Comment by sunshine-o | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sunshine-o | Hacker News Reader

I am really questioning that initial premise that "we need an European cloud". Here I roughly understand "we need a few big European hyperscaler with a dozen huge datacenters we can migrate to" because this is the model we understand. But you are fundamentally "fighting the last battle", the wrong battle.

The idea of an European cloud has happened several time before and I was once strongly encouraged to select one so I investigated, here are my findings:

About 10 years ago all those countries needed a cloud to put their government and sensitive industries on, so public money and contracts was given to friendly corporations. Once the initial chunk of free money ran out a lot of those companies got rid of the business. In France a lot got sold to Orange, the big telco partially owned by the state.

I considered it because according to some metrics they had the biggest cloud in Europe.

I found out quickly they actually immediately given everything to Huawei. So it was all managed by Huawei but if I remember correctly still hosted on Orange premises.

Strangely information about it is more difficult to find now but you can still read about it on third party websites [0].

By the way all of this is GDPR whatever compliant.

I just did a quick search and it seems they had to shut it down in 2024 because Huawei became such a radioactive topic. Information is hard to find about it in English.

In the end the companies who were forced to select a "sovereign cloud" probably went through hell and moved around several time in the last 10 years. You are told you should/must go on a sovereign cloud, you then end up on a Chinese cloud and you are then kicked out of it.

I am not pushing for the big american hyperscalers but be very careful before listening to politicians.

- [0] https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/cloud/orange-introduces-...

You have a French perspective, but EU is big and varied.

Here in Belgium we do have our own Government Cloud which, while hosted using Broadcom (VMWare) and IBM (RedHat Openshift) software is locally owned and controlled.

Now, this "cloud" is a misnomer. It is not as automated as AWS. I would rather call it a government hosting provider, but it's doing its job.

> Now, this "cloud" is a misnomer

Absolutely.

I have seen a lot and usually the smaller the better.

I remember the Flemish gov (7M people so quite small) was doing great in this domain. France where everything needs to be centralised, big and controlled is doing terrible I guess.

This is why starting the discussion with the concept of "EU" and "Cloud" is wrong. We do not need an aircraft carrier, we need a lot of drones.

> we need a lot of drones.

I agree but for a slightly different reason. EU cloud is not about chasing AWS or GCP or Azure scale and complexity. It's about hosting our businesses and most importantly governments locally.

Thus, "cloud" is not an objective but a means to a goal.

>But you are fundamentally "fighting the last battle"

In your opinion, what is the current/future battle, then?

I am not OP but let me give you a Microsoft Office example.

For many years, Open Source and businesses tried to make a Microsoft Office competitor by mimicking Microsoft Office. Naturally, all clones were worse than the original.

Until Google changed the paradigm and rolled out Google Docs that had a unique feature of online collaboration.

Then was the turn of Microsoft to mimic collaboration features of Google Docs in Microsoft Office and be worse at it almost by definition.

Another example is S3.

For years, businesses tried to have POSIX-capable filesystems seamlessly scale in size and in availability. It took Amazon to roll out a simpler alternative that, by having a smaller set of features, enable so much sought properties of distributed file systems in an efficient and commercially viable way.

I think Hetzner Cloud is a sweet spot of a cloud. Instead of reimplementing AWS, EU should standardize of something like it.

It seems we are pushed into major conflicts and disruptions so we have to decentralise it as much as possible.

The current model is very awkward, we have been pushed into those very centralised, hyperscale solution that most businesses and individual do not really need. Most businesses do not really need much to do their job.

We are probably gonna have major connectivity disruptions on of those days or what happened when your Hertzner or Orange/Huawei datacenter is down? And I know they have "better security" but if we are attacked they are gonna be taken down anyway.

We do not wanna look at what a major cyber disruption would do to our societies. I believe just the consequences on the electricity grid and hospitals would make us wave the white flags in a few weeks.

You wanna own your hardware because if there are disruptions it is gonna be hard to get your hand on some because of supply, logistics or just monetary disruptions.

How hard is it technically to setup something like Ubuntu Microcloud [0] for your own use or local businesses you provide that service for?

From my experience the biggest risk and headache is all those EU regulations like the EU Cyper resilience Act and in some cases energy costs.

So when Ursula tell you Europe needs to prepare for war and authorise/push your country to go into even more debt so her friends can build expensive tanks that will never see a battle it is ridiculous.

They should focus on removing all the obstacle to resilience they setup themselves, find a way to reduce energy costs (pretty hard now...) and maybe encourage moving out of those big tech cloud (starting by doing it themselves).

- [0] https://canonical.com/microcloud

>It seems we are pushed into major conflicts

>so her friends can build expensive tanks that will never see a battle

I am not sure how you consolidate the two statements. It seems to me that there is a very real risk of armed conflict in Europe over the next decade.

Yes there is good chance we are being pushed into one.

What I mean is the tanks, aircraft carriers or F35s probably won't really matter.

You can create enough pain on current western societies by other means such as major cyber disruption so that the classical battlefield won't really matter.

You could have said the same about Ukraine. Assuming rational (even if transactional) moves from dictators seems naïve.

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