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Comment by lnxg33k1 | Hacker News Reader

Its not an organisation, its a blucking government, it handles citizen data, and its sending them to a company of foreign country, because it can’t hire some system administrators? A GOVERNMENT? What are they doing? Still looking for their product market fit and can’t afford the headcount? Is it a joke?

EDIT If they are looking for money id like to participate a bit in the seed round

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Sysadmins are cheaper than many people seem to think.

I had a person I trust a lot telling me that "if we go with a bare metal provider like GCore we'd have to hire someone", his reason for bringing that up was that the cost difference would be justified by not having to hire someone,.

However a GCore €400,000k/y bill becomes a €6,000,000~ if you were to use a public cloud, even with the scaling up and down when not in use (we are an extreme case of needing a lot of dumb unreliable compute thats geographically distributed).

I can hire a lot of sysadmins for that money, but I probably don't even need one because public clouds also need devops staff to manage the complexity anyway.

The risk is hiring a team of ineffective sysadmins, especially if your organization can’t assess sysadmin competence.

That would indeed be a risk, but the circular logic of this means no new company could ever have any competence outside of its founders. Which feels shortsighted.

Anyway, I am a former sysadmin. I am confident that I can identify competence in the requisite areas.

Governments tend to be far less competent at determining technical competence. Due to a wide variety of factors, governments tend to be completely uncompetitive in salary for technical positions meaning they're already hiring from the lower end of the pool (not including a few altruistic folks willing to forgo their market value).

At a company if a department isn't working out you just restructure and move on, but in the government, that team is going to retire in your org and collect pension from you, and there's very little you can do about that.

Everything you said seems to also apply for developers and the staff that would manage cloud resources.

Lack of cost control or effective use of a cloud provider leads to spiralling uncontrollable costs.

yeah, every company I know of that uses cloud has a team responsible for managing it anyway, and they don't seem much smaller than the team needed to manage on-prem. I don't really think this 'savings' exists in most cases.

If you are worried about that, start with your government use of Microsoft Office and Windows who both send MB of data per minute to a US based company.

> (...) its a blucking government, it handles citizen data, and its sending them to a company of foreign country, because it can’t hire some system administrators? A GOVERNMENT? What are they doing?

This is a very good question, and bears repeating.

It's not a massive database as well. 400GB with 1k inserts/second.

> because it can’t hire some system administrators?

Spoken like someone who has never worked in the public sector. Hiring can easily take 6+ months or more due to an ever-increasing list of requirements that government HR is required to fulfill, not least of which is passing a security clearance which takes even more time. The best people on the market rarely have the patience for this. Once your employees do get hired - on-boarding can take another few/several/more months, getting various permissions, technical documentation, etc. Everything is out-of-date because making changes requires committee consensus, in a culture that is risk-averse, because nobody notices when you out-perform (after all, the requirements were also set by a committee that doesn't know who you are) but something going wrong is grounds for termination. Public sector work over-relies on hiring contractors precisely to shift blame for failure to the contractors. Managed database services are excellent tools to shift this kind of catastrophic risk of data loss to a contractor/vendor (who is managing the database).

Governments not owning their data isn't due to technical or budgetary limitations - it's strictly cultural.

Fully agree with this. I'd also add that a lot of IT is buy not build, in general. That includes support. Particularly true for the public sector and has been in place well before AWS existed.

Outsourcing the complexity to run and maintain a secure reliable database cluster really is making good use of the managed service model.

> Hiring can easily take 6+ months or more

Do you think this move didn't take even longer to plan?

> to shift blame

That reason is much more plausible.

AWS has a G-Cloud for UK just like they have one for US, no?

AWS has government specific regions (called GovCloud). Many services or features make it to GovCloud later than other regions because of the certification requirements.

AWS has US based GovCloud regions: AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West). It does not have a UK specific GovCloud region that I am aware of.

Why can't the UK government build there own cloud?

It's just completely insane to me that they would make the gov internet infrastructure completely (geopolitically) dependent on another country AND just literally give all their (citizens') data away AND pay for that "privilege"?!

I mean if the government can't host the government's websites using tech from the government's country, maybe it would be better to just forget about the whole cyberweb thing altogether? Just turn it off?

They'd still be outsourcing to a firm to do this. They wouldn't hire a load of people to do it in-house. See also Fujitsu in the recently-popular Horizon scandal, or the NHS for IT debacle[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health

Why should they build their own cloud, seeing that costs more money?

you want every government to build their own cloud? what in the world? the whole world is interlinked, should they also manufacture their own government laptops in the UK?

I don't think you have any idea just how much it costs to run infrastructure at the reliability levels provided by AWS, and just how much investment it would require to get the ball rolling on this.

A lot of people have a very unrealistic picture of what government budgets are like.

> I don't think you have any idea just how much it costs to run infrastructure at the reliability levels provided by AWS

my $12/year VPS does better than us-east-1

Where do you get a 12 dollar a year vps. Hetzner charges me 4 bucks a month and it feels like a steal

https://lowendtalk.com/

quality varies

I get that it costs a lot.

My point is that NOT hosting it yourself (as a government) costs WAY more in the long run. See my points above.

The same goes for companies in Europe who literally host their trade-secrets (designs, sales, the entire company) on US-servers (OneDrive, Google Drive, etc). The US is the home of their competitors. Who cares about infrastructure costs if you're PAYING to give your trade secrets away to your competitor(s)?!

I've always wondered how beholden the world is to Microsoft. I was once surprised to learn the US military (and probably virtually all others) don't have their own OS to avoid being tied to a particular company.

Why can't the UK government build their own cars? Their own boots? Their own pens, paper? How wasteful and pathetic that they wouldn't make all those things themselves. If it's possible to do it yourself, by golly, you should do it yourself, and there's absolutely no reason in the entire world to purchase those things from someone else instead.

By that reasoning: why not just outsource the entire UK government to some low income countries while you're at it?

I mean I'm sure Xi or any other president would be happy to govern the UK in exchange for a small fee? Much more cost effective!

I'm sure the Chinese would also be more than happy to build the UK's roads and (government) buildings at a great discount.

You still don't see my point? We're talking essential infrastructure and Geo-politically highly sensitive data.

You know that UK's National Health Service did a deal with Palantir for "federated data platform"?

No. It is only relatively recently (~5/6 years) AWS have had any data centres in the UK.

That blocked use of AWS for a lot of UK departments due to data sovereignty concerns.

I see. I don't use AWS much, I saw this [1] and assumed this was like the US g-cloud.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/g-cloud-uk/

The UK replies entirely on the mercy of USA for its nuclear deterrent (Trident)

For the UK at least, that ship has _long_ since sailed....

trident has UK built warheads and is operationally independent of the US

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