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Comment by notrealyme123 | Hacker News Reader

Have a hard time take this serious without hetzner

Also "sovereign US cloud" is a bad joke

Not really a joke at all, the point is to find a cloud provider that can place resources in a guaranteed location that stays within the legal boundaries of a country.

This is for when you need to guarantee that your services cannot possibly escape boundaries of a specific country.

I think the "joke" is if the US government orders a company to hand over that data, the fact that the servers are physically in the EU won't stop anything

why it should happen?

Intelligence.

This is addressed on the very page though:

> A sovereign US cloud does not address or mitigate the strategic reliance of European businesses and governments on US-based cloud providers.

> Some commentators are therefore calling those attempts “Sovereign-Cloud-Washing” or “EUWashing”.

It's one thing if they require the copy of data, and another thing if the President wakes up in a bad mood and orders deleting all the data. Imagine if the whole computing infrastructure for power plants, public transportation, banks, payment systems, large companies gets deleted in a minute.

You should not host the critical data on other country's servers.

That’s not the goal, it’s about regulatory compliance.

Sovereign cloud might theoretically mean sovereign control over data.

Does absolutely jack shit about the blocs trade deficit in the cloud services space though. Hundreds of billions of euros being sent abroad every year.

Without some kind of collective trade policy [1] sovereign cloud initiatives will continue to be a waste of time for everyone involved (including engineers). Also if you see the phrase Gaia-X ... run.

1. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/now-how-to-get-that-europe...

You obviously haven't heard of the cloud act, which american cloud providers must follow. Microsoft will do as they are told by Trump - "turn off access to the ICC's criminal prosecutor for Gaza" - "yes boss".

Hetzner doesn’t really have abstracted cloud services, they’re basically just bare metal servers or VPS.

A VPS is still "cloud" though, isn't it?

They are on the way, they introduced s3, and now better dns Management

There is still a lot missing, and tbh the s3 did not work great when I tested it.

Cloud services like AWS offer VPSes (Lightsail) so the boundary is very blurry. In any case Hertzner offers load balances, firewalls, private networks, which is fairly cloudy stuff.

They’re building out more cloud capability but not anywhere near the level that AWS and the rest have.

AWS has way more managed business logic. Directory services, authentication, serverless PaaS, virtual workstations, data lakes, code deployment, the list goes on and on.

Load balancers and firewalls are extremely basic in comparison.

They don't have any cloud or abstraction. You basically rent bare metal servers.

Since "cloud" just means someone else's computer, I don't see how it doesn't qualify.

They have a cloud offering. Hourly billing instances with basic management features. They also have an S3 compatible storage service as part of it and a load balancer.

I mean it is not really "cloud" compared to larger ones, just a toy but they are building things now.

Hetzner is of the opinion that they have a cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

Whether it has enough features to satisfy your needs is another question, but it is more than just bare metal or vps

I mean basic features like auto scale and create new resources.

The most basic thing with a load balancer and scale instances behind that.

They don't have any of that.

They have load balancers, and while they don't have an auto scale feature they do have APIs for starting instances and configuring the load balancer. So it's not that difficult to build your own auto scaling

As compared to a "traditional" offering where there's only a manual order form and getting a new server might take hours, making auto-scaling unfeasible

Autoscaling based on CPU usage has been the most basic thing in the last 15 years. Are you really asking people to build that?

Yes, we are very much of the opinion that we are a cloud provider. While historically we have been known for our dedicated servers, our Cloud continues to steadily grow in terms of feature set, users, infrastructure, and much more. We even updated our cloud offer today. --Katie, Hetzner

Hetzner has VPS servers. Has a web-based admin dashboard. Its API can create and teardown servers, virtual networks, block stores, load balancers, firewalls, DNS zones. It's similar to OVHCloud and Linode in my experience. If all these features are not sufficiently characteristic of clouds and abstractions, then I probably don't understand those two terms themselves.

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