The global backlash against the second Donald Trump administration keeps on growing. Canadians have boycotted US-made products, anti–Elon Musk posters have appeared across London amid widespread Tesla protests, and European officials have drastically increased military spending as US support for Ukraine falters. Dominant US tech services may be the next focus.
There are early signs that some European companies and governments are souring on their use of American cloud services provided by the three so-called hyperscalers. Between them, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) host vast swathes of the Internet and keep thousands of businesses running. However, some organizations appear to be reconsidering their use of these companies’ cloud services—including servers, storage, and databases—citing uncertainties around privacy and data access fears under the Trump administration.
“There’s a huge appetite in Europe to de-risk or decouple the over-dependence on US tech companies, because there is a concern that they could be weaponized against European interests,” says Marietje Schaake, a nonresident fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and a former decadelong member of the European Parliament.
They need to look into using alternative root servers for DNS and domain registrations as well.
Multiple countries in Europe are already working overtime to rat-fuck DNS. I’d prefer if euro-leadership remained blissfully unaware of the root DNS servers.
What do u mean?
There are several governments in Europe and abroad that have ordered DNS lookups for specific domains to be blocked.
They probably mean that we can’t trust the government to keep information free and need a way to restrict governments from blocking DNS lookups.
Unfortunately, you can’t really do DNS in a decentralized manner as the concept is based on a hirarchy.
Example:
If you want to go to www.coolsite.org your computer would make the following requests:
- Hey root server, who handles requests for .org?
- Hey .org DNS server, who handles requests for .coolsite.org?
- Hey .coolsite.org DNS server, who is www.coolsite.org?
I don’t really know how to decentralize this…
All hypothetical of course. Not convinced things will go that far without some more clear indicators.
The root servers are already spread over the globe. Enough of them are operated by non US orgs too to handle things initially, I suspect that the localised anycast servers located outside the US for those USA based operators would probably go on serving.
It’d be trivial to replace them anyway, and frankly we traffic would be much lower anyway since a lot of the Internet is run by us based organisations.
For domain registration on tlds not run by the us, they should continue to operate fine.
We have I-Root and K-Root in Europe, these are certainly used…
No one told the US to be careful what you wish for.
In Switzerland, Proton is well-known but their CEO is more than shady, and Infomaniak is a better alternative.
they offer so much, I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about them before. Most of their apps have proprietary clients though, right? And they don’t seem to offer privacy features like simplelogin for email, which was the main reason why I subscribed. and additionally, one would then have to pay separately for vpn
Not really! You can find the source code for almost everything in their github (I say almost because I haven’t checked if everything is in there, but I know the clients are because I’ve looked them up). Besides, aside from offering extremely competitive prices, they are privacy friendly (don’t offer end-to-end, but you can read their privacy policy) and use a very ethical infraestructure. I seriously recommend you check infomaniak up; I have been using them for 2 years and couldn’t be happier.
I sure hope so, but I have little faith tbh. Cloud providers have done a great job selling serverless solutions that are tightly coupled with the provider. Wise companies have limited themselves to the basics - load balancers, servers, maybe some serverless container solution or kubernetes. The latter can move pretty much anywhere with some, but not a whole lot, of effort. The former, have fun rediscovering the quirks of your new provider’s equivalent of lambdas or whatever (or at worst, rewriting the whole thing).
Wise companies have limited themselves to the basics
“Wise” is subjective here. Using a cloud vendor’s implementation can yield many times more efficiency, simplicity, stability, scalability, and agility vs rolling you own. Does it come with the cost of vendor lock-in? It absolutely can. Will that make migration to another vendor difficult? It will.
So for organizations that never embraced the cloud alternatives have had to maintain their own infrastructure or use commodity solutions, as you mentioned, to deliver their IT needs. How much more was spent using a general purpose approach with higher portability to deliver the same result vs a cloud providers proprietary version? Then include the time component.
Only time will tell.
Cancuck here. I’ve moved all my services out of the US if possible. Moved almost everything to a dedicated server at OVH BHS and a VPS at Servarica. The only service I’ve kept with a US company is my SMTP relay. Can’t go wrong with MXroute and it’s not some big company mining all your emails as they go through. Plus if I have something sensitive to send I use PGP or use my self hosted Matrix and message it to the person.
