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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

This is too funny.

What's to stop an American cloud hyperscaler from creating a "properly patriated" subsidiary that it simply licenses the tech to? Wouldn't that side step the "sovereign" protectionism?

An American company would run circles around this mess.

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Google is doing this. German and French companies are building a datacenter to GCP standards, will license the code and run essentially whitelabel GCP under full jurisdiction of the EU company. Google can only push updates with their approval and has no visibility into the operations.

https://cloud.google.com/t-systems-sovereign-cloud?hl=en

Isn't this how all the hyperscalers already run in China?

Yes. Though they increasingly own management as well.

At this point Azure in China and AWS in China is a reskin around Tencent Cloud.

This is actually quite funny. A sovereign cloud that they have no f-ing clue how to maintain without the mothership.

They get documentation and playbooks (which are pretty good), source code access, and of course direct channel to the "mothership" engineers for support.

I'm sure early days will be painful but there is no reason for this not to work.

Sure, as long as the mothership exists and is cooperative, it’s fine. But that’s not actually very sovereign, is it?

Maybe you are misunderstanding the gravity of this problem. Thanks to US Cloud Act and the Patriot Act and similar acts, there is no way any US citizen or any US company may EVER be involved in such projects. It's completely legal for the US to rely on extraterritorial jurisdiction leveraging any US companies and US citizens they have access to. But on the other hand, everyone else on out there will want to avoid that, so the only way to achieve that is to avoid involving any US citizens or companies for such sovereign projects. Google will not be able to solve it via subsidiaries, and no nice promises from Amazon, MS etc. will ever change it. Data sovereignity means all this. This will probably escalate a lot more, it might involve the financial infrastructure used (SWIFT) or even currency used in the process.

Deutsche Telekom hosted Microsoft Office 365 for some years in Germany as a German cloud offering.

I think this was the press release: https://www.telekom.com/de/medien/medieninformationen/detail...

This was a Microsoft 365 cloud hosted and operated by Deutsche Telekom in Germany. It was more expensive than the global version and had less features. It often took some years till new features were introduced.

They stopped this offering some years ago, I think they did not get as many customers as they expected, most of the German customers used the global version.

Open Telekom Cloud is a whitelabeled AWS, so they are still doing this, but with other technologies.

This press release from 2020 says Open Telekom Cloud is from Software and Hardware from Huawei.

https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sich...

Do you have any source that they switched to AWS?

I’ve used it, it’s a rebranded openstack, not aws.

They built it on OpenStack as a clone of AWS offerings

And it’s not actually too far off; couple rough edges, managed k8s is shit but everything mostly works (rds, ec2, s3, iam, ebs etc)

Or just plain old buy out any EU company that threathens to become successful with free reserve currency monopoly money.

That's exactly what is going on nowadays, anyway. In Poland we have Chmura Krajowa (national cloud), aimed at public, non profit and finance companies. It's basically more controlled local Azure and GPC region.

In Polish people don't use Cloud but Chmura?

It depends. If we’re talking about e.g. GCP we use “cloud”, but Chmura Krajowa is a Polish product and it has a Polish name, so we use “chmura”. We basically use the original name in this context.

Interesting. In Germany government uses the word cloud . Not Wolke. TIL something new.

It seems to me Germans in general like to use English phrases, but on the contrary from other European places I know, they like to use the original pronunciation and spelling. Us, Poles, like to make it sound like Polish, add our own declension and so on.

Both, but chmura is a non-controvertial and easy translation.

In Hungarian the people I know use felhő and not cloud. I don’t know what they say in actual IT circles but to my ears “cloud” sounds very awkward if stuck in a Hungarian sentence.

https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felh%C5%91alap%C3%BA_sz%C3%A1m...

The americans are already on this path https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-european-s....

They might if there was a market for it. But who wants to pay a premium to be free of US influence? America hasn’t gone full-on Gilead yet.

"Gilead" ?

Republic of Gilead - fictional future fundamentalist theocracy version of the USofA

https://the-handmaids-tale.fandom.com/wiki/Republic_of_Gilea...

Unfortunately, every democracy is one election away from Gilead.

But then they'd have to obey laws and pay taxes and who wants that.

> What's to stop an American cloud hyperscaler from creating a "properly patriated" subsidiary that it simply licenses the tech to?

Nothing. Amazon already does that in China, their subsidiary licenses the tech and support services from the US company.

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