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Comment by thibaut_barrere | Hacker News Reader

Having used both worlds: a lot of the provided features come with strong vendor lock-in, and in most cases that not, with slightly stronger “local” engineering you can reach the same targets and needs locally.

The more I work (started coding 40 years ago, and data engineering 25 years ago), the more I favor designs that are less coupled to cloud features.

If you do so, the offering in the EU just as it is now is well enough to scale.

In short: more computer science, less delegating to cloud operators, stronger designs.

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The irony is that EU education is still broader and more grounded in fundamentals, compared to US one that has become increasingly skills-oriented.

I also prefer to design solutions that are portable and platform independent, cloud providers simplify and hide something to you, it has a cost (not just money) that you cannot quantify on long term and that's clear for who has experience in both worlds.

This is sane advice but maintaining strong internal engineering and IT teams is not everone's cup of tea; even organizations gthat intend and try to do this cannot achieve it -- and furthermore the big cloud operators have spent millions of dollars spreading the gospel that the only correct way to survive and build is to migrate to cloud and use their lego building blocks.

A lot of the justification for moving away from own datacenters and heavy in-house engineering teams actually makes sense to organizations of many shapes and sizes. If the core business is not technology -- it is hard to stay invested in a in-house cloud-agnostic engineeringc capability.

The world has more or less accepted this reality and adopted the services like S3 and managed databases, and tight integration with the likes of Microsoft Entra/Purview/Sharepoint/O365 etc for ready-to-use business integrations. Prying organizations away from taht convenience is going to be hard. But the current environment cretaed due to lack of trust in US could the strongest motivator ever to push businesses and nations in that direction. I reckon it will be a long and painful process though.

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