Euro execs mull use of US clouds
theregister.com
theregister.com
For the cloud this is somewhat doable (we could run on Hetzner if we increased the team size) but for Microsoft/Apple there are zero alternative ofcourse so sofar it hasn't proceeded beyond a few risk_mapping.xls files.
[1] lithus.eu
/pitch
So I guess you just don't have enough pressure to execute the down-to-earth migrations.
The engineering culture in DIGIT is abysmal and outside of it, totally inexistent. This can also explain the lack of progress.
This is in line with my experience, too. When asked why, they would usually mention 2 arguments: 1) additional work for not much extra value, 2) vendor lock-in.
Some 20+ years ago, their IT was fragmented but decent, pretty much on par with the private sector.
But then DIGIT started the centralization efforts, and it squeezed life out of internal IT departments across institutions and directorates.
DIGIT bought all of its Microsoft software from British crooks that defrauded the Post Office and were at the origin of the Horizon scandal .
DIGIT created the infamous framework contracts system that still siphons funds to Greek and Italian mafia.
DIGIT caught on Drupal quite early but managed to suck the soul of every Drupal developer that joined in.
Once in a while the arrogance and ignorance of DIGIT management let beautiful things flourish under the carpet. For many years the EU tender system was the only big website that used XSLT for its original purpose of rendering XML into HTML on websites.
What I am trying to say is that DIGIT has to be reformed and given clear operational instructions, e.g. no more cloud migrations and a 10-year period with checkpoints to bring everything back to earth.
They should also decentralize and nourish proximity IT services.
Also people responsible for money laundering, e.g. the individuals who signed the Fujitsu framework agreement or the European Dynamics framework agreement should be prosecuted.
They may claim these agreements were legal, but let the courts decide.
No spaces allowed in passwords.
Not a great first impression.
The IT stuff is a replication effort and replication makes sense only when the original isn't available. Russia and China got some good IT stuff only when the US stuff were restricted one way or another.
So, IMHO the only hope for EU to have non-niche providers would be the complete deterioration of US-EU relations.
I think you underestimate the deterioration that's already occurred. These conversations are already happening. It will take a decade at least, but it's already begun.
We in Poland just elected a very pro-America, anti-EU president. By like 51 - 49, so very close, but still...
Currently there aren't any restrictions, the political class is worried and people don't feel good about the maker of the products but that's it.
Why would anybody invest in European mass appeal e-mail provider when things can just improve if Trump changes his pills? As a result in Europe you can't have a Gmail but instead you get Proton Mail. This is cool but its a niche product.
The same goes for everything, EU does have some great niche tech and some content studios but the platforms are always US based. I.e. one of the hottest games at this moment(clair obscur expedition 33) in the world is French made but it is primarily published on US platforms.
On Twitter you can find Euro tech boi's who will be repeating the same libertarian ideas as the US tech bros but the EU people make about as much as a successful restaurant and the US tech bros make often as much as a global restaurant chain or more.
Europe, or any place will be stuck with niche small businesses as long as US has access to their markets. Trump for some reason tries hard to change that but he hasn't succeeded yet but on the other hand he just started... So maybe in a few years it can happen after some huge scandal that justifies drastic changes. For example, it can be something like coordinated attack on Europeans by US tech giants and Russia etc. Musk with his actions in Ukraine propelled British and French satellite providers for example.
There very clearly is the restriction, upheld by courts again and again, that EU personal data cannot be processed on US clouds, including EU-based but US-owned clouds thanks to the US CLOUD ACT.
The political class and EU governments as a whole have kicked this can down the road several times, first with Safe Harbor, then Privacy Shield, and now the EU–US Data Privacy Framework which will inevitably fall.
> Europe, or any place will be stuck with niche small businesses as long as US has access to their markets.
This is just, well, untrue. Despite the oft-repeated claims to the contrary, the EU is an industrial and technological powerhouse.
What it doesn't have are US oligopolies, which are currently destroying the fabric of US society while being enormously profitable. That's a feature of the EU, not a bug.
> On Twitter you can find Euro tech boi's who will be repeating the same libertarian ideas as the US tech bros but the EU people make about as much as a successful restaurant and the US tech bros make often as much as a global restaurant chain or more.
Wealth inequality is a failure of US society, not a goal.
And moral victory is a poor substitute of the real victory.
The United States is a cruel, dystopian nightmare of a market masquerading as a country. No amount of corporate success will save it from it's inevitable collapse as the working class awaken to their situation.
To win you need to have strength. And to build your strength you need to work quite hard. Nothing comes free in this world. I would prefer that Europe sacrifices some of its comfort and survives because of it, instead of dying out with a claim to moral victory.
