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justahuman74 parent
It's simply irresponsible for the EU to depend so heavily on the US for sovereign-critical activities

stego-tech
Seriously. I wrote about it in March and have been banging on this particular drum since my first client demand to move wholesale into AWS.

https://green.spacedino.net/software-is-not-the-service/

For what it's worth, said client could never articulate a reason for why their two 2U servers needed to be in AWS at ~3x the price, only that it had to be done. I've seen dozens more moves since, blindly surrendering sovereignty over their own enterprise in the process.

Best of luck with the EU in their migration journey. I'd love to help (and get me and my loved ones out of the US), but at the very least I'm eager to see more competition from a regime more friendly to (most) human rights.

tonyhart7
"from a regime more friendly to (most) human rights"

what is this mean??? Are you saying US is lead by dictator???

hkpack
Not yet, but it is just irresponsible to wait with hope and prayers.

Some people are just extrapolating and see that US is pregnant with authoritarianism.

belter
I asked specifically about this threat, to two employees of AWS and they laughed on my face. To quote Nigel Farage...I guess they are probably not laughing now....
mistrial9
> could never articulate a reason for why their two 2U servers needed to be in AWS at ~3x the price

specifically, to dis-empower you and others in your guilds ? AWS will turn on and turn off with no labor negotiations, at a known market price. Admins and devs are competition to the decision makers and an unknown entity, asking market prices or more. This is predictable and it is playing out now.

yjftsjthsd-h
Er, so now you're on AWS and instead of paying a sysadmin to run things, you pay a DevOps Engineer™ to run things. Just because it's in The Cloud doesn't magically remove the need to manage it.
freeone3000
You still need an admin for AWS. It doesn’t actually abstract anything about services or workloads; it’s not Heroku.
stego-tech
I mean, I know all that now; it's what kicked off my descent into the politics and ideologies I hold near and dear to me now, and revitalized my interest in technology as a means of helping humans instead of amplifying Capital.

My point was, financially and logically, it made (makes) no sense. It's penny-wise and pound foolish, given how (relatively) inexpensive a VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V admin is nowadays compared to anyone with AWS, Azure, or GCP credentials.

mlinhares
China is proof of that with their own universe of cloud services, there's no reason Europe can't be competitive the same way, the talent is there, it needs capital and government push.
tonyhart7
China is one huge economy that centrally planned + strive for sustainable themselves is not easy to achieve for EU
China software industry is 10 times size of Europe. It is easier when you are big.
> My point was, financially and logically, it made (makes) no sense.

You don't know, but you proved your customer's point, unwillingly.

The thing is, your logic is flawed because it's (incredibly) shortsighted.

> VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V admin

Those three things essentially do the same thing, yet they're completely different beasts. You have to look for people knowledgeable on that specific product, and you might not find them.

When dealing with AWS EC2 instances? A lot more people with standardized competencies.

For companies it's just great because they can hire from a much larger pool of candidates.

It's great for workers too, because they can pick my skills and go work at another company where I'll be immediately productive, meaning they'll have a much smoother onboarding process (learning the business domain rather than fighting the technology).

watermelon0
Same applies for clouds, each is a completely different beast. You have AWS EC2, GCE, Azure VM, and others.

The main difference between cloud vs on-prem/colo/dedicated is that you need SRE/DevOps for the first, and sysadmins for the second.

immibis
> VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V admin

What happened to the idea of just running a program on a machine?

Or Kubernetes. Everyone loves Kubernetes, why not use it?

mistrial9
yes I agree, more than I can say in a short post
immibis
AWS is also hard to administer. Sure you don't have to deal with physical hardware, but you don't at Hetzner, either.
ranger_danger
I have never had any issues with AWS, and I don't know anyone else that has either. I'm sure some might consider it difficult, but I don't think that the vast majority do, and I don't consider that enough of a reason to blanket state that it's hard for everyone... otherwise they wouldn't be using it anyway.
immibis
Are you using it for virtual servers or for all their serverless stuff?

I've never had any issues with real servers, either. Not even a hard drive failure (touch wood). I'm sure some might consider servers difficult, but [the rest of your comment]

It already was before, and it's doubly true now. There's always been tension between the EU's and the US's view on privacy and data protection, and it's only getting worse.
firesteelrain
Azure Europe is located in data centers in Norway, Germany, Netherlands, France and others.

The only US sovereign services in Azure is Azure US Government. Microsoft isn’t rolling out Azure US Government in Europe. It does offer like Azure Germany in the past which is sovereign.

There typically is a delay in rollout of features from US to Europe though.

But you could make the same nationalist argument for their dependence on all sorts of things like Microsoft Office. They could go to LibreOffice which some places have but it doesn’t have parity with Microsoft Office

Another argument could be made that Europe shouldn’t rely on places like Dell either for corporate or business PCs such as how in many sectors years ago the US stopped using Lenovo.

Microsoft is still subject to US laws like the CLOUD Act. That’s the real issue policymakers are reacting to. They’re not necessarily anti-Azure; they’re pro-control over sensitive systems

Spooky23
You’re trusting that Microsoft is maintaining meaningful segmentation for their dozen different clouds. History suggests they do not. At best, you’re getting data residency from Microsoft. Key components, like Entra, are globally shared services.
firesteelrain
Entra (Azure AD) is indeed a globally shared service. But Microsoft has been moving toward regional anchoring with things like the EU Data Boundary.

If Europe wants full-stack control, they’ll need to build it

immibis (dead)

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