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Comment by joe_mamba | Hacker News Reader

If you're government then you can use on-prem, why TF do you need "cloud"?.

It's not like suddenly your user base(national population) could double overnight and you need such levels of scalability.

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The people who need to allocate software resources aren't "the government" writ broadly, they're specific people who operate specific organizations within it. You run a team within your local ministry of housing, and you identify a new analysis you want to run monthly that will take a day on a 12-core Spark cluster. Do you:

* clear out a supply closet, buy 12 new machines to put in it, and idle them for 97% of the year

* ask 12 employees to please deliver their computers to the supply closet on the last Friday of each month

* email Emmanuel Macron asking him to find another team who already cleared out their supply closet with spare cycles

Or do you just use the cloud and not have to solve an operational challenge every time you have a new idea? (The actual pre-cloud status quo was that most people simply couldn't implement any idea that would require more than 1 personal computer.)

>The actual pre-cloud status quo was that most people simply couldn't implement any idea that would require more than 1 personal computer.

How did Spotify manage at the beginning without the cloud? How did any other company?

They built their own internal clouds, to varying degrees of jankiness depending on how important large scale compute was to their business. It was very important for Spotify, so they had a bunch of people working on it, to the degree that it was hurting focus on their core business goals.

In less tech-forward organizations, you usually just had "the server", and it was rude or even forbidden to just run programs on it on your own initiative. You had to coordinate which programs you wanted to run when. And you'd better make sure your program doesn't have a memory leak or something, because then nobody will be able to check their emails until the sysadmin fixes it.

You might ask the US gov why they use cloud if they could do it "on prem"

And the answer is, only a very select gov clients have the $ and the skills to do it

No it's essentially just that a bunch of hype people sold everyone on the idea "the cloud is the future" and so even government types think they have to do it to modernize even if it costs more, is less secure, and less reliable than just paying your own IT guy to do it.

On-prem is not expensive or complicated, people just make dumb choices. Any IT engineer with two years of experience can run a small on-prem data cluster.

> Any IT engineer with two years of experience can run a small on-prem data cluster.

Only for comedic effect.

Because no, they cannot. But feel free to try

Are you saying deploying Debian/BSD on some servers in the basement of a government building is too complicated and more expensive than paying Microsoft/AWS?

Governments aren't scale-ups/unicorns to need the scalability and global availability of cloud, they're ossified known quantity entities with predictable userbases and traffic across a very specific geographical region. On-prem is perfect for that.

It's easy until the shit hits the fan...

> In the fire, 384 battery packs were burnt, which took down 96 government systems. Whilst this is obviously still a huge loss, 95 of these had backups - but the G-drive system (government drive), used primarily by the Ministry of Personnel Management, did not.

> [...] reports estimate that 8 years worth of data was lost, and around 17% of central government officials are impacted

https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/the-south-korean-gove...

Being against on-prem just because South Korean government implemented on-prem poorly with no backup best practices and lost data one time, would be like if homo sapiens stopped using fire because a guy burned down his straw hut one time.

Yes but you're saying this guy needs to build his own house and trusting him to obey the fire and safety codes, when plenty of professionals exist that specialize in following those.

Government agencies can pool their resources to operate a shared data center. If you take just a tax office, they are operating at scale where they have sufficient demand to operate 2-3 data centers per country in half of Europe. As for the skills, a for-profit SOE or a non-profit can deal with this as a regulated primary contractor. IT is a special case where consolidation and moving ops in-house actually makes sense at that scale. US gov does not do that likely for political reasons.

There are plenty of EU domiciled Managed Service Providers who do have the skills though.

Having your government infrastructure run in country and managed by your citizens seems like a good idea just in general. It helps to develop local skills and the people living in country have a better feel for the needs of the local people.

I am an American but this just seems like a good idea even if the current geopolitical situation was better.

Yes, I'm not against this

But cloud offers flexibility and economies of scale (regardless of who's running it)

There are European cloud providers though. American hyper scalers are not the only option. Lidl, Hetzner, OVH, ..etc.

I can spin up a dedicated server within 24-48hours or a VM within minutes on OVH. Also there have been plenty of white papers written about how much more expensive AWS is when compared to Hetzner or OVH.

The big cloud providers are quite expensive and come with a lot of geopolitical risk/baggage. European governments have safer alternatives within their own borders.

Edit: it’s Lidl who launched a cloud service not Aldi

Before the concept of cloud was a thing, every company and a computer room, smaller ones were literal closets, bigger ones were large data centers, with everything in between.

Skills can be hired and trained.

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