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Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

> Yes, the EU “cloud providers” are lagging behind but they’re catching up. Scaleway, Herzner, and others are there, and you should check them out if you’re starting a business in the EU.

I would argue that these aren't even "cloud providers", they are just VPS providers. Which is fine, but it's not the same thing.

There really isn't any European "cloud" service at all, which is a huge part of the problem. And I doubt there ever will be because who would even build it?

It would cost billions and billions of euros just to be "not AWS" (but worse in every way except location). Who is investing in that?

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>they are just VPS providers

Are we really bringing back this debate from 10 or may be 15 years when we started? Is Digital Ocean, Linode not a cloud provider. They were the VPS provider at the time.

I think in the end I agree with one of the argument, as long as these VPS providers give you a VPS that is charged per hour or per seconds, then they are cloud. Which ultimately is a server that is easily scaled up or down and charged on a time usage basis, when VPS at the time were a fixed monthly price.

But why would the Europeans want to copy the US "cloud" model of micro-compartmentalizing services into hundreds of abstracted products carefully designed to have circular dependencies between each other ..... And all shipped with price sheets billed in invented unit metrics and more small-print than a packet of prescription drugs that makes it completely impossible to predict how much you're going to pay.

I'll take the cleaner approach with predictable billing offered by the EU providers. Even if it means using my brain to RTFM and edit a couple of config files (which can then be rolled into automation via images or Ansible or whatever).

> But why would the Europeans want to copy the US "cloud" model of micro-compartmentalizing services…

Maybe it’s the best approach? Maybe it’s more profitable and European companies want to grow their business?

If Europe copy winner takes fraud is allowed and price transparency higwash ideology, then it will also end up with exact copy of current American dysfunction - ultimately including loss of democracy, Trump figure with unchecked power and failing constitution.

Europe can fail on its own, but recreating the exact billionaires are able to scam everything will make it fail faster.

best for who? for the cloud provider for all the vendor lockins? theres hardly anything i like about the popular cloud providers to be honest

You cannot possibly with a straight face claim that Scaleway is a VPS provider. Hetzner, sure, but Scaleway offers compute and database services in the same way that AWS does - just fewer.

This. I'm presently running serverless containers, serverless jobs, managed container registry, managed database, virtual private network, IAM policies, DNS, managed Grafana and object storage on Scaleway for a project I'm working on. Doesn't get more cloud than that.

Sure, Scaleway still lags behind the big three cloud providers in the US. But the US providers have a lot more money and been around much longer. Scaleway is quickly expanding its feature set though. They've recently introduced managed Clickhouse and OpenSearch among other things.

Hetzner for sure?

Hetzner Cloud is simple to use, but it's a distinguishing feature, not a bug.

I think in order to call youself a cloud you must offer blob storage, managed Kubernetes, and managed Postgres. That is the absolute minimum to me.

A lot of people actually are. I am running multiple apps on EU-based clouds offers (most PaaS rather than VPS), to the tune of multiple billion queries per year.

The offer really has moved, and people are taking it seriously.

Also: not worst in every dimension at all. For instance, you actually get serious support, no matter your size, a much better version of what premium accounts give you at AWS/GCP etc.

This…

It’s painful being a non-EU person working here, and hearing people wax lyrical about sovereign EU cloud without an actual product or product plan.

And once a product is anctua shipped and offered it is like already 5 years behind what US clouds are offering.

It’s embarrassing really

US clouds offer are featureful not first because it is useful, but because it is the best way to ensure vendor lock-in. A lot of implementors are now realizing that you can achieve the same level of service, or better, with less cloud features.

No. "Cloud" is a marketing term for VPSs.

I disagree, "cloud" is extracting basic Linux functions into as many proprietary services as possible because businesses would rather deal with obscure YAML configurations than ever having to touch Linux-proper.

I would say the most added value, keeping your angle, is auto-updating Linux, and assuming/handling the security vulnerabilities updates.

I'm sure the vast majority of businesses can handle ~10 min of scheduled downtime per week necessary to restart everything.

Now, database replication, not having to waste time to run/maintain clusters (be it Kubernetes or Elastic stack or something else), that I believe is well worth the money to offload to someone else, but even there you can get a much cheaper deal with someone that's not one of the three big cloud providers. I will also concede that Firebase is genuinely nicer to work with than its alternatives (Supabase very much included).

That's like saying "Cars are a marketing term for internal combustion engines."

Clouds give you software-definable load balancers, networking, clustering, integrated systemwide security, and a boatload of managed services like message queues, databases, AI training and inference, etc. etc.

No-one sane implements all that using a collection of VPSes, because of a simple principle of business: it's more profitable to focus investment on your core competencies, and for almost all companies, managing a non-trivial computing infrastructure is decidedly not a core competency.

It's frequently simplifying things so that you don't have to worry about managing a server at all.

I run a PowerShell script once a day at noon, and I have no idea what kind of server it's running on, where in the world that server is, how much memory it has, or any other details. I get about a CPU, a dozen MB of memory, and a tiny amount of network capacity for about 5 seconds.

This is a very different experience from "We will rent you a VPS by the month".

> Who is investing in that?

Big companies that see the opportunity to be "Not AWS"?

A VPS provider who wants to grow their marketshare?

Nation states?

Not saying it'll be a small effort, but if the US continues to wield national laws to coerce American companies to negatively affect European citizens, it's possible.

Even if they dont care us "law" it is costing us businesses a fortune.

National security by ruining the market and alienating allies to the point of uniting the world against you???

> There really isn't any European "cloud" service at all, which is a huge part of the problem. And I doubt there ever will be because who would even build it?

Lidl! https://horovits.medium.com/lidl-is-taking-on-aws-the-age-of...

https://stackit.com/en Is the actual cloud.

Good thing is that in EU we still have a lot of people who know how to write software. Like, in programming languages.

> And I doubt there ever will be because who would even build it?

My money would be on the French.

The French are second to everything + they strip naked the CEOs they hate (the Air France event and the series of CEOs taken hostage in the 1990ies) = They would never align themselves to build something that makes money. DailyMotion is 1/1000th what Youtube is; Mistral is 1/1000th what OpenAI is, nothing has changed in 20 years.

Sure France would spend the money. We’d see none of the results.

They did that already see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudwatt or Numergy.

And Minitel, they had networked computers in people's homes in the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel.

And packet switching and arguably a far more capable architecture for internetworking:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYCLADES

I know Cyso Cloud (previously Fuga Cloud - still Netherlands-hosted) lets you host K8S applications, and has S3-compatible storage. Is that what you mean with "cloud"?

OVH is a cloud provider, and a large one. It is by far the largest EU provider.

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