As Europe eyes move from US hyperscalers, IONOS dismisses scaleability worries European cloud providers and software vendors used this week's Nextcloud summit to insist that not only can workloads be moved from the US hyperscalers, not considering it is "negligent" on behalf of IT bosses. European organizations are taking a careful look at their workloads and pondering if running workloads on a US …
"European cloud providers and software vendors used this week's Nextcloud summit to insist that not only can workloads be moved from the US hyperscalers, not considering it is "negligent" on behalf of IT bosses."
Giz us ya moniez.
"the services on offer in the EU can't compete with the US giants, and datacenter capacity isn't sufficient."
A legitimate concern that would actually be negligent not to consider.
*Not arguing either way just pointing out the less than impartial position of the finger waggers.
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Tue thought that Ionos could be a genuine alternative to the likes of AWS and Azure is hilarious. Like thinking your bicycle with its basket can replace a fleet of HGVs delivering to supermarkets nationwide.
Their tooling is primitive at best, the number of services offered a rounding error compared to the big guys. Their feature sets are paper thin. My experience has proven them to be no more than a glorified web hosting. Hyperscaler they are not. A two minute browse of their catalog against what AWS offer will confirm. Maybe ok for your word press site but screw real computing.
The only reason European providers have plenty of spare capacity is that no one wants to move there. If some political disaster happened and the US hyperscalers were made untenable overnight, European computing would collapse in days.
Add to that the barely believable state of the UK energy supply with the highest industrial energy prices in the world and 5 year wait for connection to the grid for new bit barns and this side of the pond would be heading back to Victorian times - minus the skilled engineering know how and manufacturing base.
"If some political disaster happened and the US hyperscalers were made untenable overnight, European computing would collapse in days."
That's the point. If the fleet of HGV stop delivering because some bloke in another country tells them to you might find that a bicycle with a basket looks a whole lot more capable except that you'r now stuck in a queue waiting for one to become free because you didn't have the foresight to book one.
It doesn’t need to be the Hyperscalers.
If you had a petulant Orangutan in the White House and a mad expansionist CCCP dreamer in Kremlin.Esp. One that thinks the US pays too much for things others freeload off ….
Plus further nutjobs like Pete Hegseth and Russell Vought.
“Nextbase Series 2 dash cams do not use the Galileo satellite system. They utilize both the American GPS satellite system and the Russian GLONASS system for accurate and reliable location tracking.”
Locking it down to a GPS subscription will bring in bigly dollars like you have never seen before …… Nextbase, Apple, Google etc would enable that via their kit……
Apple and Google do both use Galileo, but not hard to see how that could easily be weaponised/monetised (or hacked).
Zombie hoards of kids not able to find their way to the mall….
Maybe worth a few investing a quid in A-Z Maps - LOL.
He's also shown himself to be very creative in his interpretation of US law and hostile to court challenges. If he can get around habeas corpus, I don't think the law is much of an obstacle. So far, every "surely he wouldn't" has been proved wrong.
It's right to be concerned, but - like NATO - it's going to take some considerable time and cost to construct an adequate alternative.
I'm just going to say what I've said before:
Yeah, that'll fix it. Typical EU posturing. While the US developed a rocket stage that can return to earth and park itself on its launch pad, the best the EU could produce from all it's self-appointed 'experts' and lobbyists is a bottle top that remains attached to the plastic bottle.
By the time the EU create their own cloud, the US will have invented the cloud's replacement.
The US didn't invent the cloud any more than the EU would produce its own. It's companies that do that. What the US government could do is tell those US companies that they can't offer services in the EU. Microsoft will fight them? That's great. But will they win? And this is the same Microsoft, indeed the same Brad Smith of Microsoft (I doubt there are two of them) who welcomed the CLOUD Act because it gave him clarity when any US agency demanded data from an EU resident's account hosted on an EU resident server supposedly protected by EU legislation. That's why the EU needs to move its arse to start looking after EU residents and businesses.
And if You think EU is incapable of creating cloud services - with the proviso I gave above - look where SAP comes from.