I concur. I have been using various OVH services for over 15 years, and, in spite of some amateurism that sometimes betrays its family business roots, there service is top notch, because they show dedication to solving your problems.
As should have been done already 10 years ago. When it became clear American authorities can seize any information even when stored on servers outside USA, by any American service provider.
And Obama claimed it was a “fair balance”.USA has in many ways acted almost like a totalitarian regime for decades, disregarding their own laws, international laws, and especially the laws of other countries, even allies.
This became very clear when Obama stressed that illegal surveillance/monitoring wasn’t used against American citizens.
Obviously meaning that citizens of other countries have no rights, and there are no laws preventing American intelligence in any way.As it turned out, what Obama promised wasn’t even true, and Americans stationed in for instance Iraq, were very much monitored.
With regard to information of other countries, USA has CLEARLY demonstrated, that they have no regard for decency or even laws.
This was revealed when Obama was president, and the Republicans are even worse!!
USA and EU has made an agreement on this, claimed to make it legal in EU to use American cloud services.
But as we have seen, no American administration gives a fuck about such agreements or even laws, so that agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.But why? There are already a lot of great services based in Europe. For example, Hetzner and OVH. Their product offerings aren’t exactly 1:1 w/ those big three, but they have a lot of great tools, and you can get pretty far w/ a DIY approach, you just need to hire some OPs people to manage things. Hetzner even has S3-compatible storage.
I get that there’s a lot of interesting abstractions w/ places like AWS, but I’m also of the opinion that a lot of it is unnecessary and just adds cost. Learn to orchestrate things properly and build some tooling to utilize the APIs these cloud services provide, and you can achieve the same thing for less cost.
For lower end, absolutely. For higher end enterprise space? Not so much. For me, AWS is the gold standard for product support and price at enterprise scale, and I do think I have ever worked on an enterprise application that could orchestrate 100% on its own (only for bad reasons, this is what I do at home).
I do hope a lack of reliance on these services leads to better technological solutions to come out of Europe and make its way back to the states. The enterprise made the Faustian bargain with these CSPs, and although the cloud networking is somewhat nice, the applications are a disaster.
Yep. mid size business is the best place to be for engineers. You get your pick Of the lot all without HR 🙃
price at enterprise scale
Really? I thought that’s where big cloud services fleece customers the hardest… We use AWS at work, and I’m always surprised when I ask our devOPs how much we’re paying.
My understanding is they’re selling the “time is money” angle, where things work together well so you spend less time getting stuff set up.
Yes, that is why I said enterprise scale. Pricing for personal stuff is pretty terrible, although it is reasonable in some ways.
I find AWS prices to be very reasonable, but it is much different than going race to the bottom deal hunting on hetzner. That’s definitely where you want to go deal hunting, but it isn’t suitable for a lot of enterprise applications.
With the bigger CSPs, you really have to take care of the billing yourself to get the best value. Last year, my team was able to cut our client’s cloud bill by 85% while improving service. Kind of unfair - AWS will happily take your money to do stuff incorrectly. They have business units at AWS around customer success that aims to help cut costs, but I can kind of tell they aren’t a priority at the company compared to account execs. Pretty normal for this business, unfortunately.
We use AWS at work, and the “cutting costs” thing seems largely a way to further lock-in customers. They want you to build around their tools so the switching cost is high enough to not be worthwhile. Then again, I don’t work directly with billing (I’m a SWE, not in OPs), but what I’ve seen looks a lot higher than I would’ve guessed.
Idk, maybe it’s reasonable at scale, but it seems to get really expensive really fast.
Yes, vendor lock in is always a concern around AWS. I am of 2 minds about this - the real trade off with on demand resources is cost as AWS has to essentially have hot instances ready for customers, which cost them more to run. So it definitely makes sense to have these billing options that help them save operational overhead and then pass the savings on to their customers.
But it is a fine line. What should be AWS responsibility and what should be the customers? Amazon’s whole deal is trying to step over it it ways that will ultimately be monopolistic. Personally, I am much more concerned with the egress costs, which is their true and much sneakier vendor lock in trap.
