A Swedish startup’s bid to build a green rival to AWS | Hacker News Reader

A Swedish startup’s bid to build a green rival to AWS

sifted.eu

213 pointsfoolswisdom217 comments

Corporate fluff aside, AWS is on track to run on 100% renewables by 2025[1] so the selling is mostly "European cloud" since the green part will be mostly expected by the time they actually ramp up. Competition is always good though.

> Studies by 451 Research have shown that AWS’ infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median of U.S. enterprise data centers surveyed and up to five times more energy efficient than the average in Europe. 451 Research also found that AWS can lower customers’ workload carbon footprints by nearly 80% compared to surveyed enterprise data centers, and up to 96% once AWS is powered with 100% renewable energy—a target we’re on path to meet by 2025.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/energy/sustainability/

EDIT:

  - GCP, 100% renewable by 2030 https://cloud.google.com/sustainability

  - Azure, 100% renewable by 2025 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/explore/global-infrastructure/sustainability

  - Oracle, 100% renewable in Europe already https://www.oracle.com/sustainability/green-cloud/

For real or are they purchasing dodgy “offsets?”

offset is what its name suggests. sometimes its ok if a company innovates or pays money to others to innovate.

Sure, but the reasons offsets are dodgy is because they actually aren't fungible in the way you're hoping for.

Say a paper maker is about to cut down a forest in the US. It buys up the rights to do so for $1M. Then, instead, it sells $1M worth of carbon credits to Amazon (maybe for a premium) for its data center greenwashing and doesn't end up cutting the US forest.

But then, secretly, or through some shell company machinery, it buys a plot of land in the Amazon and cuts trees down anyway to match its demand. Even though US law makers evaluate the counterfactual of the paper maker cutting trees down in the US, the net amount of trees in the world goes down.

Doesn't have to be that complicated to be dodgy. A bunch of carbon offset works on optimistic to downright stupid metrics for carbon capture.

For example they buy a plot of land and then raze it, then they will plant 10k saplings and take that figure at face value even if most of those won't take and actually become trees.

Then they will estimate the CO2 captured by averaging it over the entire life of the tree (say 30 years) and count year 1 as if it captured 1/30 of the CO2 even though the carbon capture potential of tree is not constant throughout its life.

Beyond that they will double count the carbon credits of the plot of land by selling them twice.

Finally after all the above, they will sell the plots after ~5 years to buy some other plots and it will be razed anyway. No one actually checks that the carbon capture forest will be there in 10 years, let alone 30.

I know that you are just trying to make a point, but just to be clear: no paper maker in US is importing Amazon trees to make paper out of them. That would be exceedingly idiotic from profit-making perspective.

Probably a bit of both, but their competition in this article is unproven and unbuilt data centers. Ultimately DCs don't exist in a vaccum, if the energy in Europe makes it possible to be 100% renewables without dodgy offsets then everyone will be, not just evroc. If it's not possible then nothing in the articles gives me the impression that they have a secret sauce that would make their 100% renewables "true 100%".

This is made perfectly obvious by "running on 100% renewables".

You can see more details on https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/renewable...

It's when there are mentions of "net zero" that carbon credits are purchased (which Amazon does too, but not for what we're talking about).

They're still pretty squirrelly about the specifics of their commitment, though. In particular, it's not clear if it's hourly accounting (but the fact that they don't say so suggests to me that it isn't), and there doesn't seem to be any discussion of additionality. In other words: it might be that exactly the same amount of renewable generation, and exactly the same amount of fossil-fuel generation, are going to occur with this pledge as would have without, and this is just shuffling some numbers between columns in a spreadsheet.

It’s a lot of renewables:

> The top 25 corporate solar users in 2022 include:

> Meta

> Amazon

> Apple

> Walmart

> Microsoft

https://www.seia.org/news/solarmeansbusiness2022

Just as one data point

I don't know why you're getting downvoted, the efficacy of carbon offsets is debatable:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/greenwas...

https://earth.org/is-carbon-offset-a-form-of-greenwashing/

And there are plenty of dodgy players out there that large organizations use:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed...

And there are plenty of government programs that just don't work:

https://e360.yale.edu/features/phantom-forests-tree-planting...

I'm sitting here asking myself how much Amazon cares about that, but also wondering how the "unknown Swedish startup" will approach being green.

Well we already have Hetzner and OVH which are European so just being European does not give them a selling point over others.

Neither are even remotely close to competing with AWS, GCP or Azure in terms of features though, they are more server providers than anything else.

And OVH is a dumpster fire.

Not just the dumpsters, the datacenters too!

Was looking for this comment. On the bright side, it's easy to get lulled into a sense of complacency when you're running everything in the cloud, and OVH's massive data center fire had me double check all of our backup and disaster recovery processes (on a different provider) to ensure they were geographically distributed.

Which in itself is a massive selling feature. Deploying a simple app on AWS is about as straight forward as deploying Active Directory in the early 2000s. It is so bad Amazon even launched the Lightsail product line to address the problem.

AWS now is basically "you don't know how to run a database, or a KV store, or a network, etc. so here it all is as an API with a markup." Some companies still have talent that knows how to run things efficiently and just need CPU, RAM, and storage.

It's not at all a selling point. You can do the same on AWS, get an EC2 and install everything there, that's it.

The thing is that when you will need to leverage the other services of AWS, they will be there, while you will need to migrate if you're on one of those server providers.

I never understood the complaints of complexity about AWS. You can easily just use EC2 and maybe S3 and ignore the other 100 icons.

I think, in practice, what folks are complaining about is that AWS has the worst UI known to man. In which case, you can use GCP for their nice UI and still get the benefits of a hyperscaler.

