Europe is looking for alternatives to US cloud providers
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Pretty much the same here in Belgium. Our politicians are petty chieftains who have no taste for strategic matters. So they delegated all these questions to... the USA ! Our country is run like a glorified village. Out of discussions about pensions they are simply lost.
Our politicians are not -in general- evil, they are just dumb. They took three years to realize Russia was a danger and are slowly reacting. They are worried about the US but they will take time to realize they are enemies now. And again they won't know what to do.
But our intelligence services are faster. They restricted the info they shared with the US as soon as Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed. My contacts in the Belgian military want the government to drop the F-35 contract and buy rafale instead. Some wanted this as soon as the Vance speech in Munich. The others were convinced after the ambush of Zelensky at the White House. But they have no hope in our politicians.
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The US's nationalist extremism is going to get a lot worse before it ever gets any better. So ANY country not looking to be under the thumb of tyrannical, petty, spiteful bully like Trump should probably be looking for ways to cut all ties with the US as quickly as possible. Which should be relatively easy, given how little the US actually exports, and how easily US exports can be replaced with other sources (mostly China, but that's what happens when a country exports the entire foundation of a functional economy to another country in pursuit of cheap labor).
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Look how quickly the US tooled up during WW2. I bet Europe can tool up pretty quickly when the the US stops shipping. They've already started for Ukraine.
It doesn't hurt that Russia has proven that you don't need F-22s and F-35s. Or a navy.
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Right, but those are systems where every part is allowed operate on its own layer and do its own thing. Enterprises love highly-integrated things, and Microsoft is good at highly-integrated things, and FOSS is quite bad at highly integrated things.
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It'd take me about a day to stand up a new k8s cluster, and migrate from EKS. Less if I'm allowed some downtime.
In the very early days of kubernetes (~1.5 to ~1.14), it was easy to bork the master nodes and break the cluster. So I wrote the process to make the cluster immutable, and k8s upgrades were done by standing up a new cluster and migrating traffic.
RDS -> PostgreSQL would take longer, just because the logical replication would take that long. S3 -> Ceph would be a project. Moving petabytes of data around takes a while, even at 100Gbps, and I probably wouldn't be able to get that speed inter-cloud. It would also be insanely expensive in terms of AWS accesses due to some ill-advised storage choices (It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time™).
It takes my team about 3 weeks to stand up a new legal region from scratch, when we're taking our time and triple checking everything.
That's assuming that I can still access the data to migrate it though. Multi-cloud disaster recovery is starting to look more interesting, but I don't think we're quite big enough for it to make financial sense yet.
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Come on man, what percentage of IT admins (let alone regular people) have to google what Shiboleth is before they can respond to the post? What certification can I get for Shiboleth administration? And what cloud provider is doing it turn-key for me?
And also, why are you comparing it to AD? We're now into AD-alike cloud services, no one's trying to spin up an AD server unless they have to.
Obviously it's stupid that we're at this point, but no one's adding that maintenance burden when they can pay Microsoft/Google/Zoho(?) to do it for them.
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And the US is going to hit a technological brick wall without the sole source of the EUV lithography machines that produce all of the worlds most advanced microprocessors. Machines that are made in the EU, by an EU country...that Trump and his cronies are pissing on and spitting at....
You know how they wanted to build fabs in the US? Kiss that goodbye.
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Well, sure. They mentioned Microsoft directory services and FOSS which sort of implied a "OS" level / build your own level of things, but I guess re-reading it they were more talking about Cloud services. So, my bad.
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It’s a fairly substantial difference because one of those scenarios is public and highly visible. If the NSA hacks OVH or a CIA black team visits Hetzner, it’s an international incident which will be heavily covered in the news for months. If someone calls Bezos and tells him that if he wants any of his businesses to continue being a federal supplier he has until tomorrow for AWS to exfiltrate customer data or studiously not see the NSA taking it, it won’t even be in the news.
Forcing these guys to keep their actions visible for public oversight is a win in its own right.
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If you are talking about the Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales, you may be screwed in terms of crewed aircraft, but those expensive platforms should still be quite useful as drone carriers. Are you telling us that the nation that invented the holy trinity of early post-ww2 carrier technologies (the angled flight deck, the steam catapult, and the fresnel lens landing system) is now content to be out-innovated by such used-to-be-naval-backwater nations as Turkey? At least let them show you the way with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCG_Anadolu
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Amateur Nerd
Ars Centurion
Well, it seems you haven't read the article or the comments.
This is about European companies moving away from US providers.
The companies are already subject to European laws, regardless of where the data is hosted. There are no new applicable regulations for them to study.
If anything it makes compliance easier if the provider is also subject to and familiar with the same European laws, instead of trying to reconcile the European laws with lack of or even conflicting US laws.
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As a child of the UK Sixties I grew up admiring the US. But for me the Falklands War was the turning point. Where was article 5 of NATO when the UK was actually attacked? The US sat on the fence. Special relationship? Bollocks.
And then I did some reading. And it turns out the US has always tried to screw us - the Suez crisis for example. Because we were a rival. Now a lap dog.
