Hetzner does not have all the AWS like "cloud" bells and whistles, however their VPS-es and especially dedicated servers are first class. In many, many situations it makes much more sense (both from costs perspective and ease of migration to other provider) to use dedicated servers and hire someone who will manage them, than throwing tons of money into Amazon pockets to get "X-large instances" that have power of old Celeron laptop (exaggerating a bit, but not that much).

Or, in case their virtual servers suck (which I don't know about), running VM hosts on Hetzner servers as a service.

Regarding their virtual servers: They're great, don't get me wrong! But it's a tiny piece in the puzzle that is AWS, starting from things like VPC/Security Groups to managed services like load balancers, gateways, cross-DC availability, etc. And that's just the EC2 part.

To give an anecdote regarding Hetzner and them building out an S3 clone: I once asked support if there was a way for me to upgrade the 10TB max object storage solution (Hetzner StorageBox) to more than that since I had outgrown it. Simple reply: No, but you can spin up multiple storage boxes...

EDIT: I guess DO, Linode, ... are closer equivalents to Hetzner?

Hetzner is nice. We also have Scaleway in the same category.

oh yeah, AWS is terrible with support! I have to rely on their support forum for any support as 20% of our spend for crappy support is just not feasible. I.e. I get no support whatsoever. You can trick them a bit by wrapping it up in a sales inquiry though.

That is one thing i fail to understand, since it goes against the lore of decentralized, packet switching, nuke proof, and so on.

It may have been prohibitively expensive for many in the not so recent past, but it isn't anymore in more and more places. Even redundantly connected.

And to be honest, some pizzeria or hairdresser could be run from some NAS.

Just search for someFAANG is down on HN, to get a feel for the ripples it causes globally when they have a hiccup.

How is that different?

Amazon, and Google, and Microsoft... don't win cloud business because people are dumb, they win it because they offer a better product.

And bonus you can write of the depreciation cost of hardware in your accounts.

The idea itself of supporting Europeans alternative to face American and Chinese tech giants is by itself noble (and I think necessary).

However, the usual way it is done is a disaster: top-bottom, funding some existing behemoth company that will have no capacity whatsoever to innovate, nor will to do so. But they will get the money because they have good connections.

If you think about it, it is not very different of the American military-industrial complex and the way the DoD/Army/DoE fund their programs (F-35 ?).

Creating a good environment for startups and giving grants to several ones in parallel to create an internal competitive market would be both cheaper and more effective.

But that would imply first a generation switch....

That's the tragedy of the government-backed tech in France. You also have a lot of very skilled tech companies there, but they are not the ones getting government support to grow further.

That's almost an universal tragedy.

The good techies, the innovative engineers or the avant-garde researchers... Typically, the one doing the work... are generally not the one doing outreach, going around in convention, networking, making connections with politicians.... And getting Grants.

On the other side, many conference/convention/"one-man-show" dudes are generally much better to talk than to produce anything useful.

Their is a million of example of that, in both side of the Atlantic ocean.

I would say it is less tragic in America, mainly because there is a Venture Capitalism culture there that Europe do not have.

Because when WWII ended and Europe was rebuilding, in some low-key corner of the West Coast of the US, some military contractors were trying to figure out what would their next projects look like (and getting more money from the US Gov. to fight the Russians, of course)

Then these guys became the best (read, selling more) in one thing called semiconductors then the best at this other new thing that was called computers and that's how it went.

And I might add that being the junction of tech and (accidentally) some weird hippie corner of the US might have helped in some aspects.

But one of the biggest issues in Europe is that it's not very unified yet. A French startup will launch a French product, not a "European" product. The only way to get buy-in from enough people is to have a multinational startup and product. An initiative promoted by both Germany and France has a better chance since it may appeal to ~150 million citizens.

Yet the overall scene is not quite as dynamic as the one on the other side of the Atlantic. Startups never seem to be as well funded or advertised. People take fewer risks here, there's no obvious culture of risking it all to found a startup. The whole ecosystem is not designed around this. Maybe this is changing now but today the market really isn't flooded with local products but rather with products of Silicon Valley. A lot of investments in European startups still come from SV instead of being local. There are some products that are big in one European country but don't really seem to make it over the border and it's probably because Europe is not as unified a marked as it could be.

You must understand that in Europe, using such language in good company is considered rather rude, or at the very least, irresponsible.

Europe is the place where there are still strongly held belief that proper centralized planning will beat market forces every time.

The fact that this mental model doesn't fit reality is considered a minor detail, it's just that the plan needs a little bit of refinement.

It's a very top to bottom decision process (starting from the Government/MP), with big bucks involved, and very little understanding of how to drive these tech projects, all the way to the bottom.

What I don't understand is the status-quo after years and years of failed projects. What a waste of tax payer money.

