Comment by DyslexicAtheist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DyslexicAtheist | Hacker News Reader

DyslexicAtheist

I'm going to make an outrageous prediction: due to the changing geopolitical landscape which has been going on since 9/11, loss of trust in the US as a "leader" that can keep the data safe, we will move away from the cloud and back to a model where data sovereignty trumps all else.

This will be enabled by changes to the underlying infrastructure - moving away from BGP and adopting (BGP backward compatible) protocols like SCION[1], as currently implemented by Swiss carriers, which allow improved traffic shaping, and more importantly: jurisdictional geo-fencing.

We'll also see more legislation by the EU to level the playing field against US companies who currently do business with a Double Irish Dutch sandwich.

The current model where the US is the only cloud provider with virtually no EU based competitor and where EU data is locked into US corps is unsustainable. Europeans trust into US companies has never been strong to begin with and current politics (+horrible foreign policy) will reduce it further.

The cloud is dead imo. Because in a climate where national interests are suddenly more important than partnerships and international trade, the cloud is more of a risk than anything else. The US makes that same case too, illustrated by their hostility towards Chinese products (I'm not defending China here at all btw).

[1] https://www.scion-architecture.net/

edit: I have to dig up this quote again from Aral Balkan's recent talk at the EU parliament: "You are acting as an unpaid Research and Development department for silicon valley. Because if a startup here succeeds, it gets bought by Google or Facebook. If it fails, we pick up the bill.": https://video.lqdn.fr/videos/watch/861c07f7-7e9b-4e64-9765-c...

In the whole chain, not very many people care that much. Maintaining data centers requires expertise and many years of commitment and is simply more expensive at any scale unless you are extremely cautious and predictable.

Maintain your own data centers and they become cost centers, with silly games for getting and maintaining capacity, reluctance to expand capacity, and old technology.

A few people will talk loudly about it but not much will actually get done because the people who have experience with the cloud providers and the alternatives won't have any interest in moving back for vague ideals or vague threats.

The only thing most anybody cares about is their cloud providers directly competing with the customer's business model (most notably Amazon).

A more real threat reaction is jurisdictions going after the big five or so for antitrust issues and trying to break a few of them apart.

Amazon or any of them don't care about national interests any more than they have to and they'll do whatever they need to to calm fears (more or less just strengthening the legal regional isolation as necessary).

I think there will also be an enormous drop in revenue once the next recession comes. A lot of loss-making companies, aiming to grow as fast as possible using VC money, use cloud providers because it's one less thing they have to learn how to do. If they have an actual business model, like Dropbox, they eventually self-host. If they don't, and didn't really expect to have to develop a business model other than "grow really big", then once the VC spigot gets turned off they will shut down.

It is much like the late 90's boom, when a lot of companies were selling banner ads to each other. Even the ones who appeared to be profitable weren't really, because all of their customers were not. Once the loss-making customers of cloud companies go away, the big three cloud companies may find that they don't have a business model either.

You should check infrastructure costs for band or other big enterprises... Those companies move to the cloud because it's cheaper...

Dropbox is a poor example to generalize from, since in a very real sense they're a cloud provider. They make bank directly on server administration, so cheaper servers translate directly to the bottom line. They would have to be incredibly foolish not to in-house this at some point.

Most SaaS etc. businesses make money in a way that is indirectly related to their server costs. Bringing the cost of servers down increases margin ceteris paribus, but the Latin is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

It's not at all clear to me that the median AWS customer can save money by going self-hosting. If I had to bet money on it, I'd bet against it.

Startups are not the primary customer of cloud providers. Enterprises are - and arguably that's where all the money is.

Cloud and Energy have similar economics. No economic entity I know of operates their own power plant and power distribution network in their backyard. No economic entity should be expected to operate their own datacenters and data networks. The Cloud is here to stay, just as Energy utilities are here to stay. What EU needs to do is to recognize the strategic importance of the Cloud, invest in EU Cloud infrastructure and ban American/Chinese companies from running EU Cloud datacenters. Then pray latency costs are sufficient to keep EU companies from moving their data overseas.

This was the vision of Multics, which was the predecesor of Unix. It is interesting how things come around.