So no, not 'finally' at all. Turns out that countries don't have friends, only interests (quote as per both Lord Palmeston and Kissinger apparently).
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Oh I agree. He's an oligarch who is behaving like an oligarch and his motivations ultimately don't really matter to the people who are being impoverished, kidnapped, abused, murdered, and otherwise threatened with such. I sure don't care if he had a gun to his head that forced him to do what he did. He failed to stand up for democracy when it mattered most, and now I live every day with the knowledge that my government could decide to act on their opinion that I, as a trans woman, have no right to exist.
I think it's useful to recognize the reason that people in a position to do something about a danger to the country are very frequently motivated to hedge their bets because they are so comfortable or privileged that they know failure to prevent the Bad Thing would cause them more personal harm than if they succeed. Or, more succinctly--wealth corrupts, and hyper-wealth corrupts absolutely.
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Speaking only for myself, it's more of a concern that the US is going to actually implode and I don't know how that might affect the Microsoft Azure SLAs so I'm looking for solutions that aren't going to be affected by the fall of an empire.
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Regardless where your servers are located: you have to follow national laws. And this is not limited to the EU.
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Talking of ignorance, have you heard about the ECB and what they do ? Hint it’s not a retail bank, .
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So, if the US can veto that, what about the European parts that the F-35 is built with? Can those countries than veto the export of the F-35?
https://simpleflying.com/how-many-international-parts-us-f-35-fighter-jet/
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Are you suggesting there won't ever be another Democratic administration?
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Ever is a long time; but I would assert that there are strong grounds to worry that free and fair elections are over for the time being in the US. Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 election and failed only because there were executive checks on him. He's making sure that doesn't happen this time.
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There was nothing in 2013, technology-wise, that prevented some company in Europe from doing exactly what Amazon and Google and Microsoft were already doing then, in terms of building a cloud/datacenter service.
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Ah, I see. Yes, thank you. I could have included additional context that may have been helpful.
As a non-European inclined to join European organizations in seeking alternatives to US-based providers, indeed as one who has already moved critical services to Germany, I can offer that the process is naturally quite feasible but not necessarily legally straightforward vis-a-vis surveillance concerns and legal obligations. As Europeans no doubt well know, such things are given greater consideration in Europe than in the U.S.
Perhaps it would surprise readers not in the U.S. to learn that organizations here are also evaluating options for re-homing services elsewhere, for reasons similar to those addressed indeed in the article. It resonates with some here that the U.S. either is not now or will soon not be a favorable place to do business.
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Republicans won the election and our reality is that they represent the US. I hate that with a passion but we will all now pay the price for it. Or not, if the rest of the world is too chickenshit to call the US out for being the playground bully (see also: Iraq bullshit invasion and "Freedom Fries")
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NATO's article 5 was irrelevant for the attack of the Falklands. This is because it obliges member nations to come to each others' aid when attacked in the area covered by the treaty, which does not include the South Atlantic. And the US did not sit on the fence on that war. True, it started out by trying to smooth over the two sides' differences, but once it became clear that was not going to happen, it gave significant support to the UK, including new versions of the AIM-9 Sidewinder (the 9L version, if memory serves), which probably helped the Brits win against the Argentine air force.
As for the Suez crisis, only the people who were in Ike's inner circle know for sure what his motivations were for nixing the Anglo-French-Israeli plans for (re)taking the Suez canal, but for many outside observers, respect for the international order, including the values of the UN charter, are at least as good a possible motivation for Ike's actions as any possible dislike of his ww2 allies.
And yes, countries value their interests more than their friendships. This has been true long before Lord Palmerston. If you ever watch a documentary on the whole sequence of Greco-Persian wars with friends, and you play a drinking game where you take a shot every time a Greek city-state switches sides, make sure you have the local drunk-tank on speed-dial. And the only reason why you cannot do this with the wars between the cities of Sumer is that our records from that era are too sparse.
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„collectively“ as in „won the election“.
I know many US Americans who don’t fit yor description.
One of if not the biggest concern I have, is, whether another election outcome in the future will be respected. Or will it mark the end of US democracy.
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I am starting to wonder if AMD needs to start looking to move its corporate HQ to the old ATI HQ in Markham, Ontario, Canada that AMD acquired when it bought ATI in 2006. Strategic reasons for this move could include the EU possibly prohibiting ASML from exporting EUV technology to US-based companies like Intel or prohibiting TSMC and Samsung from offering nodes that require ASML's EUV technology to US-based companies if US-EU relations get worse. ASML Holding is based in the Netherlands, and is the inventor and only supplier of EUV technology in the world. EUV is critical for manufacturing computer chips based on bleeding-edge nodes as can be seen in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithography .
Other US-based chip designers probably might need to look to move their corporate HQs out of the USA as well.
Other US-based chip designers probably might need to look to move their corporate HQs out of the USA as well.
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Well of course they are--it only makes sense. News would be if they weren't looking at their options for some reason.
And the tricky thing is, once you go through the hard work to decouple, you're highly unlikely to re-couple again, even if circumstances change back to the point where the original decoupling wouldn't be worth it anymore.
