back to article 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 …

  1. Baird34

    Rats

    Like rats jumping off the ship.

  2. codejunky Silver badge

    Hmm

    "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.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hmm

      It's great when posts are pre-labelled by the poster.

      HMM: Highly Misleading or Meaningless ?

      1. codejunky Silver badge
        FAIL

        Re: Hmm

        @AC

        "It's great when posts are pre-labelled by the poster."

        Thank you for your service coward.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Hmm

          codejunky>> Thank you for your service coward.

          Remind us all, Corporal Codejunky, Which branch of the military did you serve in? (And not in a video game.)

          1. codejunky Silver badge
            Trollface

            Re: Hmm

            @AC

            "Remind us all, Corporal Codejunky, Which branch of the military did you serve in? (And not in a video game.)"

            I dont want a rear-admiral, not interested thanks.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Hmm

              You served in the RN?

    2. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

      Re: Hmm

      Enjoying the riots?

      1. codejunky Silver badge

        Re: Hmm

        @anonymous boring coward

        "Enjoying the riots?"

        Which riots? The answer is no but I dont know if you mean France, US or somewhere else. I dont consider rioting to be a good thing.

        Or did you post that comment to me by accident?

        1. ChodeMonkey Silver badge
          Angel

          Re: Hmm

          "Which riots?"

          Your feigned ignorance is most endearing. God bless you.

          1. codejunky Silver badge

            Re: Hmm

            @ChodeMonkey

            "Your feigned ignorance is most endearing. God bless you."

            What ignorance? Read the comment. There has been more than one riot in the world.

  3. This post has been deleted by its author

  4. Sandgrounder

    Havin a laugh

    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.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Havin a laugh

      "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.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Havin a laugh

        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.

    2. HMcG

      Re: Havin a laugh

      > If some political disaster happened

      The incumbent president of the USA has threatened to invade Greenland and Canada. The political disaster has already occurred.

      1. abend0c4 Silver badge

        Re: Havin a laugh

        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.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Havin a laugh

          He's taking advantage of the fact that the court can only act after the fact. It's possible that a lot of decisions will go against him but fait accompli is pretty effective.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Havin a laugh

      IONOS *PLEASE* stop the dressed in Black Tech Granny Grace Jones 1980’s Dress-style ad’s. I’m not sure what market demographic they are aimed at but can’t think of one at all.

  5. lordminty

    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.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      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.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "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

    2. fg_swe Silver badge

      Ariane V

      It was the best and most economic space launcher before Musk entered the business.

      Also, the German Army invented both digital computers and space capable rockets. America and Russia stole both in 1945.

      Fellgiebel

      Zuse

      Von Braun

      Look them up.

    3. xyz Silver badge

      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!

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        "If a redneck in a Wisconsin wood, casting a vote, can control your IT strategy, you've got the wrong IT strategy."

        Thank you for that. A real gem.

      2. Roland6 Silver badge

        >” 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.

  6. Znuff

    Do they, now?

    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.

  7. cookiecutter

    Here come the cowards!!

    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"

    1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

      Re: Here come the cowards!!

      I think your opening paragraph is saying the opposite of what you intended, but yeah.

  8. fg_swe Silver badge

    StackIT / Lidl

    They surely have the financial power to compete with Amazon, Google, MSFT.

    The Schwarz empire behind it is the #1 food retailer here.

    https://www.stackit.de/en/

    https://gruppe.schwarz/wer-wir-sind

    500 000 men an women

    175 000 000 000€ revenue

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: StackIT / Lidl

      With all those resources you'd have thought that Stackit could produce a website that doesn't rely on Javascript to show text.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: StackIT / Lidl

        "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.

  9. C4rusty

    Capacity Isn’t Enough

    IONOS Cloud may have the capacity, but trust and performance are essential. Even the German military chose Google's air-gapped cloud over national data centers. Capability still matters more than sovereignty in important decisions.

    1. Mr. Flibble
      Black Helicopters

      Re: Capacity Isn’t Enough

      "airgapped" and "google" together is a bit of an oxymoron isn't it?

      1. fg_swe Silver badge

        "airgapped"

        It is a clumsy way of saying the Bundeswehr will operate the Google cloud software stack on Bundeswehr hardware inside some BW bunker in Germany. All locked behind BW controlled+monitored firewalls.

        Updates will come on mass storage media, not online connections.

    2. fg_swe Silver badge

      Bundeswehr Cloud

      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.

  10. DaemonProcess

    Its the services that lock people in

    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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