The feeling into "fact" flow:

Step 1) "I don't like thing"

Step 2) "I really wish thing didn't exist."

Step 3) "Thing is probably dying/dead."

Step 4) "If event happened, it would really show thing is dying/dead."

Step 5) "Event can happen."

Step 6) "Event will happen."

Step 7) "Event is happening!"

Step 8) "Events 1, 2 and 3 can/will/are happening which forms a narrative proving thing is dying/dead."

Have you considered a career as a journalist?

> Have you considered a career as a journalist?

I really have no skin in this game one way or another. I don't work with cloud companies, I don't make money with non-cloud things either. And I don't give a toot about how this unfolds because I think all things that Tech brings forward these days are bad for humans and society. So whether it's the cloud or ActivityPub or motherfuckers who believe the blockchain will cure the worlds ills ... the only thing that is on my mind is making it until spring, so that I can fuck off again into the woods for a couple of months and not think about it.

But go on with your vague insults if it eases your own personal suffering.

> I think all things that Tech brings forward these days are bad for humans and society

This response is just rude and adds nothing to the discussion.

It is rude, but the OP says "the cloud is dead" What!? That deserves to be called out.

Maybe they mean it'll just go back not being a thing, like it was in 2009.

OP prefaced by saying "outrageous prediction" - admitting plainly its pure speculation. If s/he didn't do that, that would be something that deserves to be called out.

Stating you're making a wild claim, in advance, doesn't mean you can avoid the responses to it.

All comments, by definition, add something to the discussion.

While I am not a fan of the closing sentence of this comment, the steps and flow are something I observe regularly today (in person and online). Is there a phrase for this type of information transformation?

Please don't cross into personal attack. That's against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Your comment wouldn't be too bad without the last sentence.

Even in your example it wouldn’t mean the cloud is dead, the big US cloud companies would suffer as smaller country and region specific cloud providers thrive.

yeah what I meant wasn't that any of the providers we see today will disappear, but the model under which they are forced to operate will look completely different. I'm not suggesting that Amazon/Google will be kicked out of Europe that would be silly. But they would be forced to a) pay their taxes, and b) implement guarantees that a packet will never leave a certain jurisdiction. This is so different to how cloud works today that you might as well call the cloud dead.

> implement guarantees that a packet will never leave a certain jurisdiction

It's already the case, no? My company recently contracted G Suite with a guarantee that the data stays in Europe.

Hm, or maybe someone smart will figure out a way to mangle software-defined networking into a solution.

It's already happening. Because of GPDR, companies in EU tends to avoid american companies. European solutions tends to be preferred.

What most of us who work for BigTech don't see, and I mean Big as in massive traffic and where throughput/latency is a competitive advantage, is that this advantage isn't that important to businesses not operating in that market. For them the benefits far outweigh the risks posed by putting their data up into leaky S3 buckets. And if it's not leaky buckets, it's the potential of a nation-state "alley" that abuses that trust. Even big companies like Airbus, Daimler or BASF (a few random players as an example) don't actually need the advantages that we (who want to roll out apps to an international audience) would think are crucial to dominate a market.

Can you provide some examples please?

warning: confirmation bias ahead, but fwiw:

https://fortune.com/2019/10/30/europe-cloud-independence-gai...

> Tired of its businesses turning to foreign cloud-computing providers such as the Google, Microsoft and Amazon, the German government is leading the push for a European cloud network called Gaia-X. France is also on board. “Data will be the most important raw material of the future,” said German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier in a statement this week. “The European economy urgently needs an infrastructure that ensures data sovereignty.”

https://www.zdnet.com/article/eu-turns-from-american-public-...

> Just like their American counterparts, more than half of European businesses with over 1,000 employees now use a public cloud platform. But European governments aren't so sure that they should trust their data on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud, or the IBM Cloud. They worry that the US CLOUD act enables US law enforcement to unilaterally demand access to EU citizens' cloud data -- even when it's stored outside the States.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/european-cloud-project-draws-ba...

> Germany and France are introducing a government-backed project to develop European cloud infrastructure in an effort to help local providers compete with U.S. technology giants, which dominate the global cloud market.

https://www.uscloud.com/blog/3-reasons-33-companies-ditching...

