EU Eyes Ditching Microsoft Azure for France's OVHcloud

> It's always made me curious why foreign governments allow their critical technical infrastructure to come from other nations

That was part of "end of history" politics, that we've reached a stable democratic state nothing particularly revolutionary is going to happen, just steady prosperous growth. Once upon a time it was possible to believe that, however unlikely it seems nowadays.

> no present-day "FAANG" in the EU is in no small part due to their relatively anti-business/startup policies

Draghi's report claimed a big factor was the lack of a true financial union, which made it hard to mobilize and raise capital.

I think a big big reason for that there is no Big tech companies in Europe is really that the landscape is so much more diverse then in the US.

If you are big in one state in the US. You have the same lang and most likely the same regulations. In Europe its so many languages and its no more likely that we choose a company from another country in the EU vs the US.

I think that is not true for the US. So its easier to get big in the US, and then you are so big its actually likely the a company in the EU would choose you. Maybe not over another company from the same country (everything else beeing equal), but over a company from another country in the EU/Europe

> It's always made me curious why foreign governments allow their critical technical infrastructure to come from other nations - even friendly ones

Cost and quality. Economies of scale and comparative advantage mean you can usually buy something better for cheaper from the specialists versus NBH’ing everything.

Until recently, the United States was seen as a reliable friend. So the benefits of aggregation from a cost and interoperability perspective outweighed the risk.

Now, the US is going in a direction that makes it increasingly risky. I think we’ll see global companies diversifying outside of the US in addition to governments.

It depends how big you are. If you're the UK or France or Germany, then sure, it makes sense (but you still have less scale than the US). If you're Luxembourg or Macedonia then you probably dont have the resources and at least need to collaborate with your neighbours.

because other nations don't have same capabilities or resources

same like US not producing their own food and equipment

Sure but you can ask that at different scales, in a reductio ad absurdum: Why should EU use American tech company? But also why should Germany use French tech company? Why should one region of France use tech company from other region? Why should one person use tech from another person?

An open source electronic healthcare system is well within scope of a union providing healthcare for ~449M people collectively. Epic does ~$5B/year in revenue, certainly the EU can do better with the same spend or a bit less.

It has also been a disaster in the US, to be fair.

I'm unsure if this is fair to OVH. Yes, they had a pretty epic fire not long ago - but their "bread and butter" has been low cost, from what I've gathered (never used them before).

I assume OVH will be building a private "EU Government" cloud of sorts, which may even include new private data centers. Even if they re-use their existing cloud - the government cloud isn't likely to be all in one region etc.

I guess I'm saying, it's better to give OVH (or another major cloud provider within the EU) a chance, even if they're not on-par with AWS et al today.

still a lower risk than having your entire country's internet services turned off by the US regime to gain political leverage

OVH has been getting a lot better.

They recently discovered that Terraform exists and have a usable infra as code provider now. They're starting to take multi-AZ seriously. Sometimes their network is UP and working normally, which compares favorably with us-east-1.

It's starting to look like a real cloud.

While not using it on a huge scale, I've got a few projects in OVH cloud(US) and can't remember them having ever gone down in the last couple years.

I get maintenance notices from them often that explain what they're doing and that it shouldn't be impacting, and so far they've been right.

Is your experience different?

There is also this weird question: What do you get from your hoster?

For example, I've had endless discussions with people about the reliability of Hetzner Dedicated Servers. At the end of the day, you have to realize: You get a physical server, with fans (we had performance degradations because a cable binder degraded and parts fell into a fan and the CPU throttled), a PSU, drives (HDDs and SDDs fail differently, but both fail. SDD failure can be much more evil). It's just a little box that can run for years, or it can choose to go kapeister whenever it wants. Maybe it will take it's friends along the way too. There have been outages of servers catching on fire and frying the systems on top of them as well. Then the fire suppression goes off and shatters some drives plates on top of that. Naturally only in the archiving servers, who'd be using spinning rust in other systems this day and age?

And that's the operational technique and experience that has been hoovered up by very large PaaS offerings and hosters. You need to plan for, deal with and mitigate the situation that every server and VM hosted on a server (read: all of them) are a somewhat useful crew of saboteurs that are trying to figure out when the right failure of 3-4 systems are going to cause you a lot of overtime, stress, and maybe impact and cripple the business as well.