I don’t mean to say that the simpler services have no place in the market but it’s pretty narrow. The fact DO and Linode offer things like Kubernetes now is evidence of that.

You're right that the UI is crap, but there's also another dynamic when you work in a team: some people may not be aware of complexity, and can create overengineered monsters just because they want to try the fancy stuff.

That might suck, they leave their job, and you're stuck maintaining the monster.

I honestly would not trust a developer who finds AWS too confusing. At least 80% of the "complexity" on AWS is to keep you from introducing catastrophic security vulnerabilities.

When a developer starts whining they can't figure out how to use an IAM role, it usually means they want to run their entire application as a root user whose SSH key they have sitting in Dropbox.

Stay away from my software please.

As someone who spent five years as a consultant for two AWS pro partners, I agree with this anecdote. Day one of any gig when I started building with my clients was training on IAM and resource policies.

This is called Stockholm Syndrome and there are people who can help.

AWS UI is filled with manual and tedious bullshit to do every day things. It really doesn't have to be this way, making things annoying to configure correctly leads to mistakes or lazy overly broad permissions.

If they weren't the first they wouldn't have made it.

If you're doing manual tedious bullshit in the AWS UI every day you desperately need to learn some IaaS tools.

Terraform isn't hard!

I do use terraform, but not for everything, and neither do you.

I only use the AWS console to check logs, monitor batch jobs, and check spending. I don't do state configuration in the AWS console.

I'm not sure "don't use the UI" is a valid defense for AWS' UX being terrible.

> Terraform isn't hard!

And in the world of AWS Terraform is still manual and tedious (compared to e.g. CDK).

> I honestly would not trust a developer who finds AWS too confusing.

So you would not trust most developers?

Even a lot of Sysadmins i.e. Devops find it confusing.

A lot of people just pretend it is fine by being ignorant and not learn any of it. They would follow 1-2 processes that works and never do anything else. You ask them why or how it works and you can't even get a real answer out of it.

> So you would not trust most developers?

Obviously not? Most developers are incompetent clowns. I don't feel this is controversial?

You’re not describing a poor developer. You’re describing a poor AWS developer.

There are plenty of excellent, security conscience, etc developers who take a look at IAM or any of the other dozens of sticky AWS traps and run away screaming.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill

"AWS has the worst UI known to man, except for Azure and GCP".

It still amazes me that when you add members to AAD groups the interface pops up and tells you 'change may not be displayed yet'. It's like, YOU HAVE ONE JOB.

GCP UI is much, much better than AWS.

Unless I actually need one of the services that's not available on a tier 2 provider, I would personally never want to use any of the hyperscaler services if all you need are covered by the services offered by the tier 2 providers.

And this is mostly for security reasons: I'm not familiar with Azure but AWS and GCP setup is very complex and it's very easy to make a mistake that would impact the security of your infrastructure. Tier 2 providers like DO, Scaleway, Linode before Akamai, etc generally offer products whose setup you can fully understand and that helps a lot in giving you the confidence that you didn't mess up and shot yourself in the foot without knowing it.

I think the networking layer is unnecessarily complex for the vast majority of situations and it bleeds into a lot of the other services.

I use AWS daily and have for the past 5 years, but despite all that I wheep

Also hyperscaling is a bit of a lie. You have a trillion invisible limits built into your account, you have to talk to support to raise, if you try starting up instances by the hundreds, you'll be throttled. There's zero transparency on what types of instances are available and how in-demand they are, meaning trying to scale up capacity 'on demand' is a fool's errand.

Yes, I'm speaking from experience.

Even worse with Azure. They frequently freak out if you try to provision more than 1-2 instances per week. I have encountered this issue multiple times.

> You can easily just use EC2

Now compare the cost of it for a month/year compared to other providers

> AWS now is basically

It’s literally in the name… web services.

But they might be one of the greenest. OVH had to make some trade-off compared to other providers to remain as cheap as they are and while it certainly has an impact on their reliability and security levels, a lot of them are actually positive as far a sustainability goes (use of recycled containers, the use of wood in the DC which was decried when their DC burned down etc).

To put it another way: a DC in a wooden shack connected to a low carbon grid (France) surely has bad security but a low environmental footprint too.

OVH may have sequestered a lot of carbon, but it was unexpectedly released.

> Neither are even remotely close to competing with AWS, GCP or Azure in terms of features though

And this Swedish startup is?

For that claim I'd base myself on two things: scale (even if forecasted but especially invested into), and compatibility with the main services

(though some stuff in AWS is painful like IAM, etc so maybe it can be done better)

And Scaleway.

And Exoscale

Disclosure: I used to work on GCE.

"Renewable" is a broad set of terms. Importantly from your first link on GCP it says:

> Google is carbon neutral for our operations today, but aiming higher: our goal is to run on carbon-free energy, 24/7, at all of our data centers by 2030.

Carbon-free, 24x7, is a stronger commitment than carbon-neutral which would include using renewable power offsets. Amazon's methodology is at https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/renewable-energy-meth... which makes this clear as well.

My understanding is that Google is also shifting workloads based on carbon intensity using ElectricityMap's data feed.

https://www.electricitymaps.com/blog/announcing-our-partners...

https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/data-center...

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

That's interesting, who needs massive high voltage lines when your demand is fungible.

Not for gcp though but for google internal workloads. Energy is one of the biggest dc expenses so makes sense they’d optimize to lower costs

This is important context.

There's a big difference between "we bought solar elsewhere but still burn fossil fuels for our datacenters" and "we never use fossil fuels to power our data centers".

How does this work? Will it be forbidden to drive there for work or delivery by gasoline cars?

