Re: Cloud
> Almost anything that requires recurrent payment should be run by government.
That's quite a broad category. Supply of chips for the canteen? Loo rolls?
>>Design and manufacture their own servers?
>This is one off. No need unless there is a national security concern.
They're not one-off, you refresh them on a frequency similar to that of a reserved cloud instance. So why is building, integrating and running your data centre more important than building, integrating and supporting your own server components instead of buying Dell? Is it possible your job may be related to the former.
>> Create their own hypervisors, integrated into custom silicon?
> No need. There are open-source and free hypervisors. Current commercial offerings of silicon are adequate.
Everyone loves something someone else declared as on their behalf as "adequate". Show me the commodity equivalent of AWS Nitro System. "No need" depends on your use cases and non-functional requirements.
> > - Run their own global fibre networks?
> This is an exception. But surely government could build a backbone network to connect data centres in different countries and could rent out surplus capacity.
> > - Design custom electrical substations?
> Energy supply should be run by the government. We should have a national supplier.
I'm picking up a theme here - it's not just clouds, you seem to think the government should run much of the economy
> > - Design their own CPUs?
> > - Design their own AI accelerator chips?
> > - Create their own distributed databases and analytics tools, heavily integrated into the infrastructure stack?
> No need
Again, I'm sure the people who are currently spending money on these things (or the services that are made better and cheaper by them) appreciate your opinion that they're unnecessary. You can't go and buy an equivalent of Spanner off the shelf, let alone find an Open Source equivalent.
> though of course software development should be in-house as hiring big consultancies is expensive and delivers poor quality. Though this > would need a reform of finances, as currently public sector by design cannot employ specialists as they are unable to pay market rates.
I mostly agree with this actually. Once they've reformed finances and shown they can deliver bog standard enterprise IT inhouse, let's pick up the conversation later about trying to reproduce something the world's leading tech companies took 10-15 years to build out. Although we won't, because we'll probably be dead.
> > Being a cloud is an awful lot more than building out a datacentre...
> Nothing that cannot be built and tailored for government use and bring massive savings long term. Not to mention local jobs.
I'm not quite sure what you're basing this assertion on. Perhaps you designed and built one of the hyperscale clouds yourself, and it turned out to be unexpectedly easy?
> > they increasingly consume complex, integrated technology stacks that require engineering effort and operational investment way higher than a single mid-sized government can afford.
> That's nonsense. It can only fall apart by corruption.
Well, that's OK then. Because history teaches us that dramatic expansion of the state *never* results in rampant corruption.