To me, the only answer is government regulation. We should treat cloud resources as a utility and regulate it as such to make sure that the large players don’t abuse their monopoly on compute power and servers. Instead, the government’s answer has been to do away with net neutrality, which really only makes them more powerful because they still have a monopoly on the physical resources. This is one of the reasons why I have become self hosted for my own personal technology - but for work there are a lot of benefits to just shutting up and working with a monopoly that at least has to try to drive down costs at some level to prevent regulatory action.
These services only make sense at scale and with large projects that need a ton of planning everyday. AWS will take the little people’s money if they are willing to give it, but they aren’t truly interested in their business.
egress costs, which is their true and much sneakier vendor lock in trap.
Absolutely. That’s basically Oracle’a db strategy.
Things like this are why I’ll never use AWS, even if I get to a scale where it makes sense. I value the ability to switch to a different provider or self-host with my own hardware.
the only answer is government regulation
Ideally the market is competitive enough that regulation isn’t needed. But maybe that ship has sailed.
I agree with regulations like Net Neutrality, so I guess it would depend on how it’s worded. I’m just worried massive players like AWS would find ways to abuse any regulations we try to make to exclude others.
But yeah, I don’t pitch switching at work, because I’m not in charge of infra or really involved with it at all. I’m a SWE, not a devOPs or IT tech, so if I’m touching anything in Cloudwatch other than looking at logs, something has gone horribly wrong.
The government can get a lot tougher on companies than they currently are in the US. There is a large and somewhat unstoppable public distrust of corporations that will swing the pendulum away from distrust of the government. Whatever part of the federal government that people didn’t trust is having their image re-rehabilitated by DOGE’s idioacy anyway. Corporations will do sneaky lobbying and everything, but at the end of the day they will follow laws that are enforced properly. They don’t have miliataries or private police forces. At least not yet.
I would hope to see cloud service providers fall more under a utility type of regulation, and have the government set up regional ISOs that can buy and distribute services to everyone at regulated prices, and adhere to certain computing standards. This is why I don’t get too mad at billing deals and schemes - if computation, storage, and virtual network infrastructure can be standardized and treated as a utility it would be great for everyone! They deserve to get paid for the power they have to consume and the maintenance and operations cost of a datacenter.
Instead, we see these companies play a very tricky game using the egress costs to capture traffic and activity within their infrastructure. The same strategy applies at Google with ads dictating browser development, at Amazon’s winners and losers based retail business, and everyone’s race to the bottom stealing data for hungry AI model training. It doesn’t work Jim. We need to establish fair legislation for democratizing access to computing and storage at a large scale, the same way we already did with internet access. Instead, we are seeing it go the wrong way with the corporate war against net neutrality from service providers, which is bad for cloud services anyway. In my area, cox was doing some bad stuff, which finally prompted google to come in and deliver fiber they had been teasing for around a decade, which drove costs way down for internet. So hopefully all this stuff will work itself out, but we really need to focus on empowering everyone with access to computation and ownership of their data.
For work, I am lucky enough to work for an employer that has enough pull with AWS that they essentially have to listen to us. But I prefer their open market and transparent, if complicated, pricing to trying to work though a deal with a dozen different other software platform vendors all trying to close business and screw over our clients. Even their sales people are pretty well incentivize to drive service consumption rather than promote lock in. This is leading to a huge problem in AI, but once again I respect the approach AWS is taking with hugging face and making it about flexible consumption than what microsoft and google are doing, trying to shove AI down your throat.
AWS is the gold standard for product support and price at enterprise scale,
Jesus fucking christ. Do you love being screwed over in every way possible? AWS support is… bad. And their prices? Worse.
Up next is “Oracle is a really good Database server vendor, for support and price”?
Let’s be clear here: I would never say that about oracle.
But yeah, idk what to tell you. What cloud service vendor have you had a better experience with than AWS? Genuinely curious. Do you really like GCP? I have had some good experiences, but I feel some of their services can be a miss. If you say Azure or IBM, I won’t believe you. For projects that I would consider enterprise scale, I don’t take anyone else seriously.