I don't really like terms like "carbon-free" when most components, transports and many indirect pollution used by those infrastructure use oil-derived products

It's like when I see the sign "0% pollution" on EVs, it's so far from the reality, it's the same order of magnitude of (direct and indirect) pollution than a fossil fuel vehicle, and a few order of magnitude larger than a bicycle (which is not exactly 0 too, it contains plastics, and a little bit of maintainance)

Most of these pledges are based on offsetting, I.e., planting some tree somewhere and claiming the provider’s emissions are somehow gone or captured by the trees they planted. Uhul!

All companies have these pledges, but they are mostly marketing. These companies know they don't really need to reach those targets, and unless we see massive investment from them to achieve this goal, it just won't happen.

"In an evaluation of some of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters, the investor engagement group Climate Action 100+ found no company has fully disclosed how it plans to reach net-zero."

"Some of the boldest pledges rely on carbon removal technologies that don’t even exist yet, or at least not at the scale required. Many more are heavily reliant on carbon offsets, which allow companies to invest in “nature-based” programs like tree planting or forest protection to counteract their own emissions. Offset projects, however, have been plagued by allegations of flawed accounting, greenwash and sometimes even of actively fueling climate change."

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/26/climate-...

That is, they say they'll do something, but they don't even know how, or at least won't tell for some reason... meaning that there's no way to check if they're doing the necessary work or mostly fugding with the numbers (some high profile cases where companied just patently fabricated numbers regarding their progress have already been revealed in the news).

I believe there's zero indication that companies are serious... emissions in 2023 are set to be the highest ever recorded (and this is not because of higher emissions in developing countries, the developed world is still leading the shameless business-as-usual route)... that's in the middle of a global economical crisis... imagine if the economy had been doing really well!

Until actual emissions start to fall dramatically, don't believe in these companies empty promises.

What does running 100% on renewable mean? Do they have a separate electricity grid with dedicated production? Or does it just mean they just use the same mixed electricity as everyone else and pay a small premium to have their electricity colored green, but then whoever was using that electrity before is now using non green one and everything is the same as before as far as CO2 emissions are concerned?

Yup, the latter is what is usually meant.

The price of "green" tariffs in the UK skyrocketed identically to traditional tariffs, when energy prices doubled or tripled in the last few years.

We sorely need some disruption. I rent cloud VPSes at Hetzner that cost me $27/month for 10000 Geekbench. The most efficient in house option are small nettop computers with 13700H processors that get you 13000 geekbench for $500, 50 watts of power and less than 1 liter of real estate. That same computing power would cost me north of $1000/month at AWS or Azure, and about $300 at smaller cloud providers. Which means big cloud companies got too comfortable and overcharge massively.

I never understood the value proposition of Xeon, Epyc-s and other 'enterprise-grade' hardware, considering the strong push towards horizontal scaling, failover reliablity, microservices, etc. Are they more reliable, are they bigger? They are certainly are more pricey.

I have ratty-ass computers running at home with weeks worth of uptime. More is not really needed, ironically my home stuff usually has much longer uptimes than the prod infrastructure that I work on, that has constant restarts due to upgrades, configuration, etc.

One thing is ECC. They don't want random errors in production. Another is number of threads. They can sell 112 "vcores" off one Xeon to 112 customers for web serving.

They want to create competing to US cloud companies in Europe. If I understand the business strategy as presented they initially will target companies that can't use US cloud for legal reasons, so US clouds can't even compete (so the competition while they get off the ground is small scale cloud providers in Europe), which will then give them a base from which to fight the big clouds for clients.

Quick googling says that AWS, Azure and GCP have 69% of the European cloud market. I wonder how big Europe is for their overall profits, and if this could potentially be a big problem for then in the future.

The market share of these services in the EU might end up being affected by the passage of the Digital Services Act and its sister bill the Digital Markets Act

EU is pouring huge amounts of money into development grants, because they want to decrease their dependency on the global markets.

Expect GAaaS startups (grant applications as a service) to pop up left and right, offering extremely slick pitch decks, founders in well-fitting suits and ridiculous pie-in-the-sky business ideas.

It’s some version of ”build it and they will come”. Granting millions in free money to anyone who promises to create an EU alternative to AWS / Intel / Facebook gets you a lot of said promises.

> Over the next two years, it plans to raise €3bn — that averages out as €125m a month for everyone keeping score at home

The EU pledged €2bn so it's mostly government funding. Imagine burning €125m in public money every month.

The 2bn from the EU is not earmarked for Evroc, I understood that it was a general allocation (though perhaps they expect to get a lot of it).

The EC wants to invest 2b€ in the sector in general, not in the company specifically

It was never entirely clear to me how I actually get this money except by making friends and rubbing backs with the people in Brussels.

It certainly doesn’t seem to be based on likelyhood of success.

Seems like you already answered yourself. Crony capitalism and nepotism are the traditional EU way of doing business. That’s why our companies tend to lose on the global market, when faced with a level playing field and real competition

Pretty much yes, that's why all EU funded tech projects are half-assed. As soon as the EU public money dries up, all investors pull out as well because they know nothing they do is meant to be competitive on the free market, they're just there to suck on the teat of easy EU money and take off when it's dry.

The sad part is, without EU money, nothing in tech would happen in the EU. We have no VC investors willing to put their money in something as risky as tech when they can put their money in much safer places with surer returns like real estate which sacred in the EU compared to let's say the US.

The EU start-up I was working for was looking for VC investors and we found some German guy who was like "yeah I can invest 100k in your company" at which point our boss was like "bruh, that will barely cover scientist, dev wages and infra for 3-5 months". Then came and American guy with an initial investment of 2 million. Nuff said.

How would an investor pull out prior to an exit? Since they can't why would they invest in something they don't expect to be competitive. How could they suck on the EU teat? This makes no sense.

