we were over globalized. COVID showed us that when we couldnt even produce life saving medicines domestically. If the take away from world war 1 was too much nationalism, the take away from covid is, too much globalism.
Resilient cultures are by definition market inefficient.
Even assuming this is true, EU cloud providers no longer have to compete with their American counterparts on an even footing thanks to the insanity coming out of the White House (and American society more generally). There's a very big push to get off of American providers, and many (though not all) customers are willing to make sacrifices to do so.
If providers like OVH play their cards right, they can use this sudden influx of cash to both scale up, and improve their offerings. There's a lot of money on the table right now.
I use AWS and OVH at work and this has not my experience.
AWS has more services, but a lot of those are of dubious quality. I'd love to never have to use redshift or EMR again for instance. OVH is more basic, but what it has tends to work at least.
> AWS has more services, but a lot of those are of dubious quality.
Being cynical AWS has more services because many of those are deliberately siloed in order to create a separate billing item, i.e.:
"You want to use AWS Foo ...great, welcome to AWS ! But unless you want to re-invent the wheel re-programming the standard workflow, you should really use AWS Bar and AWS Baz alongside it. Dontcha' like all the cute names we've given them ? Here are all the price sheets, don't forget to read the small print ... good luck figuring out how much it will cost you".
Oh I agree. China is clearly outplaying everyone. But EU surely doesn't want to replace one leash (US tech stack) with different leash (Chinese tech stack).
I keep wondering though. Is insane amount of compute really that crucial? Aren't most real computing needs served well with not so cutting edge tech? I am 5-10 years behind on most of my machines. Servers we have at work are very modest (and outdated) yet the software these servers power are still valuable. Maybe EU could run on some domestic RISC-V cheapo chips.
There'll be a vacuum filled by non-US brands, China is learning and given they'll push to be independent eventually they'll compete with AMD/Intel/Nvidia, Europe has ARM.
The worst thing in the long-term for American hardware makers is for the US to block other countries to purchase from them and having that money invested in alternatives.
I think companies should just allocate raw computing and put agnostic stacks on top of it instead of using whatever shinny serverless G-Azurezon Serverless Function Lambda Cloud with NOTREDIS CACHE and LOCAL FLAVOR OF KUBERNETES plus the new OTEL-BUT-INVENTED-HERE monitoring solution.
My fingers always ache when I hear praise for the company that through its incompetence nearly lost me my company's domain name... twice. Shame on me for staying with them.
> Most EU companies, including this one, offer subpar services compared to their American counterparts
Not true.
But you know what the best thing about the EU companies is ?
Transparent pricing.
EU company: Yes, you really can accurately calculate to the nearest cent how much your compute instance will cost you and exactly what you are getting for that money. No surprises.
US company:Is that Compute Savings Plan, EC2 Savings Plan, On-Demand or Spot. What speed is my network "up to" ? And then of course the big "I DUNNO" in relation to "how many IOPS am I going to be charged for EBS disk transfer ?"
EU company: Of course we don't charge you for LIST etc. on S3. We only charge you for off-network GETs and the associated data transfer, on-network is free.
US company: What do you mean LIST etc. should be free ?
You know what else I like about the EU companies ?
At least two of them allow pay as you go from a reducing credit balance.
Yes that's right US companies. It IS possible to give your customers a way to 100% guarantee you will never have an "oops I just spent a million dollars overnight" moment.
Depends how hooked into the "cloud infrastructure" ecosystem they are. If it's a provider of vms which are easy to move from one provider to another that's one thing, if it's reliant on the latest cool aws thing that's another.
They are going to have a much harder time weaning off American cloud infrastructure and on to something purely domestic.