> However, if you dig deeper, you’ll find that a growing number of organizations have public cloud buyer’s remorse. A recent VotE Organizational Dynamics 2017 survey found more than one-third of companies surveyed migrated data from public to private clouds in 2017. Forrester Research shows migration to hosted private clouds are on the upswing, with adoption rising from 28% to 33% in North America in Europe. In that same survey, 36% of cloud adopters and planners state hosted private cloud is – or will be – their primary computing platform.

https://www.cybersecurity-insiders.com/idc-says-that-compani...

> Out of 400 IT decision makers who participated in the survey, more than 80% of them agreed that their organization either migrated applications or data that were primarily on public cloud environment to on-premises data centers or private cloud solutions in the past 14 months.

Do you think SAP will come up with a cloud provider to compete with aws and the like? I don't know if there is another European software company big enough for that.

Telco operators could, that also already have network capabilities too. At least in Italy they actively try to. They are definitely inefficient, so I’ve not seen any actual result, but in some other country they could succeed.

In my opinion, the issue for European "cloud" service isn't so much the infrastructure. There are already fairly large hosting companies like OVH, Hetzner…

But on the software side it's lacking. And suggesting SAP might bridge the gap for software quality would get a laugh from anyone who regularly uses their product.

Not to disagree about the quality of SAP's product but realistically if not for us based cloud providers they're going to be stuck with Yandex cloud or Baidu.

My feeling about european cloud providers (OVH, Hetzner, Scaleway, Irideos) is that their main fault is not approaching their business like AWS does.

In the sense of being customer centric, offering thorough services, standardizing and operating on thin margins in order to reinvest most of their profits into the company itself.

A lot of small players in the cloud fields either offer an incomplete set of services, or adopt hardly-scalable models of operations.

If you want to at least have a chance of winning european customers concerned with data privacy and stuff from AWS you should try to replicate their pros -- offer a compelling alternative.

They tried before with SAP Cloud Platform (that was the last name it settled after changing from SAP HANA Cloud Platform and other myriads).

They decided to back off from being a cloud provider. They got no skin (top-level don't know how to pull it off) nor skill (EU engineers aren't the best in hi-tech) in the game.

Last I saw they only tried to build a shim-layer on top of CloudFoundry to orchestrate infrastructure running on other cloud vendors.

They got zero clients for SAP Cloud Platform since their customers prefer "best of breed" (AWS/Azure). If they say they have customers, it'll be "internal" customers: SAP other divisions who used them and they charged those divisions (that's how SAP works).

Data sovereignty will not impact cloud providers as us companies are already regionalizing data.

US compagnies still have to follow US laws that requires them to provide customer data when asked by the US government.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

keep the data safe, we will move away from the cloud and back to a model where data sovereignty trumps all else.

Why not both? That’s how AWS operates in China.

Populism is in the air. Don't bet that tech innovation is the antidote. WWII taught us that technology and liberalism are mutually independent. In SV, technology and liberalism happen to coincide, but they don't have to.

> Populism is in the air. Don't bet that tech innovation is the antidote.

I strongly agree with this. But there is a response to everything and companies don't operate in a vacuum. I'm not suggesting that SCION is our version of "let's build a wall and make Americans pay for it".

Apart from protecting regional interests (which is just 1), SCION has too many advantages that let operators/carriers monetize on, to be ignored.

I completely agree with you. EU trust into US companies is all time low between technical personal and not without a reason, companies like google and facebook has made USA look really bad, even more with their ignorance to GDPR which is a huge thing in EU. All countries have some bad connection and history ties to some dictatorship that was collecting data to remove the oposition, from Stasi, UDBA, Securitate not to mention Gestapo that gave data collection bad taste for future generations that are learning this in primary school. USA didnt have ww2 on their soil. Hoower is probably their only connection to massive survailance and even that one was limited. People there just dont get it that privacy in EU is not the same thing as in USA, we had massive killings and torture due to lack of it. Europe remebers it and FB and Google are poking into one open wound they shouldnt. To have Crypto AG connection with CIA in national news is something that never happened before (highly specialized hitech themes is typically not submitted to general public). And then Facebook got kicked due to trying to smuggle something forbidden (this is perception of average cityzen) You couldnt wish for worse publicity for their service. And USA is always tied to this.

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