The era of cloud colonialism has begun When the major cloud providers warned of slowing customer demand earlier this quarter, many expected them to pull back on their capex expenditures until the latest macroeconomic headwinds had blown over. Only, they didn't. Week after week, the major cloud providers have pushed ahead. They've announced new capacity, …
Yes, though at least in Germany government service providers (and most ministries) are very weary of US companies and the very open data grabbing by them and - through the CLOUD-act - the US government. Some journos don't seem to get it, but those are very obviously not technically trained and by far not paranoid enough to call these shots.
I noticed that for start ups in order to secure funding, one of the major requirement of various VCs is that their product has to be hosted at AWS, Google or Azure.
These cloud services are actually overpriced and extremely expensive and start ups are forced to burn cash in order to have some hope at receiving funding.
The main reason I heard is that, the VC won't fund a project that is run through different type of hosting, because they don't trust it.
Something CMA should look into.
I've seen start ups spending £10k a month on the cloud and they could easily host their service for less than £1k and with better performance and redundancy.
That being said, for the latter you need to have an experienced dev op to set everything up, but then you should have one anyway.
This is also another sign what's wrong with our economic system. Due to high taxes imposed on the pleb, people are not able to amass capital through their own work and then start a business.
They are at the mercy of banks, VC and other kind of speculators and they make sure that politicians keep the status quo and continue pulling up any remaining ladders.
They are at the mercy of banks, VC and other kind of speculators and they make sure that politicians keep the status quo and continue pulling up any remaining ladders. .... elsergiovolador
And whenever politicians are not smart enough enabled to maintain a conflict free status quo, are the banks, VC and other kinds of speculators at the mercy of private and pirate mercenaries, renegade rogues and all manner of psychotic wannabe daemons and treasure hunting Caesars and Cassandras/Merlins and Pandoras/Mars and Minervas.
I'm not sure if that's a requirement from all of them, but there is a potential reason for VCs to ask about cloud hosting, namely scaling. VCs are frequently obsessed (sometimes correctly and frequently not) about getting this business to grow really fast. Some businesses can scale just by adding a few more servers, but if it's something that requires a lot of capacity in local areas, then expanding worldwide can't be done so easily if you self-host. The business would have to hire people to either set up colos or datacenters in multiple places, including hiring maintenance staff and therefore working with labor laws in all those places. A larger company can manage that, but one that's just starting out will find it a bit more difficult. VCs may want some indication that there is a plan for adding geographical regions without incurring that cost, and proving that cloud can be used, even if the first regions are self-hosted, is a way of indicating that. Just as their reasons for wanting growth they won't get can be wrong, so can their insistence on cloud, but it does make sense at times.
Investors are not stupid, and IF (not sure if they do push this TBH) they are insisting that a company uses Amazon, Microsoft or Google, it's for a good reason. Ability to go global, number of different services available, the pace of new features and services being launched, uptime (well, not including Azure on that one). The smaller hosters may be a lower price, but they absolutely won't get anywhere near the capabilities of the large providers.
Investors are not stupid, and IF (not sure if they do push this TBH) they are insisting that a company uses Amazon, Microsoft or Google, it's for a good reason. Ability to go global, number of different services available, the pace of new features and services being launched, uptime (well, not including Azure on that one).
Add "focus" to that list. Technology businesses should be focussing on the thing that makes their business special, not re-inventing the infrastructure wheel.
This means (at least in the early stages) re-using as many off-the-shelf services as possible. *If* they reach the scale where it's necessary to in-house some of these to save costs, that bridge can be crossed later.
VC investors piled tons of money into WeWork, then after it imploded they piled tons of money into Adam Neumann's next scheme. They also dumped money into Martin Shkrelli's cryptocurrency scam after he'd already been convicted of securities fraud. I'm not sure I believe the "they're not stupid" argument. I think they're mostly trend chasers who have more money than they know what to do with.
"Investors are not stupid, and IF (not sure if they do push this TBH) they are insisting that a company uses Amazon, Microsoft or Google, it's for a good reason."
Firstly, VC investors are stupid. That's why 12 in every 13 of their investments tanks.
