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Comment by armcat | Hacker News Reader

there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer

That's true right now, yes. But things are changing rapidly, e.g. there is evroc [1], Mimer [2] and others are popping up too.

it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering

I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard benchmark, things in principle can be done much faster if you are smaller, nimbler and more focused. The solution to EUs problems is less paperwork and meetings, and more smaller bespoke companies that are laser focused on solving a specific sub-problem. Can they do it? Probably not if they try to create their Google or Microsoft.

[1] https://evroc.com/ [2] https://mimer-ai.eu/

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Getting Google Docs to be a Word alternative was an order of magnitude easier than getting GCP to be an AWS competitor.

Now that AWS has two serious competitors (and some non serious ones), privately funding another one just seems impossible to me. Who is gonna chip in tens of billions of dollars to fund "that, but European, and 15 years from now"?

I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is some combination of:

1. EU intervention (nasty regulations and expensive subsidies).

2. People using non-equivalent products (Europeans have to use lower-level infra and do a lot more ops in-house). This part would have its upsides anyway TBH.

> I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is some combination of

Just mandate EU countries' public administration to rely exclusively on EU cloud solutions. That doesn't need to be done at once.

This would create enough of a captive market to start the homegrown industry.

> Europeans have to use lower-level infra and do a lot more ops in-house

To be honest, every large enough company would benefit from doing a little bit of that.

> Just mandate EU countries' public administration to rely exclusively on EU cloud solutions.

This happens already in some areas and it is not cheaper or better. The EU funds national clouds where public institutions use them. What does it mean? VMware with Tanzu or OpenStack. And then some services thrown in to offer some S3 like buckets and that's it. The rest has to be built by the beneficiaries. Servers? Brand names like Lenovo/HP/Dell. Storage? Brand names like NetApp, HP, Dell, Lenovo, 3Par, IBM and the list goes on. Networking? Cisco (mostly), HP/Juniper. Firewalls? Cisco/Fortinet/PaloAlto/CheckPoint/etc.

Basically an enterprise setup masquerading as a cloud offering.

And even if there would be EU wide offerings for such cloud, there's too much money at stake to let institutions from one country buy services from another.

And it's all basically US tech made in China. The irony.

> not cheaper or better

Yeah. The EuroCloud will always be dramatically more expensive and much much worse. Anyone who's claiming otherwise is living a fantasy. The only argument that makes sense is "but it's worth it".

(One detail: it will be much worse at the margins where current clouds actually compete. But actually I suspect only a small number of our customers actually exist at that margin. I think a lot of people are just massively overpaying for their cloud platform and so they might be fine with a EuroCloud anyway. This is why you hear stories today like "we switched to Hetzner, halved our bill, and it works exactly as well as the AWS products we used to use).

> And then some services thrown in to offer some S3 like buckets and that's it. The rest has to be built by the beneficiaries.

Ditto, a fully featured EuroCloud is not gonna happen. Again, it has to be worth this cost.

> Brand names like NetApp, HP, Dell, Lenovo, 3Par, IBM and the list goes on.

This is the only part where I disagree. I think it's OK if the EuroCloud is built out of US hardware (like how the AmeriCloud is very far from free of Chinese hardware). Obviously presents a significant risk re supply chain security but still, the _really_ important thing is actually sovereign operations. The most important thing is who has the keys to the DC.

> This happens already in some areas and it is not cheaper or better.

The goal is not for it to be cheaper or better. The goal is to have money spent on domestic actors. Will some of them provide a dogshit service? Sure. Just like it happened in the US. Time will sort things out.

> What does it mean? VMware with Tanzu or OpenStack. And then some services thrown in to offer some S3 like buckets and that's it. The rest has to be built by the beneficiaries. Servers? Brand names like Lenovo/HP/Dell. Storage? Brand names like NetApp, HP, Dell, Lenovo, 3Par, IBM and the list goes on. Networking? Cisco (mostly), HP/Juniper. Firewalls? Cisco/Fortinet/PaloAlto/CheckPoint/etc.

You need to cut this purity bullshit where Europe must own all the stack from the foundry, or do nothing. What you're building is an unwinnable battle.

> Who is gonna chip in tens of billions of dollars to fund "that, but European, and 15 years from now"?

Dieter Schwarz might. At least he has the money and is trying 'something' with stackit. But he probably won't see the result in 15 years.

> I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard benchmark

My point was that even with Google's money, they're still not on par with MS even if the Office files format has been standardized for a number of years. And if you extrapolate that to any other technology, you will find out very fast that it is very expensive to come up with a replacement solution that will actually be embraced by potential customers.

On the other hand, there is not much office work which could not have been done almost as effective in office 97.

I don't think the right explanation of MS monopoly is technical superiority, but rather the natural forces of monopoly. They are extremely hard to break with free market competition, but can definitely be broken with legislation.

I am convinced that 99% of office use can be replaced with competitors if needed, and it would work out OK.

Yes, we need a posix of productivity tool. You want to work with a EU government, you have to use this and that open standards. This is the way to break that particular monopoly.

> My point was that even with Google's money, they're still not on par with MS even if the Office files format has been standardized for a number of years.

The counterpoint is that they don't need to be on par :-/ The problem is that individual procurement decision-makers are incentivised to go with the Microsoft suite, not that the alternatives aren't a good enough replacement.

I'd say they are incentivized to go with the suite that offers the most compatibility with their clients and partners.

> I'd say they are incentivized to go with the suite that offers the most compatibility with their clients and partners.

If that were true, they'd have ditched Microsoft already. Since they didn't, I'm skeptical that that is their incentive.

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