"And if You think EU is incapable of creating cloud services - with the proviso I gave above - look where SAP comes from."
Yupe, I used to work on the infrastructure for SAP's Private Bare Metal Cloud - this was for *large* enterprises (strangely enough mainly USA orgs who are household names including some very large IT companies) to host their *monster* SAP HANA in-memory databases on automatically provisioned physical machines (rather than VMs) in SAP's data centres around the world, at the time mainly in Europe DCs (obviously including those in SAP's home country Germany) as far as I remember, but locations seem to have expanded quite a bit since then: https://www.sap.com/about/trust-center/data-center.html?currentLevel=world&mode=solutions&solutionId=NZA182
IIRC BT offered space for sale on its cloud way back in the later nineties but obviously the price was way too high.
Anyhoo. Ionos is a joke but the one thing to consider is a sort of butterfly effect...
If a redneck in a Wisconsin wood, casting a vote, can control your IT strategy, you've got the wrong IT strategy.
Everyone back to onprem and string up the cloud salespeople!
>” If a redneck in a Wisconsin wood, casting a vote, can control your IT strategy, you've got the wrong IT strategy.”
Nice to see NextCloud are HQ’d in Europe, need more open source projects to relocate their Hq’s and repositories to locations outside of the US, so they can side step US export bans.
Given the speed things are moving, I expect we (RotW outside of the US) will need to “fork” several of the US HQ’d open source foundations within the next four years.
A few years ago, a client of mine rented a few 10Gbit servers from IONOS, about 15, in different locations across Europe.
Their network was struggling to keep up, barely seeing 2 gbit/s per server at peak hours. People were complaining about everything being slow as hell.
They ended up discontinuing their 10Gbit offers.
If you're a REAL IT person rather than the kind of recent graduate who ONLY knows cloud or has spent an entire career using a Windows machine & gets confused when presented with a Mac or Linux desktop, THEN this is impossible.
US older guys who've moved from tech to tech to tech & who've had situations where we've been using Cisco kit & suddenly purchasing have forced a juniper upgrade or similar will find this easy.
I've been looking into European providers for a while now & especially if you're running kubernetes or virtual machines in the cloud, this is hard but not impossible. If your Developers can't convert from lambda to something else because that's all they've worked with then fire them.
You don't NEED to go with ONE EU provider, you can actually spread the load or even....HORROR....move back into your own collocation and it WILL be cheaper than the US firms.
What this WILL expose is the Indian guys who have used things like "just on time learning" or training courses to learn just enough to get through the interview. The kind of guy I took into an actual DC once who, not only didn't know how the airlock worked but got upset at the "noise and cold"
"With all those resources you'd have thought that Stackit could produce a website that doesn't rely on Javascript to show text."
It's the norm these days unfortunately.
Look at the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) who are supposed to espouse good computer security practices yet their whole site presents as completely blank pages if JavaScript is disabled.
According to
https://www.bundeswehr.de/de/meldungen/partnerschaft-bwi-google-bundeswehr-eigene-cloud-5952950
It actually is a fully German controlled system, except for the updates, which come on mass storage. All operators are BWI(=Bundeswehr) employees.
It is like IBM S/390 zOS operated in a German data center by German operators.
And surely BW/CIR will monitor all data flows in and out of this system using their own special tools, which may or may not be German designed.
Finally, it is only VS NFD cleared, which means it is good for the lowest secrecy level. It can be used to collect newspaper articles, Sauerkraut dish recipes, repair manuals for cars and the like.
Anything of SECRET or higher must NOT be processed on the Google Contraption.
Things the hyperscalers do well is behind the scenes SDN, service connections, security and logging, bolt-on services. The lock-in comes from forcing proprietary API code as service glue. You can overcome some of this using Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Chef etc but scripting also relies on translation into the vendor's own command line interface. Ionos will need to radically increase the number of open source services on offer, which will mean a large investment. I fear they got left behind 15 years ago due to concentrating on SMB workloads and will not be able to catch up to compete against the huge money available to the big 3.
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