If you plan for this, Hetzner Cloud + Dedicated can be a great hoster, with great support and really good value for money.

If you assume that a single Hetzner Dedicated Server or Cloud VM has the same manpower behind it to give it the staggering uptime of EC2 instances, and you bet all of your company and all of your money on this VM never going down... well, you can do this on AWS. We've had a prolonged outage of an EC2 instance once in like 7 years.

But don't do this. Fix your failovers and architecture and embrace the fun of european hosters. After some grief with the early stages of the Cloud-Dedicated-VSwitch infrastructure, we're seeing great uptime with them.

Ovh has a lot of products. Some of them are cheap and the services quality acts accordingly. OVH is mostly pretty good.

Care to elaborate? I've been using their different products for around 20 years.

Might be a feature. A chaos monkey. What do you do when your provider is like this: use a second cloud for resilience.

"from a regime more friendly to (most) human rights"

what is this mean??? Are you saying US is lead by dictator???

I asked specifically about this threat, to two employees of AWS and they laughed on my face. To quote Nigel Farage...I guess they are probably not laughing now....

> could never articulate a reason for why their two 2U servers needed to be in AWS at ~3x the price

specifically, to dis-empower you and others in your guilds ? AWS will turn on and turn off with no labor negotiations, at a known market price. Admins and devs are competition to the decision makers and an unknown entity, asking market prices or more. This is predictable and it is playing out now.

You’re trusting that Microsoft is maintaining meaningful segmentation for their dozen different clouds. History suggests they do not. At best, you’re getting data residency from Microsoft. Key components, like Entra, are globally shared services.

> This is an empirically observed fact.

No, this is demonstrably false. There are many entire organizations whose sole purpose is to monitor responsibilities and prepare for crises.

I usually enjoy reading your comments, so I wish you'd expand a bit here.

“Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.”

― Voltaire

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7390459-lord-protect-me-fro...

Arm? But also, thy ere is a big difference in that if Microsoft was somehow forced to hand over data, then they could, even if that data was in the EU. If Europe couldn’t buy US chips things would’t immediately fail, though it would still be a huge problem.

All of this to me says the world needs far more diverse supply chains either a healthy level of alternatives at every stage.

US cannot even stop a single country from getting access to latest GPU.

> Without intel/amd/nvidia/ampere/qualcom what servers can one deploy?

ARM? Something that is increasingly commonplace as a machine type in AWS and GCP

Nationalizing ASML could be option to combat this. No more semi-conductor making machines for you...

SiPearl, MediaTek, etc.

> Without intel/amd/nvidia/ampere/qualcom what servers can one deploy?

Without memory or storage chips from Asian manufacturers what servers can one deploy? I think Micron is the last (?) major US-headquartered maker of these types of chips.

> What client devices can the EU buy?

Who makes the screens for client devices (phones, tablets, laptops, etc)? How many are American companies?

In the short term, Trump could order the immediate shutdown of cloud accounts for the EU, as exemplified in the article. While this won’t completely eliminate the EU’s reliance on American tech, as you rightly pointed out, it does reduce the risk of a sudden disconnect and initiates a long-term commitment to gradually distance itself from US tech. It’s a step in the right direction.

Yes, it's been going on for three administrations now.

Azure Europe is one truth social post removed from a shutdown.

It’s basically the same idea as applying for a line of credit

I had the same experience with Digital Ocean. Thankfully there were several other providers happy to take my money immediately.

Including GCP and AWS, even: you need to open support requests to gain access to the larger instance types (and to raise the quotas.)

Why?

Some let you enter more KYC data, and maybe use a different form of payment, to bypass this.

Exactly that. Rather than centralise the risks, distribute them therefore reducing them.

One political change put millions of people and businesses at risk. Minimising this in future is not putting everything on someone else's computers.

Many of us still run servers in our own building.

Perhaps they were simply unlucky, or using that claim to cover for their own mismanagement. I just checked one of my OVH machines, it's been up for 313 days with 100% service uptime, only rebooted for an OS upgrade.

While I love and regularly use Hetzner’s cloud and dedicated servers for many things, it’s unfortunately not yet on the same scale as OVH in terms of product offering. But I hope that changes over time.

Kimsufi is dedicated, not VPS