I would not be so sure. I looked at the IT salaries there (both as a permanent and as a contractor) and it just doesn’t make sense to stay there when you could earn way more money elsewhere in Europe.

In the post-covid world of increased remote working, the brain drain will likely increase tenfold since developers won't even have to leave the country anymore.

If remote works, it won't really be a brain drain anymore, because they'll be paying taxes and spending their money in France :)

Other cities in the US are much more in line with the big EU cities in that regard.

If 10 years ago there were predominantly outfits servicing larger US/UK/Scandinavia companies, now it's shifting towards building their own products/services. Basically the guys learned how to do it and not they start spreading the wings. The only thing missing in Europe is active and mature VC sector that could match that in the US.

If I, a french worker, stay working in France, I pay French taxes and my lineage and social impact remain in France. I can't imagine how that is not a plus pour mon cher pays.

What surprises me is that these companies seem to either hide their French roots, and are often ignored by the academic world. When I was student in engineering school, the only companies we would hear from where the big French corps like Orange, Cap Gemini, Thales and co.

I'm sad to see that these French companies don't get the support and publicity they deserve. I hoped that the French tech thing would help these companies, but I only ever hear about startup with vague pitches founded by business school graduates which don't know a thing nor care about any "tech".

Personally I am of the philosophy that if they have to appeal to nationalism they suck as they lack any other qualifications or other features to cite first.

Anyway the US is really at the bottom of the list. Most people would prefer anywhere in Europe or at worse Canada and Australia.

Too bad none of the immigration numbers bear this out.

Friendly reminder that what you prefer does not necessarily generalize.

They do. The only country in Europe I can think of where the US is the favored destination is Germany.

Note that by « most people » I was implicitly referring to my people, and in a larger sense Europeans. Not humanity at large.

What are your monthly expenses?

One reason EU salaries are so low is that everyone is afraid of discussing their salaries.

In the USA there is levels.fyi with widely validated salaries.

We could've gone the Chinese way and just close the door to American companies, effectively forcing the local populace to use home-grown tools, but we're too nice for that. Instead we try to compete fairly in an open market, except that in practice most multinational corporations manage not to pay taxes in most European countries and they have a huge headstart so it's not really all that fair in the end.

It's easy to be cynical about it but again, tech is too important to just say "well, we lost, I guess we'll increase wine production instead". I want the EU to keep trying.

>Old, well-connected companies like Bull that have zero ability to innovate and not a clue about the domain will rake in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money and deliver some garbage platform that no one will use except other government-funded moonshot companies.

What alternative is there though? The government also tried to help small start ups and incubators with fiscal advantages. We have the brains, we have the means, the government is just trying to make it happen. The hope is that eventually it'll manage to seed the industry. We also do have significant tech companies in Europe today that actually do interesting work, so it's a bit unfair to say that we only have "ridiculous projects" that are "never actually doing anything remotely useful".

I'm French too, I know that we love to be cynical about everything, always see the glass half empty but it's not a very productive attitude. "MPs will make sure their buddies get the contracts", as if France was suddenly the most corrupt country in the world. Look around, see what the rest of the world is doing. We're not doing that poorly.

They all seem to rally around an kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare of interacting with anything state-related... Especially orgs collecting payroll taxes... The stories I see, where you get nailed huge fines every year, for small nitpicky details. They all talk of nightmares where some admin comes and destroy their company with a single inscrutable letter...

That being said the problem with these testimonies is that you'll often hear people complain when something go wrong but nobody is going to tell you how great the French tax system is when it plays in their favor. It's... whatever the opposite of survivor bias is. People also like to deflect the blame away from them when their companies go under. When you don't have COVID-19 you have to find something else.

But I'm sure that there are things that can be improved regardless, I just wish we were more constructive about it instead of just throwing the whole system in the garbage and lighting another cigarette while looking pensively at empty space Camus-style.

And I also think part of the problem is overzealous government orgs, who I'm sure take their job very seriously, but are not encouraged to think mistakes are made with no intent to cheat, by default.

I liked the idea of a 'by default we think you made a mistake, our laws and procedures are too complex, let's settle this without penalty, with a generous paiement plan... let's wait a bit before we punish you'... I don't know...

   Macron and Merkel learn 
   Javascript and ...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/prime...

[2] https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/0B2G2LjIu7Wbdfjha...

Very reasonable indeed IMO if e.g. German police has to use AWS because of lack of alternatives, or the countless local authorities running on windows.

On the other hand, it is not the US to blame for their tech-supremacy. It is Germany and France to blame.

There might be many reasons to cite why we lack behind. But the whole spirit behind a government-google, a government-aws, government-yaddayadda comes across as being more part of the problem than part of the solution.

While there may be some good for avoiding outside control it is a cover for their drooling about shoving others inside their domain of control.