Europe is strong, stronger than the United States in its core institutions. You also lack the introspection to see that.
It is the United States that is at risk of losing its sovereignty, its wealth, and it's power. Again, you lack the introspection to see that too.
I'm not going to hold my breath.
I'll happily take stability living under an "oligarchy" with relatively weak and divided oligarchs, in a country with free elections that can still effect change, even if it happens at a glacial pace.
If only Europeans could pay their mortgages and bills with morals instead of money. If only Russia could be defeated by morals and not weapons. If only the pensions and welfare Europeans enjoy could be funded my morals and not by economic growth.
As usual, people who keep scoffing at economic growth saying "money doesn't matter" are those living in a bubble where they already have more than enough money and never experienced massive economic decline and take the economic prosperity they had for granted.
Ask Greece or Eastern European countries how they feel about winning economically.
The only ones that complain are those who want to have the cake and eat it too. In general, the life in those countries is quite relaxed just as the working conditions. You may see thing like working hours are long but those working hours are not comparable to the working hours in Germany or France for example.
Mortgage default rates or inability to pay the bills is also not that bad. Those who actually have trouble can seek better lives in the western Europe and many do and for quite many the good life is actually in Eastern Europe even if they would complain often.
It's not like those countries lack some resource or something making them poor, it's their expectations. In fact, Eastern Europe has quite a favorable geography with nice climate, access to water and plenty of sunshine. It's such a nice location that those countries receive considerable amount of tourists.
For those who are more ambitious, Eastern Europe offers everything they need - including powerful passports that let them go to the rich parts of the world hassle free.
Prosperity comes from wealth. You can have a lack of prosperity even with wealth, but you can't have prosperity without wealth.
Have they? As far as I am aware there's been a lot of handwaving and possibly FUD but nothing more.
Surely if your claim was factual, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc would have ceased business in the EU...
> Surely if your claim was factual, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc would have ceased business in the EU...
The legal cover is now the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, which allows these transfers subject to self certification. This is already under challenge and inevitably will fall judicial review in the next few years.
Once all the delaying tactics have been dealt with, we'll be left with the inevitable conclusion. Data transfers to the US or US controlled companies are unlawful as long as the CLOUD Act and similar are in force.
It's simply unreconcilable with the ECHR Right To Privacy and GDPR.
Not at all. Again, this is only about privacy shield and actual transfers to the US.
> It's simply unreconcilable with the ECHR Right To Privacy and GDPR.
That's the FUD I was talking about considering that this is exactly the same situation as access by EU-based law enforcement.
EU is playing politics and is tangling itself in unworkable legislation.
You are wrong on this. The CJEU ruled that making EU data “available” to an entity in a third country is a transfer, and the European Data Protection Board subsequently clarified that remote access from a third country triggers the GDPR transfer rules.
Those oligopolies you claim are "destroying the fabric of US society" are also providing tones of skilled jobs in the US, pouring billions in research (how much FOSS is developed at FAANGs?), and are a vital source of US soft and hard power, while also building a cloud for the German military[1][2] because EU tech industry is far so behind no EU company can replicate what Google can do here at their scale. It's not FAANG's fault there are problems in the US society, that's a failure of US politicians.
And there will always be oligopolies, always have been, better they be on your side that on your adversaries' side. If you cripple your companies to "destroy oligopolies" like your cheer the EU for, then China's state propped oligopolies will gladly step in to fill the vacuum and put your industries out of business. Morality and shaming others for not following your values never wins, power wins. That's Realpolitik. Crazy people still don't get it.
> That's a feature of the EU, not a bug.
It's a feature to have a stagnating economy of archaic companies that are in decline?
[1] https://www.techzine.eu/news/infrastructure/131897/google-to...
[2] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Bundeswehr-relies-on-Google-Clo...
They're not on _your_ side, as much as you want to believe they are.
> Morality and shaming others for not following your values never wins, power wins.
Do you think the US is winning? The American people?
Right now, Europeans are "winning" with the highest quality of life in the world. That's not true for the American population.
> Crazy people still don't get it.
I think we can both agree on that.
They're accountable to the government Americans vote for, that's what I meant. Better for them to be accountable to your government than a foreign government.
>Do you think the US is winning? The American people?
You're deflecting instead of answering my question: If Chinese oligopolies would replace them, would the US citizens be winning more or less?
>Right now, Europeans are "winning" with the highest quality of life in the world.
Tell that to Europeans who can't afford a home and who are struggling to pay the bills. HN users constantly pulling out a random statistic off Google to dispute the reality people actually live in is the bane of this forum.