As you point out, the real issue appears to be a lack of VC risk appetite for investing in early-stage startups in the EU vs the US.

You misunderstood. As soon as the EU pulls out, so do the private investors. They're only along for the ride as long as the EU puts in most of the money and the risk.

We must know different investors. What ride would they be on except to bankruptcy if they can't profit from their investment?

It should be embarrassing for Europeans that the only way they can compete with Americans in IT is by literally banning US products. I don't think that will work out very well for them in the long run. Europe is otherwise usually a fierce competitor in high tech, but when it comes to IT it seems they didn't really got going strong. Just out of sheer patriotism, European companies could snatch back a lot of customers from their foreign competitors by just offering an equal or slightly worse product.

The big problem is IT in Europe just doesn’t pay very well. It beats a blue collar job, but anyone truly good has the option to emigrate for 2-3x more money.

Moving away from your established life, friends, family to a country where you will (at least initially) be foreign, where the lifestyle is different are burdens that should not be underestimated.

I'm sure everybody in the EU would like US level salaries, but most wouldn't move for the money alone

America is the ~only country where you may truly be "local" in the eye of the locals.

In all other countries you'll always be a foreigner (your kids will be local though).

UK as well, it's very welcoming to foreign workers compared to most of continental Europe where even if you learn the language you're still a a foreigner with glass ceilings.

And 10x for healthcare elsewhere.

Health care costs shouldn't be of too much concern for young professionals (those more likely to move). Eating well and exercise should come first, because even if healthcare is free or cheap - who wants to be sick in the first place?

Your well being doesn't always depend on your diet and exercise. Viruses like Coivd or other bugs you can get from a simple surgical procedure like a root canal, preexisting and congenital conditions that hit you later in life, accidents, are a thing for many people despite balanced lifestyles.

Certainly. But if we compare how much Americans are happily paying for health insurance and Europeans are happily paying in taxes, with the cost and effort of a healthy life style, the healthy life style is much cheaper. And accessible all over the world.

I'm kidding about the "happily" of course.

The US food is terrible, GMO everywhere with artificial, sugary taste that ‘deactivates’ the natural senses of your mouth, so everything needs sugar to taste “okay-ish”. It is more cognitively and economically expensive to be healthy in the US than in Europe.

Leaving aside edge cases (e.g preexisting chronic illness). This is mostly irrelevant for software engineers even for the ones without top of the market compensation.

-10x for love then.

The question is: Why won't the companies pay well? Good quality IT gives massive savings/profit, there should certainly be enough left over to pay the people who actually did the work. I think there is an attitude in Europe of workers not deserving high compensation, by the virtue of them dirtying themselves with work and not belonging to the owner class. If you lose talented employees, so be it, they simply don't deserve getting paid better no matter how much money they bring in to you.

Yeah, I get this impression as well. Only way to have it better is to be one of the owners.

Isn't it similar to what the USA did when many companies started replacing cisco network equipment, Dell/HP servers and SANs for the cheaper Huawei offering?

Sounds very similar. Didn't Huawei stuff get banned as well?

> The biggest European provider, Deutsche Telekom OVHcloud, holds 1-2% of the market.

Wait what? It's OVHcloud, not "Deutsche Telekom OVHcloud". There is no mention of any relationship between the two companies beside a common project named "Gaia-X" which is still in a very very early stage of planning.

This doesn't inspire confidence in the journalist.

Ovhcloud is French. Telekom is a German company and they have open telekom cloud. We actually use this on a project (and I don't recommend that to friends).

Gaia-X is a european initiative and consortium to build some standardized cloud ecosystem. The goals are a bit hand wavy and since Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are actually part of the consortium, it's not really clear what the goals are at this point. I haven't heard much about this since it was announced a few years ago.

I've used AWS, Gcloud, Hetzner, Telekom Cloud, and a few other things. My view on this space is that it needs disruption. Amazon was disruptive when they launched in 2006. It was great and it enabled a lot of companies to stop worrying about maintaining infrastructure. That's 15 years ago. It's a commodity product at this point.

The problems I see:

- Companies overcharge for their services. AWS especially is very expensive to use. To the point that the monthly cost of some of their more expensive things about pays for the hardware they give you. Of course it delivers a lot of value. But it creates an opportunity for others to offer cheaper services.

- Most providers try to lock you into their platform with a combination of complexity and convenience. Once you are on a platform, switching it out for another becomes really expensive. Things like openstack exist of course but are a combination of complex and not that comprehensive.

- The services offered by these companies are very hard to use for what they do. You end up micro managing lots of bits and pieces and you need expensive devops people to do that for you. There are better ways to deploy software to server these days that feature higher levels of automation and convenience.

To disrupt the big providers, you'd need to be as good but an order of magnitude cheaper. Instead of focusing the commodity things that everybody has (buckets, vms, load balancers, etc.), the real value is in the more advanced stuff they offer. Things like Fargate or Google cloud run. Basically Kubernetes without all the moving parts to worry about. Don't offer database servers but scalable elastic data bases.

In short, that's where the money is and the reason Amazon is so ridiculously wealthy. They overcharge for this stuff and they don't get any real competition so they get away with it. If you think about it, a lot of this stuff is very resource efficient. So it should be cheaper than getting a lot of hardware that you then under utilize. Instead, it's more expensive. AWS pockets the difference.

That's what needs disrupting but it will be a race to the bottom once this starts happening. I think that's overdue though. So this Swedish company might be onto something.

FTA:

> The lack of home-grown cloud providers in Europe

Not accurate. OVH (France), IONOS (Germany), Scaleway (Sweden) are few examples thar had been serving customers for years/decades.