They didn't want to build Google / Facebook / Whatever before those existed. Instead, they want to build a "French Google". Qwant is an example of that. Whatever they're trying to accomplish with Orange in the cloud business is just a "French AWS".

During the lockdown when everyone was using Zoom, some politician was unhappy that EU countries would depend on foreign technology. Solution? Build a European Zoom! I find this kind of ironic, seeing how Skype used to be European...

https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108986-six-ans-apres-son-lan...

https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108320-qwant-mail-fail-linag...

turnover and employee discontent: https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108123-le-cahier-doleances-s...

Deepl (https://www.deepl.com/en/translator) will do a great job at translating those articles.

Having interacted with some of the folks at conferences I'm pretty sure there's a core of people in there somewhat committed to open source which was nice to see. But in terms of innovation none of the projects branded as "German X as a service" over the last decades stood out as particularly innovative or remotely well managed.

[1] https://cloud.telekom.de/resource/blob/data/90924/6196063473...

Airbus did not arise from the government putting out a tender for an airline company to be delivered in working order. There were many smaller, working, profitable aviation companies first.

[1] They all disappeared absent subsidies/tariffs.

A company like Airbus makes some sort of sense since the government heavily funds Boeing/Lockheed Martin via defense contracts. But Amazon/Google and VC-backed tech startups and companies?

Not to mention that the pay for software developers and engineers in general in Europe is ridiculously low for a comparable position in the United States, or even Japan. How are they going to retain talent?

* A good, free education system * Social security * Good healthcare system * Proper democracy * Politicians who aren't clowns * A total of 500 police killings ... in total since 1950

The US is close to becoming a failed state due to the increasing wealth and income gap.

Also, please do me a favour and read up a bit on the history of silicon valley and us innovation. It's hard to claim the government investment isn't a big factor. The DoD is behind a lot of stuff.

And I say this with envy - the US model of government investment is way better than the European one. OP correctly described the issues we have.

(Not saying Germany is perfect and the US is pure shit, I was being overly provocative to establish an extreme counter point)

None of these things (for good or bad) have anything to do with making good tech products.

I think about this quite a bit, while the median middle class salary is higher in the US, the burden to fund everything out of pocket here is enormous. If salaries are 10-20% higher in the US, much of that goes out the window to fund things like health care, retirement, higher education, daycare/pre-K education, high rents, etc. Things that most Europeans take for granted. All of a sudden that 10-20% gap seems much smaller.

Also keep in mind that not everyone working in tech in the US is making SV level salaries.

A medium/median salaried person would be much better off in Western Europe for sure.

Completely delusional in the face of the past thirty years or so, but it remains a worryingly common talking point in WE “tech adjacent” circles.

EU taxpayers consider unacceptable that govt funding goes to waste, but in the end gov funding goes to waster anyway because the amount of bureaucracy is staggering and we don't even get internal competition like the US.

So we waster money and we basically burn it without any positive outcome.

In my experience, many EU equivalent programs have a strong bias toward being the "second-mover" because it is seen as too risky to be the first-mover. When opportunities arise to be a legitimate first-mover in Europe with a government program, everything tends to grind to a halt due to analysis paralysis because everyone is terrified of failure. I've seen a number of cases where the US showed years late but ended up taking the lead because they can make decisions so quickly and back that with large quantities of money.

Granted, I never worked in a Volkswagen-style mega-corp, so my perception is biased.

How did you get that impression? Hm K, maybe not horror clown grade, rather sad clowns.

Its a lot easier to offer those services when everyone has roughly the same income, the same education, the same IQ, the same genetics, the same family experience.

It's so boring that in every discussion where some other country does something better than the US, people find a million reasons why this could never work there.

Pretty sure the strict and difficult process of getting a working visa has something to do with that as well, not just that not everyone on the planet is interested in migrating.

For me the salaries in the silicon Valley are very attractive, but the social issues in the country makes me prefer Europe. Even though my salary is ridiculously low compared to USA.

Salaries in some of our neighbours like Germany are much higher and still only a small percent of the talented people move there.

Money is an incentive for sure. But it's not an absolute factor.

With CIA funding, amongst others. https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

> It invests in high-tech companies for the sole purpose of keeping the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United States intelligence capability.

I've said it before, it still puzzles me how come the Russians let the Google StreetView car do its thing on the streets of Moscow and other big Russian cities, the Chinese were smarter than that.

Because of us government funding which created silicon valley. Silicon Valley itself is pretty much a DoD project. The foundation of the internet and many of these companies were laid by government - direct spending, subsidies, tax breaks and in amazon's case, legal protection ( they didn't have to collect state taxes ) until fairly recently.

> A company like Airbus makes some sort of sense since the government heavily funds Boeing/Lockheed Martin via defense contracts.

This is silicon valley.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#History_(pre-19...

> But Amazon/Google and VC-backed tech startups and companies?

