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Comment by kunwon1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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/

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?

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 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 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

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 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.

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

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

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?

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