On lower end there even more competitors like Servers.com and Hetzner.

The reason AWS is such prevalent is not lack of options. It is VCs pushing "free" credits on their portfolio companies till it became synonymous with cloud for some engineers and founders.

Most are already carbon neutral (nuclear) or renewable powered.

OVH even has patented highly efficient water cooling used on large scale.

Rather than announcing US cloud rivalry, we should make community aware of better, cheaper solution at "home".

Scaleway is a French venture.

Ah, sorry, mixed it something else. Thanks for correction.

Would never use a cloud service simply because "its European", it's got to be better and cheaper than AWS.

Seems they're aiming to capture the market of people who want "green" clouds, not "European" clouds. Besides, if you just want better and cheaper AWS, there is so many options already.

Doesn't look like being a green cloud will be a differentiator for very long.

"Amazon is the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy and is on a path to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025"

https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/renewable...

This is for Amazon as a whole (so not AWS) but recent news (26 May 2023) seems that they are targeting net-zero by 2040:

"The ecommerce giant recently backed out of a commitment to make 50% of its shipments net-zero carbon by 2030. Amazon said in a statement that it would roll this goal into a broader Climate Pledge to reach net-zero carbon across all its operations by 2040. That's a decade later than the 50% goal, which was called "Shipment Zero" at the time." [0]

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-shipment-zero-gives-u...

Also worth noting that this is a target. And targets can always shift eg 2040, 2050, etc

> Seems they're aiming to capture the market of people who want "green" clouds, not "European" clouds.

Just make a green colored logo and website?

A lot of european companies would. You’d be surprised how often saas clients told me to _never_ allow client data to get anywhere near a us company. People around europe are very privacy aware.

It's something most Americans don't appreciate. Half of Europe suffered under or from a totalitarian regime not that long ago and set up their respective barriers.

Some people give it lip service in America for political points but they don't understand it on a fundamental level - most of them would turn around and complain about why google street view doesn't work in Germany.

I say this as someone who has bounced around between both sides of the pond

Meanwhile the Dutch security services had a truly ridiculous number of wiretaps.

they did and still do https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36229557

You mean they don’t want to keep filling out forms and wait for approval to be able to help someone that got hacked?

When the cops don't need to fill out forms to catch criminals that's a police state.

Are you kidding? If this happened in America we'd never hear the end of it from Europeans.

Obviously, the government would love to just pilfer around in the computers of private citizens and businesses without "filling out forms", but that's not a good reason to give it to them.

Clearly the reverse is also true :)

They don’t get to ‘pilver around the computers of private citizens’ though. Only those citizens directly affected by an existing hack (I read it as being under control of the hacker).

If I had the choice between just a nefarious hacker, and both the nefarious hacker and the NL security services having access to my PC I’d choose the latter.

> Half of Europe suffered under or from a totalitarian regime not that long ago and set up their respective barriers.

Meanwhile Denmark: “It’s time to fill out your yearly tax declaration! Actually, you don’t have to bother! We already pulled your data from EVERYWHERE…”.

I actually think that's not "that wrong". You pay social security to the government, you pay car tax to the government and (to some part in Switzerland) the health insurances are tightly coupled to the government. Bank statements missing and the government already has 80% of your tax form.

Still you need to put in everything again, each year.

Yep, some banks already make it mandatory that you do not store whatever data you may have from them outside of Europe.

Not just banks, many large enterprises have such requirements. Keep all personal data inside the EU, it's just easier for them to mitigate risks that way.

But all three major clouds offer several European data centers so it's really not such a big deal.

I wonder what kind of talent they will be able to hire, paying the usual European taxed peanuts.

People choose to live in Europe for reasons other than money. Things money can't buy.

They can give out stock? Being taken for a ride is being taken for a ride.

Basal capitalistic view. What's the most beautiful city you've ever visited and why?

a beautiful retirement home is still a retirement home.

you either grow your own economy or become a vassal to someone else who does.

if europe keeps stagnating and america keeps posting 4% gdp growth, a day will come when the EU can pass as many laws as they like and it won't matter. it'll be like some shitpoor latin american country against united fruit.

"economy" is a meme - both china and the EU realized that this anglo-american system has its weaknesses which can be exploited

The Chinese did it by just taking all the IP they could get as a requirement to sell in their nation

The Europeans did it by requiring companies to abide by their new law or pay out fines(basically a quasitax)

The capitalistic system is an addict to access to markets. Governments setup their various Guardrails to ensure that it can't entirely (i lack a nice word for this verb) their society and peoples.

china is the world's factory, arabs have oil. what does europe make?

the way things are going, there will eventually be an american company with a market cap greater than the GDP of France or Germany. at that point, they'll be making the real rules.

Europe makes for the largest, wealthiest single market in the world, the world's biggest importer and the world's biggest exporter.

There's a lot of power in that.

not even close.

USA GDP: $26.8 trillion

EU GDP: $17.1 trillion

Problem is, most of that US GDP is going to a few billionaires.

There's a massive impoverished underclass in the US, who are not going to be able to drive much consumption.

GDP is an incredibly reductive measure.

every country has an underclass. there is no rigorously defensible way to say that americans are poorer than europeans. none whatsoever.

Every country has an underclass, the US one is just much bigger proportionally compared to the US one.

This map speaks volumes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

> The Europeans did it by requiring companies to abide by their new law or pay out fines(basically a quasitax)

This works only because EU is a relatively big and wealthy economy. If, say, Chile or Botswana tried to do the same, US companies would be like “lol, bye”. If, or when the Europe becomes just as poor as these relative to US, the incentive for US companies to stay in Europe and pay these ridiculous fines, will simply not be there, and so they will leave.

