Comment by ody4242 a day ago
You don't need hundreds of services. Give me virtual machines, reliable block storage, file storage and object storage, networking, dns, managed kubernetes, and it will cover the majority of workloads in Europe that run on Openshift or Openstack today.
When we designed the (by now largely self-hosted) stack for our production enviroment, we had that discussion. And honestly, on the persistence side, most people agreed that PostgreSQL, S3 and a file system for some special services is plenty. Maybe add some async queueing as well. Add some container scheduling, the usual TLS/Edge loadbalancing, some monitoring and you have a fairly narrow stack that can run a lot of applications with different purposes and customers..
We (10 people) run this + CI on just a VM + storage provider, mostly VSphere from our sister team of 6 (and yes it hurts, and we have no time to move it), Hetzner and some legacy things on AWS.
Though that's currently the problem -- there is a somewhat steep minimal invest of time into this. But that's good, because this means there could be value for European cloud providers to build up this narrow stack managed and get paid for it. We will see.
> Give me virtual machines, reliable block storage, file storage and object storage, networking, dns, managed kubernetes, [...]
But managers wants to _buy_ these services, not be directly responsible for them. That's where the problem lies, as I see it.
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.
You might save 100k in server fees, but now you have to hire three full time people to manage your own servers. And you won’t get the redundancy or the security of having the experts do it across three data centres for you.
> If those managers currently sold on The Cloud, can instead be sold on how much money they'd save not being on The Cloud...
This is more than a theory, it's a trend that is already underway. The cloud remains supremely capital efficient for startups, but pricing has crept up and some customers are falling off the other side of the table.
> 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".
Note that once you have virtual machines, those other things can be provided using that same virtual machine interface. Layering and standards are really useful. Spin up your own storage cluster? if you want...pay a managed service from a third party on the same cloud? whatever makes sense to you. I find it appalling that because money was so cheap, people got used to just throwing it at the hyperscalers 'rich offerings', and now we have multiple generations of people that think RDS is some magic box that would take billions in investment to replicate.
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.
> Give me
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.
I am old enough to have set up services on bare metal servers with what was virtualization or containerization back then (vserver), but today no one wants to know how to tweak Postfix because some emails are not coming through or whatnot.