Enterprise is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I would never use them for my smaller scale personal stuff. I would recommend something like Digital Ocean to smaller devs, but for personal projects I think self hosted is the way to go.
I’m increasingly seeing ads about Canadian cloud hosting services. I just hope companies stat to look at local solutions seriously.
We’re looking at scaleway. They seem pretty decent so far.
Using what OS, Microsoft Windows I assume?
Mate, Linux is so simple my 70 year old dad can use it, I’m using opensuse (German) right now, but he is on Ubuntu (British) both are solid choices that a monkey could install and use.
Out code runs on Linux containers, so no Windows needed. Personally, I use OpenSuSE, but the containers use Alpine.
In my immediate vicinity I can see a trend to insource critical infrastructure again. Not necessarily to their own servers but towards certified European data centers. Sometimes they manage to cut costs at the same time as the pricing structure for the big three is so in-transparent that they wasted a lot on unneeded resources.
in-transparent
As a helpful FYI the word you were looking for there was “opaque”.
“Rare”
Thus I am for forbidden to employ it merely because ‘tis of rare and precious nature? Surely thou jest!
I’ve been closing all my US based accounts recently. I was looking for a non US based Password manager service a couple of days ago. I used european-alternatives.eu and looked at a couple of options before settling on “Heylogin” it is so good I thought I had better recommend it to others… oh and I dumped chat GPT for chat.mistral.ai a couple of weeks ago, I recommend giving it a go.
Wait, what, password manager service? Not selfhost, you entrust someone else with your passwords?
Heylogin looks pretty cool, thanks for the hint. I will definitely take a deeper look into that!
GOP: What if we used culture war as a way to shoot the economy in the balls?
Trump & Musk: Waaaaay ahead of ya!
I wonder if I should sell my Microsoft stock.
Why? I highly doubt this little protest will meaningfully impact their bottom line.
That said, I always recommend diversifying. Invest in broad index funds instead of individual stocks and you’ll most likely be better off long-term.
It will be hard to do if AWS is 1/3 to 1/2 of the cloud space, originally people wanted to move on from AWS to Ms or even Google. They will have to develop something equivalent or equal
In just see no alternative to Microsofts Office tools. I think 99% of all companies in Western world rely on Microsoft office.
technically libreoffice exists, they really need to fix office comparability though
No, they just need to enforce PDFs for things that leave an office so everyone else isn’t locked into loading and running a bloated mess just to view a read-only spreadsheet.
The analogue to the printed chart isn’t an XLS6 attached to e-mail. It’s a PDF.
That’s it. Done.
I’d prefer a Wiki style software that exports to PDF. Why aren’t we all using wiki’s, with build in version control and diagramming, like Confluence, Youtrack, etc…?
Those are moving goalposts. The LibreOffice devs do their best, but they’ll always be a step behind. The correct solution is to get people to move away from closed yet ever-changing standards made by monoliths who wish to retain a monopoly.
Note that I’m not saying that’s easy or even possible. Only that it’s correct.
MS Office rules the corporate world because their standards never change.
the fact that there is .xls and .xlsx, .doc, .docx … proves otherwise.
Yes they can still load and handle the old formats, but evidently the standards did change. As they are pushing for Office365 this will become an even more regular scenario as they want to force everyone to use the latest software, which then is only available in the subscription model.
…until they come up with the New Outlook which is total shit.
I’ve never had compatibility issues. Of course many people have, but a lot of the time people are blindly speculating about potential badness.
There is no real alternative to Excel, that’s the killer app. Anyone arguing differently hasn’t got the corporate experience to argue.
Doesn’t even matter if an alternate is better, and none are, it’s about rock-solid compatibility and knowing your sheets and books will still work in 20-years.
MS fucks about with OS updates, but notice that they never break Excel? (or Word or PowerPoint for that matter)
Word has been broken since v.5.1a. But you’re right about Excel.
Of course there are alternatives to Excel. Anyone pretending otherwise has only worked at a few places and is generalizing with great but mistaken confidence.
But even if there weren’t, think about those companies living on the edge of one software breakdown. There’s a word for that: brittle. Meh, YOLO.