Thus, if Europe’s strategy is to impose more and more strict regulations and taxes on US companies, it must return to growing in wealth in power. Otherwise, this strategy will backfire: not only Europe will stay poor, but also the highly productive companies will exit it.

>stay poor

Have californians started thinking of Europe as poor?

the poorest american state is still richer in per capita terms than france or germany. europe is poor and getting poorer, relative to america.

Yet the life expectancy in most EU countries is much higher than in America. Wealth isn't the only relevant metric.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy#differences-in-li...

they're dying sooner because of diseases of ... affluence.

and we can expect the new weight loss drugs to make a noticeable dent in that (at the cost of who-knows-what side effects, but they can't be as big a killer as obesity)

I have a bridge to sell you... Unfortunately, it is likely those medicines will drive the next wave of chronic disease.

Yes, the Americans are not as effective at war on drugs as Europeans, which is why we have very high rates of death from overdoes, which is the main driver of low life expectancy.

Fun fact: There are 17 European countries that rank higher than the US in the Index of Economic Freedom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom

Do we know they're paying peanuts as salary at this point? There are a lot of companies in Europe who will pay engineers 200k+ EUR and beyond, however admittedly nearly all are US companies or very closely connected to the US capital markets

this blurs further with UK leaving Europe. Berlin doesn't pay much. And what's left then? Paris? Or Stockholm Sweden? Even the CxO's there don't make much more than 200K

Berlin pays the most in EU.

I thought Dublin did, actually.

US clouds will be banned in EU so it's a captive market.

Interesting. Any sources on this?

Straightforward synthesis of widely known information regarding incompatibility between the laws of the countries (GDPR/CLOUD Act). If US companies can't process the data of EU citizens because they are unable to say no to the US spying apparatus, or even keep them at arms length, where do you think that leaves them?

https://www.csis.org/analysis/cloud-act-and-transatlantic-tr...

> “Amazon, Google and Microsoft are really good, but US authorities have the right to see the data stored on non-American citizens. That means that many companies and authorities in Europe cannot put sensitive data on the American cloud and instead store it on servers in the cellar,” Åström says.

Isn't this FUD? US authorities can't subpoena data on a server in the EU even if it's owned by a US company

Anything which passes through cloudflare, AWS, Apple, or any corporation with an HQ in America is part and parcel of the American 3 letter industry

If you're worried about the spy agencies, data is safer inside the US that out.

Let me introduce you to the CLOUD act, which multiple times have been ruled to be fundamentally incompatible with GDPR.

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

Curious to see whether pessimism about big-$$$ companies getting to shape US law to their will could win versus pessimism about the seemingly inevitable creep of the security state, if Europe actually forces tech companies' hands here... one can kind of imagine it being possible to repeal the CLOUD act if enough lobbyist dollars were spent.

I think there’s an opportunity for an IkeaCloud or AldiCloud that is just barebones and cheap but still is a proper cloud.

Given that Microsoft and google are struggling to match aws it seems we’re still decades away from someone truly being able to deliver the same features, scale, and reliability.

Doesn't this already exist in the form of Digital Ocean, Linode/Akamai, OVH, etc.?

also hetzner

Hetzner is great for servers and storage, but it's not a "proper cloud" like AWS/GCP/Azure/Oracle/IBM.

well yea, we are talking ikea cloud. cheap but serviceable (https://www.hetzner.com/cloud)

Those are not cheap, but they do exist already yes

"LidlCloud" is a thing... https://www.stackit.de/en/

It's a thing, but not really competing in all ways to AWS, as there's no signup, just a contact form. A bit more enterprise-y.

Wouldn't that be Hetzner?

Hetzner lacks a lot of features to count as a proper cloud. Still wishing for managed kubernetes.

Managed k8s probably wouldn't count as a bare bones cloud.

Upcloud, Vultr, Scaleway, Linode, DigitalOcean, etc have all included managed k8s. I think the standards have moved up and it's pretty much a standard feature of most bare bones cloud now.

I've been using scaleway which fits that description imo

> When the sun is shining in Spain, then we move the data there, and when the wind is blowing in the Netherlands then we move it there.

I'm sure this sounds great for the laymen and politicians, but does it really make sense technically?

Not really

No. Nothing beats a truck full of drives for bandwidth, nothing beats fiber for latency, they need both.

And nothing is expensive like an idle data center.

This whole idea of moving compute around based on where the free power doesn't actually work. Power has grown as a fraction of data center cost over time, that's very very true, but saving 50% on power doesn't offset having a data center 90% idle.

> Nothing beats a truck full of drives

You need pigeons!

Has "Europe is investing $X billions to rival $AMERICAN_TECH_GIANT" ever worked? I'm highly skeptical of planned enterprises. Inovation often happens organically.

It works better when they use Legislation to keep the great satan in check.

They're addicted to that market and they(we?) need checks and balances to constrain that which we have wrought

Airbus ?

IaaS but in Europe isn't innovation though. If you want a factory just build it; don't wait for it to emerge organically.

I kind of struggled to find the name of the company in the start of the article.

Turns out its https://evroc.com

It’s in the subheading:

> Having just raised a €13m pre-seed round, evroc aims to raise €3bn within the next two years

And in the first paragraph and in the third paragraph, in the fifth, etc. I count twelve occurrences.

I think it doesn’t pop out because it’s written without capital letters.

This must be the biggest-paddings-between-blocks website ever. At least for mobile.

They left room for the solar panels to power the DCs

A lot of “US vs Europe” in the comments. The focus ought to be to provide great services rather than just “it’s built here and not there”.

I use Hetzner over other providers because it’s dead simple to create and delete VMs and the prices are competitive … and yes it’s a European company.

