In large cloud environments it's about who controls the data, not the physical location. Gigabytes of data can be transferred in seconds to other side of the world. With a flip of a switch it can be totally erased or made inaccessible even to people with physical access to the servers.
What annoys me to no end is the temporal amnesia there is to this. Sure, yeah, true, cloud providers are practically an American cartel at this point in time. But cloud itself is a fairly novel thing in most corporate histories: we used to run most things on premise with people on payroll, and that was a single digit years ago. Moving out of the cloud is as valid an option, if not a better one, than trying to come up with a competing cartel.
Isn’t it? Iaas is a lot more than just VPS and a few PaaS offerings, you need object storage, a command line and more. Last I looked the European cloud vendors were very lacking.
> If you want to compete you must also invest in associated PaaS and SaaS-services supported by a development framework to code and integrate it all.
People have got to start somewhere, and they can't really take shortcuts. Messages of the type "you need to build all the spectrum of services available on big US brands ovenight" aren't really useful.
Better committing $20B now (by one player) than only talking about it and continuing to rely on others.
And while the point about OSes is also well made, there is no reason to believe that this will not also happen, albeit at a slower pace and via community mechanism rather than SAP funding.
I've seen many projects that go in that direction that have been launched. In a way, one has to 'thank' Trump for incentivising fixing something that should already be done right from the start, and which otherwise would have left undone for longer.
Everyone only uses 10% of them and complains that it'd be a lot simpler to use if the 90% went away.
But everyone uses a different 10% of it =)
The same is true with cloud offerings. There's no way to force full feature parity with AWS without a trillion euro investment.
But can they find the 10% that is enough for the relevant users? The ones that can't for legal and privacy reasons have their data exist physically in the US or even within US companies.
Since we're talking about Europe, my first instinct here is that I want to double-check what they mean by "billion"[1].
This article being in English makes me assume short scale, but SAP being German makes it possible (even if unlikely) that it could be a mistranslation that everyone else just copied.
If only any of these articles could link to a source. But searching for literal quotes doesn't seem to return any authoritative source, or even any transcripts (if this was announced verbally).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#German-s...
The idea of SAP spending 20e12 EUR seems hard to believe.
and the relevant quote: "Durch eine langfristige Investition von über 20 Milliarden Euro setzt SAP einen klaren strategischen Fokus auf digitale Souveränität."
"more than 20000 million euros"
even if they truly spend 20B over 5 years, it's nothing.
20 billions in the pocket of Hertzner or OVH to build a cloud, I believe it but 20 billions with SAP, I don't.
I very much doubt SAP has the competence to replicate this. I'll also bet those unnamed open-source technologies are mostly sprinkled on top of proprietary Azure tech, like the rest of their infrastructure.
I doubt thats the case.
why you'd want to fork it it beyond me.
They very likely still contribute upstream, but you can't build an enterprise cloud by going through some community system.
A bit like SpaceX doing rocketry with modern CAD and computing power. It’s much cheaper and faster iteration from what NASA had to deal with.
The problem is, the European mindset towards software. Maybe Americans doing it in Europe can have much greater chance.
but SAP that want to build it??? idk about that, rather prefer OVH or Hetzner to take the helm
The best market to expand besides your own Euro-country is the US but tthen when you enter that market you are too small of a fish to do anything.
There is no such thing as european companies. It's german companies, french companies all mainly focused on their main markets.
nottorp•1h ago
sauercrowd•1h ago
r_lee•1h ago
tcldr•1h ago
For example:
* Object storage: lots of horror stories out there regarding flakey performance so hard to justify sticking mission critical stuff there.
* Private networking: Again, too many anecdotes about loss of service. Lots of people just using the public IP6 interfaces to avoid their private networking entirely. And private networks are IP4 only.
* Kubernetes CSI: I've had issues with this where a PV gets in some locked state and I can't remove from console.
I'd love to see more competition here.
Y-bar•33m ago
graemep•1h ago
Its not just cloud. There is a lot of reliance on mobile OSes too, also American (and anything that needs updates is effectively controlled by whoever supplies the updates).
From past HN stories the EU is developing an age verification app that only works on Google attested Android or on iOS. The NHS relies on AWS. British courts use MS Teams for remote hearings. The majority of my clients (apart from some I guide elsewhere) use AWS - its the safe choice. AWS is the current "nobody ever got fired for buying X" supplier. Gmail holds the same position for email.
preisschild•52m ago
theshrike79•41m ago
And it also seems that themoviedb.org also has an IP ban on Hetzner, found this out last week trying to build a tool that would've needed it to enrich its data.
jpalomaki•1h ago
nottorp•1h ago
tcldr•1h ago
theshrike79•30m ago
You could get one running on their own custom hardware for like 4€/month, enough for a bunch of small utilities.
Tried to get one some time ago, but they've sold all of the capacity and it's not available. Need to check if that has changed.
MrDresden•50m ago
A big EU business moving to their own cloud infrastructure is a good thing, even though you and I can't immediately take advantage of it.
gjvc•59m ago
ta1243•57m ago
xandrius•29m ago
Supports lots of countries, affordable and the people there are super nice.
ExoticPearTree•3m ago
There are a lot of small providers here and there, but they can't offer the scale of even GCP (the smallest of the bunch).