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Comment by Dzidas | Hacker News Reader

The biggest elephants in the room are cloud providers, but I didn't find an easy alternative yet (hetzner, ovhcloud). ATM, the idea to the business is sold, that data resides somewhere near by in a datacenter, EU proximity. However, the EU businesses are realising that, well, whole region is at a mercy of one person.

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Hetzner is great value, but their networking has a few issues:

1) Networking is mostly limited to 1Gbps. Even private networking. You can request a 10Gbps NIC, but it has to be housed in the correct data center and adds a $48 monthly fee.

2) Private networking is IPv4 only so dual-stack private networking isn't possible. Also each public IPv6 address is /64. Would be nice to get a /56 to setup dual-stack IPv6.

3) Can't specify a subnet to assign a server to when using hcloud API/Terraform. You have to specify the required IP on the subnet explicitly.

4) As I understand it, the private network traffic isn't truly secure between tenants, so needs to be encrypted between nodes anyway.

Still, I'm betting they'll fix these issues as their offering grows.

OVH and Hetzner are excellent companies. I doubt there would be any problem with them in the future.

Both companies are excellent, and I'd absolutely trust them with my business, but neither can replace something like AWS. The friends I have at companies who are actively using AWS are all relying on a fairly large number of AWS only services. Either they'd need to stand up their own replacements and host those services on VMs, or in some cases rewrite parts of their stack.

E.g. if you're using AWS Cognito then you're not going anywhere.

IMHO Aws is designed for totally embracing their philosophy and language. You don't understand two Aws Devs talking to each other. Even organizations are internally structured for Aws operations. This create something even stronger than a dependency.

Making yourself a subsided of Amazon was never wise. You exist as long as Amazon allows you to. It’s modern feudalism.

> Making yourself a subsided of Amazon was never wise

True, but the AWS pricing doesn't make sense otherwise. If you're not using the managed services, then the value proposition is no longer there. Using those services is what allows you to build massive systems for relatively cheap, with much less staff. We had a project that was to be moved from on-prem to Azure (same deal), it went from thousands of Euros per month to fitting into the a free-tier, but only because we could use managed services. Spinning up the same VMs would cost more than hosting it ourselves.

Exactly! You can get a bare minimum, like a virtual machine (EC2) or storage (S3), which probably enough for small and medium enterprises (SME). However, if we move beyond, I'm not sure as I don't have experience with them. Now, if I'm building a prototype, I want something quick and just a lack of Cognito is a deal breaker.

Other notable EU cloud providers are also STACKIT, IONOS, Cloud Ferro and Exoscale

OVH is an absolute joke.

People are really quick to forget the fire that destroyed one of their data centers a few years ago and which did not get addressed in any way by OVH for months.

They also learned nothing from it, and are repeating the exact same mistakes.

I stopped hosting even my personal blog on OVH because of how garbage it is.

Yes they are such chaos internally. Even their support tells you different things every time. I kept having issues around my IRC bouncer on one of my servers (kimsufi, their budget brands). Some support people said yeah no issue as long as you don't do anything illegal. Others said I'd get insta-banned, and sometimes I did have issues and had to call them to get re-enabled.

Now, I have to admit I haven't been a customer of them for 10 years due to exactly this. But yes the fires exposed a lot of the same I left them for.

I left to go to DigitalOcean but it became too expensive and then I found Scaleway which I'm a happy customer of for years now.

How about Scaleway?

I like them a lot but they only have EU DCs, if you are looking for Global (or at least Asia) you're out of luck for now. Perhaps this disconnect from US services might give them the impulse to spread out though! I'm really happy with them as a customer and I don't have needs beyond Europe anyway.

I've found Scaleway for AWS-style managed backend services fronted by Bunny (https://bunny.net/ - also EU-based & owned, but with global CDN DCs) works well! Bunny have nearly 30 DCs in Asia alone.

koyeb.com is an EU (France) alternative to fly.io

Have you used Koyeb? I really like fly.io, though it would of course be ideal if they weren't US-based.

Problem with Hetzner is they don't have the self hosted DCs in pacific region yet. They have Singapore for their PaaS solution, but if you want those cheap second hand servers then have to be in EU

What is their PaaS solution? Hetzner Cloud is IaaS.

Schwarz Group seems to be getting traction in that space. (stackit)

I think this is less of an issue than people actually think - if it gets to the point where this becomes a real problem, individual EU countries can force the datacenter owners like Google/MS to change ownership structure for these datacenters to EU-based subsidiaries or completely new companies if they want to continue to operate.

I wouldn't buy that - if there is a dead switch then sorry, I don't want to pay that with my business.

Virtually all foreign companies that set-up shop in Europe (or anywhere else) do so by setting up local subsidiaries.

Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, etc. When you deal with all of these guys in Europe you deal with their local subsidiary(ies), not the US mothership.

I'm aware of their use of subsidiaries, but is this true for ownership of the buildings and hardware, or just something done for tax purposes?

Usually everything is through subsidiaries. For tax and profit allocation purposes the way it works is that you set up subsidiaries in tax-friendly jurisdictions and then channel the profits to them through contracts between subsidiaries.

The general point is what does "moving away from US cloud services" mean, then?

Does it mean not using infrastructure actually located in the US? Or does it mean effectively boycotting US-owned companies that may be fully located, including infrastructure, in Europe?

This doesn't matter as far as the concerns about US warrantless surveillance laws go because those laws also apply to subsidiaries of US companies. IIRC Microsoft tried to argue that its EU subsidiary could not comply with US requests and lost.

I wonder if there will be some kind of setup like AWS did in China - with a local partner managing the DC.

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