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@bert_hubert@fosstodon.orgEurope and European governments can no longer rely on American clouds. A European alternative won’t emerge on its own. That’s why it’s time for industrial policy—but it won’t be easy.
In this post, I explore the challenges and immodestly propose a coherent strategy to develop European alternatives: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/now-how-to-get-that-european-cloud/
@bert_hubert really well reasoned article - you’re the kind of advisor the EU should be listening to, or putting charge of the effort :).
@pirijan thanks - the good news is that they sometimes do listen! At the very least they read my posts.
As an example, the rules for storing content you have not evaluated for being legal are too strict, and the consequences too harsh. If one example of porn, copyright violation or nazi propaganda slips through automated checks, platforms may face criminal consequences, and can't just say "sorry" and take it down like in the US.
GDPR is also designed to have an immense overhead to smaller players who suddenly need to hire legal teams, while large players already have the necessary staff and have no real trouble putting up with the (to them) minor increase in bureaucracy.
Regulations need to be evaluated about how they benefit outside actors like the US more than startups in the EU, and adjusted accordingly. The DMA actually has some good ideas in there and seems to not have this kind of bias.
@divVerent my government streaming proposal had nothing about porn in there or hosting general videos. It is a European habit to look for regulatory problems even when they aren't there yet.
@bert_hubert I just know that at least one major company (OK, an US one) refuses to store any user generated content in Germany because they cannot, despite all kinds of use of ML and AI, entirely rule out that one of those files may contain a swastika. And I know for a fact that this would then have up to 3 years of prison on it: § 86a (1) 2. StGB.
“Yes but we didn’t know” -> “You knew your scanning can’t get everything, so there’s dolus eventualis“
@bert_hubert It's like when we had to rely on American GPS, it can be turned off at a moments notice. One of the positives of this trade war is that hopefully the EU will move away from relying on American infrastructure. Microsoft O365 is something we need to get away from too.
@bert_hubert You're a treasure trove of knowledge. Thanks for sharing it with us.
@bert_hubert Hiervan krijg je toch zin om ermee aan de slag te gaan! Ik wel tenminste.
@bert_hubert Can we expect a talk or expert panel or workshop on that topic at WHY 2025? 
@bert_hubert All this cloud stuff is over complicating things. Just hire a furry and give em a budget for a few servers, problem solved.
@KitsuneVixi actually no.
@bert_hubert @KitsuneVixi I understand the short answer, but I also think the service model is taken for granted too often, as if it’s the only possible solution to each problem. Do we really need a Cloudflare alternative to provide (D)DOS protection as a service, or could you expect from a server admin to at least understand how to implement a bloody WAF. Services create unnecessary dependency (QED), centralized risks and often add complexity, instead of solving it
@bert_hubert
Play capitalism, win stupid prizes.
@dzwiedziu Stupid prizes or death!
@bert_hubert Did you find any good sources on how tariffs for digital services would work in practice? I only found this: https://mamot.fr/@nemobis/113939473348359500
I don't understand how procurement can avoid setting what the providers must build. Isn't it just grants then?
As for gratis email I think a good model is Italy's #SPID, for reasons @quinta explained elsewhere. You don't want a single bottleneck but it's ok for the state to fund a few private providers and support underlying FLOSS.
@bert_hubert great article!
@bert_hubert I would love to be part of this. Working for a company in this space I could really believe that they can pull this off.
@bert_hubert I'm currently using the Vivaldi browser, which is developed by a Norwegian company. It is based on the Blink engine, and I am a bit confused as to if that would satisfy the need for an European browser alternative?
I mean, the Blink engine is the same used by Chromium, but it is open source and free, which I guess is a good as it gets these days. Or do you advocate for deeloping a completely new engine and base a browser on that?
@bert_hubert I’m not sure I saw OVH mentioned anywhere and it’s fairly big in Europe from what I have in mind.
@artemismucaj nothing advanced I tried there worked well. They are big in terms of renting virtual machines though.
@bert_hubert really? I would have said 4 - 5 
they have quite the number of managed alternatives available (database, container orchestration, even AI stuff. However I agree that if half of those are broken / not widely used in production (which I don’t know as i have never used their cloud) then maybe you get a bad ROI by using them instead of self hosting!
@bert_hubert
I would love to read your impressions on OVH managed k8s and what exactly doesn't work there. I was thinking to try it myself when I get the opportunity.
https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/kubernetes/
@artemismucaj
@bert_hubert Ecosia and Qwant are developing a European Search Index https://betterweb.qwant.com/en/2024/11/08/ecosia-and-qwant-join-forces-to-develop-european-search-index/
@bert_hubert My last two Swiss employers ran on-premises cloud infrastructures. It takes a bit of work, but it's not impossible. One employer was the Swiss NREN, and other NRENs were also running their own 'clouds' to my knowledge, mostly because of European privacy regulations.
@alpinegreg Dutch NREN Surf is a huge Microsoft enabler & reseller even I think.... Also their former director now works for Microsoft.
@bert_hubert It has been a few years since I worked for the Swiss NREN. That's disappointing news about Surf.