Secondly, when I was getting VC funding back in the day it came with one particularly odd string which was that we had to host on Dell hardware because Dell were giving them backhanders. They even suggested that we should not try to optimise the application too much as they would like to ask Dell for bigger hardware and therefore a bigger sweetener (basically Dell wanted to boast about installed CPUs).
None of the things you listed are of any real value to a startup; even uptime.
VCs know nothing. If they did, they'd do it themselves or have a decent hit-rate.
"Firstly, VC investors are stupid. That's why 12 in every 13 of their investments tanks."
They're more crazy than stupid. What they are looking for is the next thing that has a chance at going viral no matter what it is or if it has enough merit to be around for the long term. They invest in companies with new ideas, charge that firm a huge amount of the company for the cash and look to recoup their cash as soon as they see some multiple and then move off to the next thing. After cashing out, they will still hold 50-60% of the company just in case it does show some legs and will close it down if its another flash in the pan trend.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud overwhelmingly dominate the US and European markets blah blah blah blah .....
That is as may, or may not be any current situation, but whom and/or what do you know is pulling and pumping and pimping pioneering levers in those august convenient environments exercising responsibility and non-accountability for Universally Sensitive Activity taking over and making over traditional and conventional market sharing leaderships and oligarchies/autocracies and fake democracies which are not meritocracies of a SMARTR IntelAIgent Agency ‽ .
"... of all the data centers we can power and cool by damming that big river in Brazil."
I know You are jocking, but just in case aren't...
The Amazonas is huge, but not possible to contain. Too large a cross section and too little slope.
As for cooling... It would (could) work. Except it is in the middle of nowere, with no infrastructure and no population.
Like 1000km from anything.
>Just as countless governments and empires have over the past half millennium, the major cloud providers will paint these investments as an altruistic effort to bring vital infrastructure, services, and jobs to underserved regions. And if it stopped there, that might be alright. But in reality the cloud providers are motivated by their desire to get more customers for their products.
In other news water is wet, the sky is mostly blue and nights are mostly darker than days. Most producers of goods or providers of services (whether they're companies, merchants or individuals) are trying to make money by providing goods and services to people who need them! Heck, the local plumber will not come and fix my faucet from an altruistic impulse to fix my house's necessary infrastructure etc. He'll want paying, the egotistical dastard! He'll also try to do good work in the desire to get more customers for his products! Imagine this!
>Microsoft aims to bring internet service to 100 million Africans within the next three years and is working with Viasat to reach some of the most remote residents.
I'm flabbergasted that the author tries to spin this as being a bad thing on the whole. Looks to me like a terminal case of ideology trumping good sense. As far as I can see, 100 million Africans (including some of the most remote ones) getting internet access can only be good for them and for the entire world. Yes, Microsoft et. al. will make a profit - but from the tone of the article, it looks like the author will rather have those Africans go without internet access altogether than have them get access to GMail or Amazon services.
The article looks to me a (really poor) attempt at anti-cloud provider spin. The only glimmer of an argument is the complaint about stifling local competition. It's a bad argument, of course, because there is no such thing as local competition. It's like the author argues for forbidding electricity in the UK because it would have a negative impact on the local jackalope population - there are no jackalopes in the UK, nor meaningful local cloud providers in Africa. Developing a cloud provider requires a lot of available capital, a lot of know-how, a favorable legal framework, political stability, large and relatively cheap power sources and many other things. How many of those exist in Africa - or even in Latin America?
Now, a more interesting discussion would be the reason why there are no global European cloud providers - Europe has the know-how, the capital, the political stability, and, despite the recent Russian shenanigans, it has available power sources large enough to support big data centers - moreover, local providers would have fewer problems with storing and processing personal data of European citizens. I don't know why there are no big European providers (as yet?).
I don't know why there are no big European providers (as yet?).
It's a fair question.
There are plenty of medium-sized providers, but try asking customers of OVH and Rackspace what they think of them, when their data centres catch fire and their servers get hacked.
I think the answer is chicken-and-egg: you can't do cloud properly unless you're really big, but you can't get big without being a trusted and well-known brand. AWS made it by being first, followed by sustained and rapid product development. Microsoft did it through its name and its leverage with licensing. Google struggles.
Even Oracle has found it impossible to break into the hegemony of the Big Three, despite aggressive pricing and a name well known to business.
Google Cloud still isn't making a profit, which might be some indication of the steep threshold to profitability.