The EU flag alone is not enough - Stable services, great UX and second to none support is the alternative that the market has been longing.

A lot of “US vs Europe” in the comments

I think the previous administration spooked Europe and made it clear that the USA is an unreliable partner.

The French president got treated to a proper American meal by a proper American president and looked very happy. It’s all forgotten now.

The EU has made a big pot of money available to try to get an EU cloud provider, a lot of people are interested in that money.

I just don't think most of these people grasp how complex it's going to be. None of the existing EU hosting providers have succeeded in providing even a small subset of the services AWS provides. You also just can start out with an S3, SQS and EC2 clone anymore, customers expect more features from day one.

Bootstrapping an new cloud provider is going to cost and insane amount of money and billions of Euros, all of which may be wasted if the EU and US can reach an agreement on data processing.

As an example, look at Google, they have the money, the people and the technology, and they are having a hard time competing with AWS and Azure.

There is already a grest swedish cloud peovider called GleSYS. They are 100% running on renewable energy and the have an awesome control panel to control your servers. I only wish that they had more hosted solutions like digital ocean.

Other than that, there is hetzner which I also use and is very good and probably the cheapest cloud provider out there. Then there is the french ovh.

Oh boy, this one is not cheap: VPS hosting, for example, is 2x..4x than that of DotBlock.

There is nothing defensible about this business model. It's entering a crowded category with entrenched players who have far deep pockets and can negate all of this startup's so-called advantages. It's really about the worst kind of business to enter besides the restaurant industry.

Why restaurant business is bad for you?

No OP, but restaurants are the most competitive industry possible. Anyone can start a restaurant, and lots of people want and can do it. Because it's intrinsically a physical business, the market reach is limited to a small area unless it's in downtown or a highly trafficked area - where it also costs a lot more in rent.

There's almost no way to make a restaurant profitable as many restaurants are a labour of love, basically.

As an interesting historical legend, Sequoia Capital invested in Il Fornaio, an Italian restaurant chain. It's not a grand concern but it has endured as an okay restaurant. Darden, OTHO, is a sizeable corporation that's growth oriented and has acquired some good regional chains. McDonald's, etc. are really real estate companies.

In that case they need to negotiate with Washington first, to remove the legislation that sets them apart from this startup.

They want to raise 3 billions in 3 years to build a Cloud from scratch and with no real USP. What a joke. This guy probably think that you can throw money at a hard problem and it will fix itself by magic. Building the tech that power a cloud service at hyper scale is no small feat. You can have all the money in the world, building a team that can do that is hard and will take time. It's not like he can install OpenStack and be done with it. Also, as others have pointed out, real EU competition exists and most are already on a path to sustainable computing (disclaimer: I work for a EU cloud provider on Sustainability topics).

> .. to build a Cloud from scratch and with no real USP. What a joke.

Using a cloud not owned by a US company is quite a big USP for many non US organisations. I can't name any big EU cloud providers, but I imagine that a large chunk of that 3 Billion will be spent on marketing so people will have heard of evroc in a few years.

There is a USP and it is very strong. If you are a government organisation, you don't have many clouds to chose from, given the legislative situation. It is a greenfield basically. I am surprised not more people have seen it.

It sounds like it's layering on the European aspect to get government/EU backing. Fair enough, I hope they succeed.

It's a necessary evil to combat a larger one.

I'm interested to hear their business plan, given that there's already established ones like https://elastx.se/en/, and they're not running terribly well, although they have quite a good product IMO.

It’s in the article. They plan to keep raising money and opening offices while selling “green EU cloud” to clueless businesses and politicians.

>> Amazon, Google and Microsoft are really good, but US authorities have the right to see the data stored on non-American citizens

That doesn't sound right. If the data center is located outside of the US, there should be absolutely no reason why US authorities could have access. In fact, US authorities should not even have access to the data within the US. Sure you might catch the odd bad guy but government creeps eroding everyone's trust is not a worthwhile tradeoff.

€3bn to rival AWS that is going to be more secure and will also only use green energy, sounds like something EU bureaucrats would come up with.

I'm deeply disappointed that the EU is afraid of doing real investments with realistic goals into information infrastructure while it happily throws away billions on the failing Ukraine war.

Plenty of reasons for infrastructure/platform/software independence. But if Munich and Bavaria, one of the richest regions in all of Europe, could not escape the shackles of Microsoft I think there’s not enough free will to scale a Swedish startup to continental scale.

they seem to have misunderstood the why and the how of startup culture in the valley

it has been a way to get startup entrepreneurs (founders) to absorb the negative cost of trying out new things; and whatever actually works well gets bought by an established winner.

what's fundamentally unproven about how to build data-centers? this seems to be about using a different sort of 'power supply' for the whole project

what is to stop AWS from being even more green even faster (by buying 'greener' power supplies?)

the only way this makes sense is if their real end-game is to get bought by some already established datacenter company.

then again, it's not 2018 anymore. The VC scheme is also changing a lot. they should find a way to chuck "AI" in their pitch to get startup money now

Their real end game is living comfortably for years on large salaries financed by EU development grants.

They are taking advantage of regulatory capture - that's all. I don't think I'm blaming anybody here. Maybe these are good regulations. Regardless, it creates a business opportunity.

The EU passes laws which require data/compute/whatever to run in the EU. So a company springs up with a product for that.

Data sovereignty is a thing and low environmental impact appreciated as well but they will have to find something else to differentiate from AWS (and the other two, I forget the names)

What could that be? Its not easy but on the other hand you dont win the future by doing easy stuff.

If the concern mentioned in this article of "Americans can view sensitive data on European citizens," they should just go the route China did - it hosts its own version of AWS that's pretty walled off, from what I know.