"You see, you can't be doing poorly, because the graph or the statistic shows otherwise". People don't care about meaningless statistics or graphs, they care about what's in their bank account and how that number has evolved(or devolved) compared to the past. People don't care that on paper they're theoretically higher in an index than Americans, when they're relatively worse off than they were 10 - 20 years ago. What matters is how people feel about their situation.
Are you suggesting the housing situation is better in the US of all markets?
> People don't care about meaningless statistics or graphs, they care about what's in their bank account and how that number has evolved(or devolved) compared to the past.
People actually care about much more than that, including family life, health, and human rights, which are all better in the EU than the US.
People's finances are _also_ better in the EU than the US in real terms.
> What matters is how people feel about their situation.
If this is true, people in the EU are _much_ happier with their lives than in the US.
At this point, I'm not sure if you're trolling or completely disconnect with the reality of life in the US?
The thing is that the EU is not a political monolith, just look at Poland which has just elected a pro-US and anti-EU president. The anti-US policy comes mostly from France, part of Germany (I'm pretty sure a big chunk of the CDU still sides with the Americans out of the public eye) and from the Nordics, maybe the Dutch, too, but I don't follow them all that closely. Also, Italy has got Meloni who's a lot more buddy-buddy with Trump than with any bureaucrat in Brussels.
People here in Eastern- and Central-Europe are fully aware that if push were to come to the proverbial stove and a hot-war against Russia were to start then none of the Western-Euros would do anything consequential to make it go our (Eastern Europeans' way), just look at Poland in '39, for the simple reason that said Western-Europeans don't have the means of doing that anymore and will probably never be able to do it ever again. So the Americans are the only reliable counter-weight against Russia.
I think it is a very good thing for us to be supporting Ukraine and East Europe, but respect and gratitude for it seems to be in very short supply. Especially since East Europe's rapid economic growth has only been possible with untold billions poured into it unselfishly by.. West Europe.
I can't blame them, I'm myself too wanting to live in Germany, but keep in mind that this is the price we paid.
And yet Ukraine is still doomed, if only due to demography and people that fled west.
Ukrainian youth and oligarchs with money moving west to raise birth rates and property prices is just the icing on the cake for the western economies.
A depopulated Ukraine is also good for them. More places to mine for rare earth without NIMBYs getting in the way.
Same with Romania, and why wouldn't they be? The US ensures our defense from Russia, not France, not Germany, not the EU. Their nuclear shield, troops, land and air bases in our country ensured our defense even before we joined the EU so of course we'd grateful for that. The US companies opening well paid tech jobs here is another icing on the cake making us wealthier and also giving the US some assets they might want to defend.
We're too small and poor to have armies that can compete with Russia and we saw how weak and toothless the western European powers are when push comes to shove, ever since they threw us under the Soviet bus in WW2. Polish people know what I'm talking about.
What help would western EU countries be to us in an actual war when in the not too distant past, under Ursula v.d. Leyen, German military couldn't even provide underwear and dog tags to their own conscripts? And besides the sorry state of their military, Germans aren't patriotic enough to stand up for their own people, how can we expect them to care about some Slavs and Eastern Europeans, when they could gladly just cut a deal with Russia for cheap gas to throw us under the bus again?
So of course we're gonna support the US.
What? Do you seriously believe that europe would not intervene in a hot war against Europe?
For the part of USA being counter weight to Russia, they're single handedly alienating themselves from Europe
With thoughts and prayers, yes, because they have pretty much nothing else remaining. See September 3rd 1939, when on paper Britain was still a super-power. It wasn't, it hadn't been for some time, probably since Passchendaele or since Jutland demonstrated that being a Naval Superpower does absolutely nothing when it comes to a big European land-war. Also, and a lot more recently, see the joke that was their (Britain's and France's) intervention in Libya, the Americans had to come to rescue them up. Pathetic.
But, frankly, America won't come to help either :|
That's due to a combination of multiple factors:
- owning hardware is capex and means assets that depreciate on the balance sheet, which is bad for finance bros. Outsourcing that means opex and no responsibility for assets.
- there are European cloud service providers but they lack the comprehensiveness of AWS/GCE/Azure and in many cases integration into Terraform or other IaC solutions, on top of that they are more expensive than American counterparts
- in the office suite space, there is no "one stop shop" solution like Office 365 offers - it's in the best case a collection of different open source tools that don't have even close to the level of integration that Microsoft offers, there is barely any commercial vendor offering support for all of them (so you have to coordinate with a bunch of vendors).