(On the other hand, maybe GC just has the wrong approach.)
In any event, the horrendous security problems faced by any cloud provider mean a huge investment in security expertise is an absolute requirement from the get go. Cut corners and you end up like Ratspace or many other smaller cloud players who got pwned ... if you can call Ratspace's 3 billion revenue "small".
Because after WWII the UK declared the programmable electronic computer a state secret, effectively preventing people who had worked on it from developing and commercializing the concept (Tommy Flowers famously failed to recieve capital funding because people didn't believe such a thing was possible, even though he had literally designed and built one to beat the Nazis).
Then they gave the idea to the Americans, who were only too happy to do so. Thus, the European computing industry started 20 years behind the American one as far as investment and has spent the last half century struggling to catch up.
"it looks like the author will rather have those Africans go without internet access altogether than have them get access to GMail or Amazon services."
The author couldn't give a monkey's about African connectivity - it's just a smug wrapper for his disdain for big tech companies. And it's fine to criticise big tech, it does awful things, but spare us the concern trolling.
"Pox-laden Blankets" describes the problem accurately! As I once wrote on my blog:
Maybe I’m wearing a tinfoil hat but, over time, I’ve begun to see the following playbook used by the west – mainly USA – to colonize countries digitally:
Digital Colonizer Playbook
Foreign companies unleash security technologies on India and other unsuspecting countries, watch them impede the adoption of digital payments in these countries because of bad user experience, then come back a few years later with frictionless solutions that solve the UX problems created by their own security products in the past, and take over the market.
The playbook works probably because it seems to take years even to realize the obvious.
You have to understand: to the Americans, it is their "God Given Right" to loot and pillage the world so that the US enjoys the vast majority of the world's GDP to feed the ever-burgeoning "need" for the latest iPhone, diversion, and fast "food." It has been so ever since WWII and them being granted veto rights at the UN security council. NO nation should have a veto on that council. NONE.
Inclined to agree on the veto point. Though it is not the role of the UN to define for anyone how to govern.
At its highest level the UN exists as a mechanism to get nations to talk. The veto capability was necessary to get certain people to participate.
Now, if a nation chooses to spout utter BS in the UN that's their choice, but at least they are talking. The alternative is already well known and documented across human history.
What is this cloud business, it’s really just website hosting?
They are liquidating tons of old servers down at the recycling center, surely you could just buy one of those & do the same?
Why would I pay big rent money when I could buy my own equipment for so much cheaper. They really are practically giving them away. It’s baffling.
Love the dig on colonialism and capitalism. Too bad the heads of Google, Microsoft, and IBM aren't white -- then you could have beefed up the colonialism creed a bit and throw in racism to boot. We all know a home grown, native people, solution based on socialism would be better. Right?
>Too bad the heads of Google, Microsoft, and IBM aren't white
Skin color has nothing to do with it. Colonialism is about impressing a culture on a people and you can be from anywhere to do this, all you need is a MBA. Imperialism is an economic phenomenon anyway, what we associate with "Emperor" is just glitz and glitter, nothing to do with it (which is why the British Empire was largely a corporate undertaking until just before it started contracting).
This is serious problem that we have to deal with today. Far too many people look at the superficial to make judgments about what can and can't be right.
The only colonialist things this article identifies are the smug prejudices that of Tobias Mann and The Register itself.
The story here is one of massive growth in demand for tech and connectivity in Africa and Lat Am. As even bloody Microsoft recognises, "one of the most important markets in the world, with the fastest growing population, projected to grow from 1.4 billion to almost 1.7 billion by 2030. It’s the youngest continent in the world with a median age of under 20 and 60% of the population under the age of 25." The projects announced are being executed in partnership with African tech companies and in response to African consumers' demand.
And yet Mann has written this article through the lens of colonialism (which ended 65 years ago in Ghana, where one of the projects is located) and presents African and Lat Am consumers and techies as mere unsophisticated objects, without agency, who will be grateful for blankets.
Did he bother speaking to any African tech companies that will be executing the projects? Did he seek comment from African techies about their markets? No, he just relied on press releases from Seattle and Silicon Valley. Perhaps if he HAD made the effort to speak to those people, he wouldn't have used such condescending, outdated, colonialist arseburgers.
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