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shadowtree

Does Desktop OS matter anymore? So much is running in "browsers" now, even the SpaceX astronaut controls were Electron.

The cloud provider is where it's at. AWS, Azure, GCloud ... and nothing from Europe.

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Hetzner Cloud is in Germany.

Hetzner is pretty cool, but its a far cry from the vast amount of services offered by the big 3.

It's pretty cool. I pay about 2.5 EUR a month for a nice cloud server. Indeed you can replace most cloud services with selfhosted, OSS options those days (for example there's nextcloud and seafile for file storage).

I feel like what you're really asking is "Does personal computing matter anymore?".

OVH / Scaleway?

Yes, it does. I don't want to have city documents in some cloud.

Why not? Seems unreasonable to expect that every city can manage their own secure data store...

Because very likely that would be another US company again. The whole point is to become less reliant on US companies.

There are German cloud providers (DT, 1&1, Hetzner, Exoscale are the best known)

my small city wastes money on much less useful stuff... like fireworks and such

That is not a strict priority list. It is not unheard of to burn some money on celebrations and decorations, while cutting budgets in the essentials.

The appropriate question to ask is: at which size can you afford a competent security team in-house for what you would pay for a secure cloud offering. I would actually love to know the answer to that question.

They need to get their priorities straight when spending tax money.

"The Cloud" is just someone else's computer, or datacenter in this case. So if they would not be storing it in the cloud where would they store it? That would be either a datacenter from a big party that manages multiple municipalities as well as other government/for profit organisations IT. Most often this will be the lowest bidder for a public tender. I don't know if they would be any better or worse than the big cloud vendors. The only alternative is (shudder) a "datacenter" managed by the municipality itself. For big cities that might work. For smaller ones it's a recipe for disaster.

I'd much prefer it to having cities hacked with Ryuk again and again and again...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/us/lake-city-florida-rans...

> city documents

You realize that AWS/AZURE ect. all have GOVERNMENT contracts right? They have special infrastructure and portals just for government customers.

> They have special infrastructure and portals just for government customers.

The special infrastructure is for users subject to certain federal government data rules, which isn't coextensive with “government customers”. Most government use of cloud services from the big public cloud vendors is exactly the public commercial offering. Most government data is, both legally and practically, less protected than HIPAA PHI, which both government and non-government customers use commercial cloud offerings for.

Yes it matters. No, the cloud provider is not where it's at. No, the SpaceX Astronaut controls aren't electron.

2 out of 3.

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9243/what-computer...

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