@bert_hubert @alpinegreg Everybody with an O365, LinkedIn or GitHub account works for Microsoft. The former director of Surf *gets paid* by Microsoft.
@staatssecretarisbzk
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@bert_hubert
What a good writeup. And also applicable outside the EU, if the EU was to charge forward with it and set a precedent and evolve the #OpenSource ecosystem that then smaller countries (like AoNZ) can pick up and adopt to create a larger movement.
@phlogiston @bert_hubert @lightweight I feel like the opportunity for that has mostly sailed with the large cloud providers building data centers in NZ after being given incentives by previous governments
@ragectl @phlogiston @bert_hubert I could be wrong, but my understanding is that most of those large data providers have pulled out - even Microsoft... And good riddance to them.
@lightweight @phlogiston @bert_hubert AWS currently still proceeding with their data centres in NZ. Not sure about Microsoft.
@ragectl @phlogiston @bert_hubert I think we have to start making a bit of a stink about issues like the tech status quo implications for our digital sovereignty (this sort of thing: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/sites/bartlett_public_purpose/files/reclaiming-digital-sovereignty.pdf) - esp with Trump & Musk at the 'helm' & the issue of digital colonisation (e.g. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/3/13/digital-colonialism-is-threatening-the-global-south and https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-to-fight-digital-colonialism/).
If they became part of the public discourse, I think the tech Overton Window would shift.
@bert_hubert Thanks for your writing, is very clear and interesting! Regarding your point about EU's over-dependence on US tech products (email, browsers, Internet services), I think that there's another very important aspect that you didn't mention: app stores. Communication and services are now very dependent on apps, but these apps are only available on two US stores: Apple's App Store and Google Play.
@bert_hubert excellent article, thank you! I shared it and then, via the Mastodon UI, saw that you are also on here, and I instantly followed you.
@bert_hubert "cloud" is a big term, that is misused by a lot of people (in my humble opinion as a public Cloud provider). For hosting in Europe, there are a bunch of people using OpenStack doing great work, including (but not limited to) a common deployment stack by https://scs.community/ that is used by a number of organisations.
Productivity suites which can be dedicated and managed would be great. There are a few building blocks out there, including NextCloud, Seafile etc.
I was thinking that the closest thing to a practical path forward, as enormous as it might be, would be open source projects to build Amazon and Microsoft Azure service compatibility layers on top of the Sovereign Cloud Stack (or more generally on OpenStack).
There are tens of billions of dollars/Euro in annual spending on the existing American clouds, with on the order of billions of lines of configuration invested in them.
The easiest way to entice companies off AWS is to prove they can use their existing Terraform/Pulumi/Chef or even CloudFormation configuration as-is on your alternative. An infrastructure rewrite is a hard sell.
@firebreathingduck @bert_hubert Until recently, and probably still, I expect no one has been fired for buying the services of the large US cloud providers.
Using the services provided are seductive and provide lock in. Many aren't needed.
We should certainly encourage the use of OpenTofu/Terraform as this allows more agnostic cloud use.
But I think Bert is looking more at the services that consumers now think of as "cloud". Office productivity suites, file sync, email, etc.
I agree we should be promoting OpenTofu/Terraform and tools like it, where possible.
And in terms of services, I meant the same ones Bert did. I'm envisioning a set of tools running on top of OpenStack, so someone can hit an API, or login and click a button, and have deployed for you some SaaS that's functionally (and API) equivalent to a popular Microsoft or AWS offering.
So more than "we have email services too", also "we have email services and also shims that let you use those services the same way you were using Office365". (And likewise for productivity suites, file sync, CRMs, etc...)
@firebreathingduck @bert_hubert Ah, yes. There have been attempts to do this (Murano in OpenStack), but creating the templates etc is hard. With Kubernetes (Magnum in OpenStack) we're in a better place. What I'd love to see is an integration in OpenStack of life cycle management of Helm deployments into Magnum.
Of course, then we need the catalogue of charts and containers...
European alternatives exist already.
For exemple at Qwant Search Engine where I work, all our infrastructure servers are hosted by the OVH cloud. We have some minor services also at Scaleway.
@327ppm At best up to 'level 3' as outlined by this blog post. And that is not what a lot of places are buying. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-european-cloud-ladder/
@bert_hubert this is excellent but I'd like to point out that cloud infrastructure today *IS* defense. It's as defense as something that doesn't directly kill people can be.
It would be good to remind EU politicians of this ASAP, because I'm very sure US ones are up to speed.
@bert_hubert Hey, on the plus side
a) these things aren't actually that hard to build (the special sauce is the scaling and maintenance, the buliding of them is just "find a place with cheap electricity, build a room with really good thermal regulation, stuuuuuuuuuff it with computers". It's a fun plumbing and electrical project with a giant pile of prior art)
b) there's a whole lot of experts in both the building and maintenance of these who would be really, really excited to maybe take a long-term work visa to a lovely European country with, shall we say, a tolerant attitude on LGBTQ topics and socialism? I've heard there are a few!
(Seriously though, for Europeans who want to alter the tech status quo, this is the moment. Trump has handed an opportunity to the world on a silver platter)