- On top of that, it's very difficult for open-source solutions to check the "auditability" / "recordkeeping" checkboxes that companies with an exposure to the US stonk market demand, whereas Microsoft does all of that as an integrated and "standard practice"-conformant service
Then you check the "BIG effort" the EU makes and it's, 10 years of 0 budget + 5% of the budget US invests yearly for 3 years + never looking at it again. To make it worse from that point, they mostly don't divide such budgets across a million small proposals like the US does. No, the politicians in the Brussels find 2 or 3 companies or institutions they like and sign a contract with them. Which results in the many (usually small) companies that actually have accomplishments not getting their business, but big consultancies or institutions or ... getting the contracts by promising to divide the business among pre-agreed subcontractors (doing the EU's job for them, or at least the administration/checking job the US government does in the US, and the subcontractors especially have to be in the right countries). Afterwards, they don't even check what was actually accomplished, and intervening is just unheard of.
Meanwhile you look at it, and you're forced to conclude:
1) scientists will not be leaving the US under Trump. Yes the difference between the EU and US will become smaller, but still heavily in favor of the US (as in >100% difference, factors, not percentage points). In pay, in budget (ie. for research equipment), in infrastructure, in existing knowledge, and of course in future job prospects after research. Also: it's not just the US universities that are coming under increasing pressure.
2) the EU brain drain towards the US will continue in other sectors too (IT, medicine, pharma, ...)
3) cloud business will continue migrating to the US (whether we're talking Salesforce or AWS EC2)
4) factories will keep migrating to the US (already started long before Trump, so it's not his accomplishment, and they won't be providing the jobs hoped for, but they'll keep migrating to the US)
Hence why Nothern countries have such a hard time understanding why we usually have some issues caring to follow all regulations, and are somehow flexible in what to follow.
We have been throughout this way of working across centuries.
You could re-publish the famous Portuguese writer, Eça de Queiroz, books critizing the society from 19th century updated to a modern setting, and most of it would still apply.
In practice, "clouds" are more about the hundreds of battle-tested services that are trivial to deploy and easy to integrate. Want a K8s cluster? Sure, we'll give you a control plane for free. A few TB of storage? Here you go. A message queue? Done. Authorization between them? Sure, built-in. These services combined have probably billions of lines of code and have been used for things from the most trivial little fun app with almost no users to systems with massive load. That's what sets them apart and makes them so useful.
The hyperscalers have probably invested multiple trillion dollars into their clouds by now, yet it seems the EU keeps believing a EUR 10m bureaucracy project will put them in the same league.
And the biggest joke is: certain government projects force you into local providers whose software stack comes from ... Huawei... lol
Ah, I see you've also dealt with certain German Healthcare IT companies lol
As a starter, you have no excuse.
The future is interconnected desktops, thanks to FTTH, current hardware, photovoltaic with storage for the vast areas of the world where is meaningful and of course A/C. The future is FLOSS, decentralized, distributed for specific applications. Fog/edge computing admit that without telling, interested parties lobby against, but that's is.
This wouldn't do anything, while using US operating systems, programming languages, phone and watch devices.
How is a programming language an issue? Not sure even which programming language would count as a "US programming language" other than maybe Java. But even then the language itself shouldn't be an issue (maybe you could make the case for the runtime).
Anything that isn't guided by ISO, ECMA, or an international foundation is at peril from goverments.
The joke is that it's the UK government that actually want to snoop on the data, apparently in the name of child safety [1], the same people that have repeatedly failed to act on child safety right in front of them [2].
Bare in mind that the UK can just issue a TCN [3]:
> Technical Capability Notices - TCNs – are secret orders that could compel any company in any jurisdiction, so long as they have sufficient connection to the UK, to make changes to their service to facilitate the UK's use of its investigatory powers. These changes could reduce the service's security, including by removing electronic protection (such as encryption).
You can't even say it's not a real threat, because it just happened to Apple [4], which they tried to hold in complete secrecy [5]. Apple is struggling and have an almighty legal team and almost bottomless resources, your little UK company has no hope.
I think that the article's framing is wrong about Trump and tariffs, and that de-clouding is more about getting off the hype-train and reducing costs. I suspect multiple companies realised that they don't need a thousand micro-services and that they can run comfortably from several bare metal servers.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/end-to-end-encryp...
[2] https://news.sky.com/story/grooming-gangs-scandal-timeline-w...
[3] https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/5547/our-challeng...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/07/uk-confro...
[5] https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/investigatory-powers-tr...
Just a straight conflict of interest.
> This comes from research carried out by Civo, a UK-based cloud operator which undoubtedly has skin in the game, having campaigned against what it sees as unfair practices by the hyperscalers for some time.
> Nevertheless, [..]
It's obvious at this point that the American government should not be trusted with European governments data. Hell, you could even argue that the American government should not be trusted with the data of it's own citizens, them having let Doge and Elon Musk have had access to citizen information.