered is a bit misleading I think.

I bet 90% of AWS customers could be served by something like 10% of their services.

Having to roll each of those by your lonesome is still preferable over having some asshole cut you off from the services that you pay for on a whim. And that sort of thing is definitely on the table. Trump came within a hair of starting a shooting war with Europe, that sort of thing tends to cause people to re-evaluate their relationships.

You go multi-region. Multi-cloud is extremely expensive, both in terms of data and functional equivalence.

Bare metal is pretty much the same story: you can host it at different providers, but scaling that and maintaining coherence between data centers is not an easy feat as it might sound.

And seriously now, no sane provider is willing to cover your losses if they go do down. On the other hand, it's not a secret this is not happening and you can take this into account in your risk management strategy.

After years and years, Amazon now has an offering to shield you from when us-east-1 goes down. Funny, no?

Having used both worlds: a lot of the provided features come with strong vendor lock-in, and in most cases that not, with slightly stronger “local” engineering you can reach the same targets and needs locally.

The more I work (started coding 40 years ago, and data engineering 25 years ago), the more I favor designs that are less coupled to cloud features.

If you do so, the offering in the EU just as it is now is well enough to scale.

In short: more computer science, less delegating to cloud operators, stronger designs.

How about not limiting yourself to specific services? If you've built your product around specific cloud providers services then that is the problem not the fact that there aren't alternatives to those seevices.

You don't need to tick all boxes from a cloud vendor.

Boring technology goes a long way.

You can get all of that in the EU via scaleway, Ionos etc. for example.

I don't know what you mean by native access to frontier models. Who has native access to these frontier models?

And in education, please. Very important in the long term.

I definitely hire talent that can grow the business, and grow with it.

And that means knowing your 0's and 1's better than knowing how to operate the latest trendy calculator: it's easier to understand the calculator, when you know what it's made of; harder to work your way backwards, although doable.

Yes, finding people that master PostgreSQL clustering (and SLA/RTO tradeoffs) is harder than finding AWS-certified folks, but that deeper knowledge definitely pays off: you understand the tradeoffs why, before you migrate, not after. When you know the fundamentals, you learn their implementation way faster.

The "wildly used", locked-in services are more often than not, built with/over the "niche", no-strings-attached ones.

If you use AWS virtual machines https://european-alternatives.eu/category/vps-virtual-privat... (some of these also do managed load balancers, managed databases)

If you use AWS for object storage: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/object-storage-pro...

If you use SES: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/transactional-emai... (but hosting your own is also a viable option)

CDNs: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cdn-content-delive...

There isn't any single provider that can match each and every AWS service. But for subsets of services there are options.

If there's a specific AWS service that you cannot get anywhere else but do absolutely need, that's vendor lock-in. Would it be fair to blame EU companies for your bad decisions?

https://european-alternatives.eu/

Based on your comment you probably aren't gonna discuss in good faith but move the goalposts each time.

Combell is a popular choice on my country ( small - Belgium) because it's actively managed

scaleway, ionos, hechner, ovcloud.

They may not have every single thing that AWS has but you can build solid infrastructure on top of those.

Thanks. I meant to say, but it's always been online.net for me. Can't get used to Scaleway.