Posted by cmrdporcupine 7 hours ago
If you want to see a different perspective, lmk.
Can someone please help me understand what their competitive advantage is, versus the likes of AWS / Azure et al, who are also available in the EU.
I love a good underdog story, but I'm not understanding the economics of it.
Because US-in-EU is fake-EU.
CLOUD act, PATRIOT act etc. etc. US headquarters doesn't escape the arm of US law.
Remember a long time ago there was a famous case where Microsoft fought the US DoJ when they came looking for somebody's data in Azure Ireland ?
That was then. Now is now. Do you honestly think Microsoft would put up the same fight today, especially if the US President decided to lean on them ? I don't !
CLOUD/PATRIOT etc. has gone from a theoretical risk to a real one. And now you have a US President in office who doesn't care much for bypassing all that anyway.
TBF (and the subject of government tech and procurement aside) there are good ones in Europe.
The problem tends to be how much of the US-cloud cool-aid your organisation has drunk.
If you've drunk the whole bottle, i.e. the random alphabet-soup of interdependent microservices, then sure you'll have a tough time finding a like-for-like equivalent.
But if you've still got old-school IT brains in your IT team, then its perfectly feasible to find equivalence in Europe.
Not only that, but you'll probably pay at least 10x less in Europe because you're not paying through the nose for the alphabet-soup of random interdependency.
Also the EU providers price sheets are clear and it is easy to reliably forecast how much you will be paying. As opposed to the US provider's muddy price sheets full of small-print and all sorts of random invented proprietary billing units that are nigh on impossible to reason about.
Do other institutions care? Some people and some institutions do, but how many?
What about the private sector? Even if you moved all government services entirely away from the US, your economy can still be reliant on American suppliers and communications between the government and the private sector and individuals will too.
> we would switch to sovereign clouds in a heartbeat if we had any good ones in Europe.
What is wrong with the options you have in Europe? That comment suggests to me you do not care enough to do anything that takes effort.
So you basically confirmed that being located in Europe isn't enough.
> EU-US agreement [1]
> Negotiations with the United States to facilitate cross-border access to e-evidence for judicial cooperation in criminal matters started in September 2019 and are currently ongoing. At present, US-based service providers collaborate with European law enforcement authorities through direct cooperation on a voluntary basis or through mutual legal assistance (MLA) procedures.
Don't get me wrong, as a European I'm all for EU, but we should offer products and services that are at least as good as abroad competitors. My company still relies heavily on US tech, for the simple fact that lots of it is plain better and/or cheaper.
Disclaimer: I work at Verda.
Hopefully it's for buying VSORA or Euclyd machines, but well...
The Euclyd machines, probably many months away.