I don't want Europe to grow its own hyperscalers.

[liw@toot.liw.fi]

I don't want Europe to grow its own hyperscalers. Companies that become too big are a problem no matter who owns them. Instead, lets bring a healthy and thriving ecosystem of small and medium sized organizations to do hosting and who co-operate.

(Edit: I'm muting replies to this. I can't deal with the toxic fetishization of status quo today.)

[andrew_shadura@mastodon.social]

@liw indeed. I love working with small companies. Feels much better, more personal. They usually care about their reputation, often resulting in higher quality.

[felixf@chaos.social]

@liw I don’t believe that scale is the primary issue.
First big hurdle is creating a product that manages infrastructure through an API that is as comprehensive as Amazon‘s et al.

[elricofmelnibone@mastodon.social]

@liw Tell that to European governments. Whenever they send out a public tender for anything, there are requirements on size, capital, headcount that effectively mean SMEs can't compete.

[datenwolf@chaos.social]

@felixf @liw

Not to endorse a specific product/vendor, but this looks pretty comprehensive to me:

https://docs.hetzner.cloud/

[isotopp@infosec.exchange]

@liw Yeah, when building data centers, capex is a thing.

It is really HARD being a small data center operator.

It is also really hard to use a small data center, see also the unavailability of everything all of the time in Azure (unlike AWS and Google, Azure has very many locations, close to where you are, which are tiny compared to AWS or Google installations. That means the instance type or service you want isn't available to you when you need it, in the location you need it).

[kiliange@mastodon.social]

@datenwolf @felixf @liw I think it lacks e.g. an IAM offering. @bert_hubert covers this well in this article https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/dear-hosting-providers-you-sell-lumber-and-not-furniture/

[audin@nerdculture.de]

@liw I work for very large international organizations. I can't imagine having to work with local "medium-sized" companies in every region, with their own billing systems, or companies that don't speak English (Belgium, France, Brazil). On the other hand, I wish, especially for our European clients, that everything would run on non-US-dependent hosting providers. But just ask SAP; they only work with AWS, Azure, or Google data centers.

[audin@nerdculture.de]

@liw On the other hand, that's also reassuring, because the three big companies use SAP and are dependent on it. And conversely, SAP is dependent on them. No one's going to pull the plug on themselves. Because if the US corporations were to pull the plug on SAP in their data centers, then 90% of the top US companies would be left without an ERP system.