Many of the VCs had indirect government ties. But that's besides the point. Amazon/Google doesn't exist without silicon valley which the government created, government subsidies and government protection.

And this isn't including the government's role in keeping international markets open to google/amazon/etc. Notice how there wasn't much pushback from most countries while google/amazon gobbled up entire countries? Now compare that to intense pushback china gets for any and everything.

> Not to mention that the pay for software developers and engineers in general in Europe is ridiculously low for a comparable position in the United States, or even Japan. How are they going to retain talent?

Considering american tech companies own the european market why wouldn't american developers get higher pay? If europeans protected their market and european tech companies take over the european market, tech pay would inevitably rise.

Its much easier to trust democratic governments than autocratic ones. If China were a democracy I highly doubt this would be the case. Sure some would push back but many would back it too. The push back that China receives is also because of their economic colonialism and I guess rightfully so. German car companies for example dont receive as much push back. Ericsson/Nokia doesn't receive as much pushback as their counterpart Huwawei.

History shows otherwise. They are equally shady. After all, it was a democracy that broke every treaty with the natives and exterminated them. But I guess it all depends on your biases and agenda. Certainly, nobody can objectively say that US, Britain, France, etc as any less shadier than any autocratic countries.

> If China were a democracy I highly doubt this would be the case.

Really? Bolivia is a democracy. Venezuela is a democracy. Russia is a democracy. If china were a democracy, the chinese people would vote to fully annex hong kong and taiwan. And being a democracy, I suppose the chinese government would have to follow through, huh?

> The push back that China receives is also because of their economic colonialism and I guess rightfully so.

Now this is rather absurd. Especially considering it is us trying to force china to adopt our ways. But agenda tends to blind people.

> German car companies for example dont receive as much push back. Ericsson/Nokia doesn't receive as much pushback as their counterpart Huwawei.

But iranian, venezuelan, russian, etc companies do. And conveniently saudi arabian companies don't. They are not a democracy.

So there goes your theory about democracy. It has nothing to do with democracy. It's about geopolitics and power. The need to maintain dominance over the world as long as we can.

US: Andy von Bechtolsheim meets with two bright guys, sees the huge potential of their algorithm, walks back to his Porsche, signs them a 100,000$ cheque, and a few years later we have a global tech giant called Google who the rest of the world either admires or is afraid of.

   "something great"

That's why the EU started big funding of research on cloud computing after Amazon made money with it, started big funding of research on search engine when Google made money with it, started big funding of research on AI/ML after Google made money with it ...

I predict that the EU will go all in on supporting research on quantum computing when Google sells it in a big way.

Qwant is poorly managed, but that doesn't mean every project is doomed to fail. If you would judge Google success based on their failed projects, it would be the same conclusion.

The problem has many layers, Europe is not really united, which makes most markets small, the governments are pretty bad at managing investiments in tech fields, and there's not enough private capital going around pouring money into this.

It's far from perfect, there's definitely stuff they do wrong, but it's also far from being the Quaero fiasco.

And yes results are bad in spanish.

Do you have arguments or is it just a blank criticism? OVH for instance is built in part on OpenStack, what's so very wrong with it?

I hope they learned their mistakes and won't do them again but I fear they'll just do it the same way.

What the French government doesn't understand is that you don't create a tech giant the same way you create the TGV, the Ariane rocket or Airbus. That model worked for those giant industrial projects, but it doesn't work for tech.

I'll go one step further and make conjecture that the entire Gaia-X thingie is likely from the get-go a nice little scheme to milk public money directly into the pockets of the proponents of the whole affair.

Brussels is teeming with firms whose specialty and sole purpose is fabricating bogus "projects" to squeeze EU research grant money into their and their clients pockets.

OCaml is the French SML ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9kJrwkfNp4&t=1320

I did an internship there (before it was bought, in 2012), the river of public money had mostly dried up and I felt like the company didn't really knew what to do, even if there was some nifty tech being developed here and there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_int...

https://www.chinese-antique-porcelain.com/european-porcelain...

The US have a history of stealing tech secrets from the British:

https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-na...

Hell, even the name America for which we give to the United States today was stolen since America was originally given to "Latin America" named after Amerigo who had only set foot in Latin America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerigo_Vespucci

I was also astounded when I found out how much US brands actually copy each other. So really, there is no shame in copying from others first before innovating, because that's what essentially learning is all about right? I mean we are constantly standing on the shoulder of giants, but for some reason, for certain sectors, we tend to lock out that process.

To be fair, that's the same in London or SF :)

My understanding is that it’s the opposite. Software is significantly underpaid but you can do quite well with a typical paper-pushing bullshit job.

I know they have some small offices on campus at top universities where they employ a hand full of PhDs for ML/AI research but that's a drop in the ocean.

Sophia-Antipolis is mostly semiconductor and hardware and has the weather and property prices of SoCal without the pay.