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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

It seems every single comment in the thread is understanding "cloud" here to mean AWS vs Hetzner. But it's clear from the first paragraph of the article that what they actually mean is MS 365 Dynamics vs SAP. They primarily want a managed ERP + CRM solution, not servers.

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Cloud must be the most uselessly overloaded term ever. I have no way of knowing what you are actually talking about when you use it.

Cloud always means "somebody else's computer".

Even that isn't generic and broad enough. I've noticed so many people mean SaaS when they say cloud. That isn't even a hardware or server or infrastructure meaning. It's referring to a whole cohesive IT product that you subscribe to.

Actually I'd say "cloud" says more about the business model than it says about the actual product.

If only. But it can also mean your own computers ("private cloud").

My experience is that when people say "private cloud", they usually mean a VPC or similar that is located on somebody else's computer.

I'm sure some people use the term correctly, at least sometimes!

In there early days of cloud there were actual definitions created for it. Nobody seems to remember or care any more.

SAP needs servers though, if they buy SAP hosted in AWS that kind of defeats the purpose.

Indeed. And SAP has no cooperation with any European cloud providers, afaik. It's the big three plus alibaba. SAP wants to move away from on-prem, but I guess it has a solution for critical applications. Maybe that can be shoehorned onto OVH or something.

It seems OVH does support SAP. https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/solutions/sap/

How good/bad it is, I have zero expertise.

Not entirely true. You can do SAP RISE on Telekom (not Open Telekom Cloud, forgot the name of the thing) and as far as I know STACKIT is currently in beta. Apparently the AWS Sovereign Cloud will be possible as well. Its just way more expensive because Microsoft and AWS use their monetary power to give SAP better offers (just guesswork obviously, its not like SAP would tell you).

SAP runs its own cloud/IaaS in addition to running its workloads on the hyperscalers. It's been doing that for years internally, and that SAP cloud is now being extended to be open for direct consumption by other companies:

https://learning.sap.com/learning-journeys/exploring-sap-con...

I will be servers as well. Eurostack cloud providers. We are involved in one of these - a large car company doing the same.

As far as I know SAP is more capable and widespread, so I don’t know why they were using Microsoft in the first place.

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