China was able to pressure the west to do so because western companies:

- "need" to operate in China

- The Chinese government requires majority state ownership of enterprises

I don't think the conditions are the same in Europe, especially given the historical precedents of Safe Harbor/Privacy Shield/etc.

Well, yeah, that's what evroc is aiming to be.

China has literally AWS, though, not just something similar. All the same services, just with a CCP official looking over your shoulder and a Chinese company operating it.

Not really all the same services.. there is a ton of them missing in CN AWS. It is like few years behind..

True enough, but how many services is a completely new European startup going to have?

Not literally though, it’s run by some company that is not Amazon.

I feel like that’s exactly what will happen, and this company would be well placed to benefit.

Basically some European company licenses the “AWS” stack and follows instructions to build and operate the data center.

Works in China, and even more so with the various government regions.

Europe is basically building the Great Firewall slowly and through committee, they’ll end up in the same spot.

> they should just go the route China did - it hosts its own version of AWS that's pretty walled off, from what I know

Wouldn't count that as the route China did. China forces all companies to have local ownership. It has nothing to do with the data. At least it wasn't the intent.

They have actual local clouds that are popular from Alibaba, Tencent, JD and many other big names.

What happened to Gaia-X, the previous European cloud project? If I recall correctly, its main objective was not to build new data centers but rather to develop an overlay on top of the existing European VPS providers.

US cloud companies are just a subsidiary of the NSA, so this sounds good.

The hardware is peaking.

So software is where you can make the difference: http://host.rupy.se

I wonder why they are HTTP only. Despite some of the hosted (3rd party?) pages having login forms.

The login uses OTP: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289

No need for HTTPS.

Didn’t know them. Anything comparable for other languages?

You want Java on the server. VM with GC is the way.

I hope they will have a US cloud region since the European laws are pretty strict and hard to keep up with

> “Amazon, Google and Microsoft are really good, but US authorities have the right to see the data stored on non-American citizens."

Unfortunately Mattias, they don't care if they have the right or not. American citizens are routinely subject to surveillance, dragnet and otherwise. I'd be very surprised if any of your data centers stay out of view of our unconscionable surveillance apparatus.

Sounds interesting, but It’s a shame that they only hire you if you’re willing to relocate to Sweden.

~250x in two years? Starting with a 13m pre-seed round? Does this make any sense?

Good luck, they gonna need it.

> green ambitious, applaudable, but doomed to market realities

Why do I, a user, care about the energy type used?

In this world of capitalism, only the price matters. Pure green would be more expensive than the cheapest energy option at all times.

I think that we're going to see a lot of these initiatives in the coming years. I know a lot of non Europeans, and even a lot of Europeans outside of non-tech Enterprise IT might be sleeping on this a little, but there are some serious powers moving against the non-European Cloud. These powers aren't going to slow down either, they've only been ramping up since 2016 when the EU sort of woke to the threat of a transatlantic relationship that might not be as it had been.

For context I've worked a decade in the public sector of Denmark, and while the GDPR didn't actually change much on the back-end because we already took privacy and data serious, many of the compliance contracts and standards that work with AWS and almost with Azure in GDPR contexts aren't viable in what is now considered national security. Today I work in an investment bank that builds green energy solutions around the globe, you would think that we wouldn't be too affected by these powers in the EU, but the financial sector (and the energy sector) are all considered on the same level as our public services. In the past year, I've had to write up a plan on how we can leave Azure in a couple of days, if the EU deems it necessary to demand that 50% of the European finance sector needs to move away from Azure as a single cloud solution because it's too risky to rely on a single vendor, especially one that is not an EU vendor. Easy enough for my team, we build software, it all runs in containers and it doesn't really care where it runs. Sure we'll have to replace Azure Functions with Express in our node functions, but we've build some automation to make it possible to do in a day to be in compliance. It's much harder to do with our document storage in SharePoint Online and all our federated security build into Azure Active Directory, and, well... Outlook or Windows. I'm not sure anyone has a plan on how to exit Outlook or Windows, but if the EU points at Microsoft and tells us that our number came up, we actually need to tell them how we plan to do it.

The cloud isn't Windows or Outlook though. It'll be hard for us to leave SharePoint Online (you could know this as OneDrive, but in enterprise it's all SharePoint Online), AAD and a lot of the more Operations sided stuff in regards to well running an IT department (I'm sorry, I don't know too much about all those Runbooks), but it also won't be hard for us the same way leaving Outlook or Windows would. But if someone comes a long with viable EU alternatives to Azure, then we're likely going to jump on them. Not because we dislike Azure, but because the bureaucratic measures which force us to maintain these "you need to get out in a day" plans is a lot of work. It also limits us in the services we want to buy, we were looking into the Azure managed Kubernetes product that I forgot the name of, but we decided it wouldn't be a good idea because of how much work it would add for us to plan for an exit that will likely never come. I'm sure that last part has a lot of you rolling eyes. It has us rolling eyes too, but it's the world we live in, and it's not going to change. With the war in the Ukraine, the troubles with China and the risk of America electing another EU-unfriendly president/government, it's likely only going to accelerate, and someone, maybe even this Swedish initiative, are going to be the company or organization, that eventually gets the EU cloud alternative right. I think it'll be more a matter of timing and luck, than being able to actually compete with AWS or Azure in terms of services though. I think it's unrealistic for someone to build an AWS, but it won't be unrealistic to build something that's enough AWS and convenient as legislation pushes harder and harder.

What I'm personally curious about is to see what they plan on doing with smartphones. In Denmark your iPhone is your payment tool, your drivers licence, your social security license, you passport, your national digital ID, your bank and so on, and I'm not sure how the EU plans on having an European smartphone to rival Apple or Google.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com