In other words, current events are doing irreparable damage. Business that is lost in the coming years probably isn't ever coming back to these U.S. firms.
Way to squander a moat, guys.
And the tricky thing is, once you go through the hard work to decouple, you're highly unlikely to re-couple again, even if circumstances change back to the point where the original decoupling wouldn't be worth it anymore.
In other words, current events are doing irreparable damage. Business that is lost in the coming years probably isn't ever coming back to these U.S. firms.
Way to squander a moat, guys.
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To Trump that only means that you're suckers and losers (exactly like he sees american servicepeople) and ripe for another shakedown!
The concepts of good faith, trust or even gratitude are completely alien to him.
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Yep. The National Reconnaissance Office ("The National Reconnaissance Office makes the world a better, safer, stronger place and ensures America remains the undisputed leader in space").
Well, it was until relatively recently when DOGE i
Our allies? would have to consider such compromised, given all that has transpired.
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Thatcher did not invoke it, so none of the NATO allies had any reason to respond to it. (And it looks like she couldn't have even had she wanted to – see above.)
As far as I know about this it was the final rearguard action of the dying British Empire and the US had no interest in investing its own political and very real capital into preserving that. It would have been a lost cause anyway.
Countries can build trust on pursuing common interests but that ends once one of them clarifies that shaking down absolutely everybody else like a two-bit mobster is their only attitude towards others!
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Even the massive deterioration we are seeing now is still very, very far removed from the European Union embargoing critical technologies from the USA!
Retaliatory tariffs are almost certain now as they had been enacted against the similarly stupid trade war started by GW Bush and Trump #1 already.
But the EU's primary interest now is to coax the USA back into the realm of rule of law at least eventually, even if major realignments and investments into Europe's independence are now being prioritized anyway.
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That already caused a very real rift between the USA under GW Bush and most european countries who stridently opposed the made-up lies that invasion was based on:
https://www.dw.com/en/munich-conference-opens-with-sharp-differences-over-iraq/a-774512
This was absolutely not a case of a "chickenshit" response except for a few, most notably Tony Blair!
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Only clueless bullies know nothing else but domination or submission and have absolutely no concept of what earned trust is all about, and all the benefits that normally flow from that!
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And they weren't necessarily much slower to get there than the USA alone to the still problematic F-22 and the still limping F-35!
It is practically certain that the next european fighter program will be multinational again. Neither of the member nations could go it alone without major compromises and there would be no point in ignoring the massive advantages of pan-european supply chains and shared program engagement, funding and probably purchasing.
Most likely, yes.
Ditching the F-35 lemon may well be a net positive after all!
It is Trump who is pulling away from NATO but the european allies remain very much motivated to keep strengthening NATO even and especially if the USA turns tail. Especially for the increasingly unhappily brexited UK NATO is a welcome structure to keep collaboration alive even while having no part in the European Union any longer.
(Brexit will almost certainly be reversed eventually, but it will likely take years before that long path back towards re-accession will even be opened, let alone completed.)
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I never really commented on that. I had said that there were essentially three individual countries you could buy modern fighter jets from. The US, France, and Russia. China seems to have some complexities I don't understand so I'd take a correction there. Japan seems to build under license, etc.
Someone disputed that and raise the Typhoon. I responded that no single country builds that.
In that instance, he odds of at least one country becoming a problem is higher (than a single source country), but on the other, it seems more possible to shift manufacturing from that country to the remainder of the consortium.
That Trump, and the Heritige foundation, and Musk, and the US GOP, and anyone else are the people pulling the levers doesn't change that this is exactly what Russia hoped for through their years of influence peddling, election meddling, and information warfare. There's a reason they've spent so long in social media with targeted disinformation.
And yea, Brexit looks similar. The result of a lot of forces, but one being hostile powers looking to weaken Europe engaging in disinformation.
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And I wasn't implying that you were, but the actual effort to conduct such development programs is a relevant aspect in this context!
Such a thing is just very unlikely to happen to the extent that it would endanger the whole project. Especially the core countries with the biggest workshares would have too much riding on it including future spending going to their industries for development and production.
And the EU is far less dysfunctional than some people imagine it to be, squabbling about relatively minor issues (or currently Orban's Hungary) notwithstanding. Even across 27 sovereign member countries it is actually much less dysfunctional than US politics on their own!
And of course Putin and Trump do much to motivate unity and sober priorities as we can already see.
Yes, the Brexit campaign has still not been investigated properly but there are suspicious indications that russian money was a major factor in its success.
But even so it has not worked out as Putin will have imagined: Brexit chagrin is increasing in the UK, the UK is again engaging constructively with the EU and the EU has actually been strengthened by Brexit instead of weakened.
More points in a very long list of tactical wins but strategic failures for Putin notably including his "3 days" campaign to overrun Ukraine which just happens to slog through its third year by now...
And that pattern of reaping unintended consequences obviously extends to Putin's minion Trump as well, with all of Trump's offensive foreign policies likely to do more damage to the USA than any benefits to show for them, including the dissolution of many business ties which had so far been based fundamentally on an essential basis of trust which Trump has now destroyed personally.
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