Towards a true multi-cloud offering to deliver on broken promises
scaleway.com
scaleway.com
Some days I wish there was an entire HN devoted to self-hosting and cloud-agnosticity lol.
Using provider-specific services is fine. You only need to be mindful of what it will take to migrate that functionality out of that specific cloud provider,and what work will be required to replace it.
Everything is a tradeoff. The time and cost required to roll out a feature is balanced by the cost of avoiding a tie-in. It makes no sense to spend ages and tons of cash writing a cloud-agnostic implementation when a one-liner of a cloud-specific service does the same job.
We use Azure blob storage, but just the parts that reasonably maps to say S3. We're using Azure Service Bus, but keep to the AMPQ bits. We use Entra ID, but rely on OAuth and SCIM. And so on.
So far we've not needed special functionality for anything critical, so while it wouldn't be just a flick of a button, the hope is we're avoiding painting ourselves in a cloud provider corner.
Time will tell, hadn't done any cloudy stuff until a year or so ago.
Projects like GAIA-X are aimed at eliminating the dependency on US companies for critical infrastructure. A few million are peanuts in the scope of shedding a multi-million dependency.
Among the top 10 cloud provides, 7 are from the US and below the top 3 all other players are barely in the single-digit scale.
Not as a cloud provider, but as a secondary shareholder (i.e., is a company really EU if a minority shareholder is non-EU?) and as a reference to Huawei dominating the networking infrastructure market. The last, all on itself, is a strategic concern.
On their website you can see the "milestones" and there's a "Launch of the new Gaia-X Release (Loire)" mentioned but I couldn't find anything about that "release". So mainly summits, websites and so on.
This is such a European way of approaching problems. We were colonized by them, and this kind of vapor work reigns in all their ex colonies.
Gaia-X appears to have delivered nothing useful. Related newer rant: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-dis...
The IaaS that OpenStack was interesting but I'm not sure that it's made enough strides to keep up to options in the market.
With that being said, I definitely have used OpenStack and wish it was more well known.
Yep, it's still widely used in a bunch of orgs (if I'm not mistaken it's popular at telcos, for instance). If you want a full blown private cloud (like the hyperscalers, but in your own datacenters on your own hardware), it's literally the only option. All alternatives just do Virtual Machines and that's it.
This feels like a commitment to misunderstanding.
A cloud's objective is only to acquire, and deeply retain customers including making switching cost and efforts unbearable.