I had a person I trust a lot telling me that "if we go with a bare metal provider like GCore we'd have to hire someone", his reason for bringing that up was that the cost difference would be justified by not having to hire someone,.
However a GCore €400,000k/y bill becomes a €6,000,000~ if you were to use a public cloud, even with the scaling up and down when not in use (we are an extreme case of needing a lot of dumb unreliable compute thats geographically distributed).
I can hire a lot of sysadmins for that money, but I probably don't even need one because public clouds also need devops staff to manage the complexity anyway.
Anyway, I am a former sysadmin. I am confident that I can identify competence in the requisite areas.
At a company if a department isn't working out you just restructure and move on, but in the government, that team is going to retire in your org and collect pension from you, and there's very little you can do about that.
Lack of cost control or effective use of a cloud provider leads to spiralling uncontrollable costs.
For the UK at least, that ship has _long_ since sailed....
It's just completely insane to me that they would make the gov internet infrastructure completely (geopolitically) dependent on another country AND just literally give all their (citizens') data away AND pay for that "privilege"?!
I mean if the government can't host the government's websites using tech from the government's country, maybe it would be better to just forget about the whole cyberweb thing altogether? Just turn it off?
A lot of people have a very unrealistic picture of what government budgets are like.
my $12/year VPS does better than us-east-1
quality varies
My point is that NOT hosting it yourself (as a government) costs WAY more in the long run. See my points above.
The same goes for companies in Europe who literally host their trade-secrets (designs, sales, the entire company) on US-servers (OneDrive, Google Drive, etc). The US is the home of their competitors. Who cares about infrastructure costs if you're PAYING to give your trade secrets away to your competitor(s)?!
I mean I'm sure Xi or any other president would be happy to govern the UK in exchange for a small fee? Much more cost effective!
I'm sure the Chinese would also be more than happy to build the UK's roads and (government) buildings at a great discount.
You still don't see my point? We're talking essential infrastructure and Geo-politically highly sensitive data.
That blocked use of AWS for a lot of UK departments due to data sovereignty concerns.
This is a very good question, and bears repeating.
It's not a massive database as well. 400GB with 1k inserts/second.
Spoken like someone who has never worked in the public sector. Hiring can easily take 6+ months or more due to an ever-increasing list of requirements that government HR is required to fulfill, not least of which is passing a security clearance which takes even more time. The best people on the market rarely have the patience for this. Once your employees do get hired - on-boarding can take another few/several/more months, getting various permissions, technical documentation, etc. Everything is out-of-date because making changes requires committee consensus, in a culture that is risk-averse, because nobody notices when you out-perform (after all, the requirements were also set by a committee that doesn't know who you are) but something going wrong is grounds for termination. Public sector work over-relies on hiring contractors precisely to shift blame for failure to the contractors. Managed database services are excellent tools to shift this kind of catastrophic risk of data loss to a contractor/vendor (who is managing the database).
Governments not owning their data isn't due to technical or budgetary limitations - it's strictly cultural.
Outsourcing the complexity to run and maintain a secure reliable database cluster really is making good use of the managed service model.
Do you think this move didn't take even longer to plan?
> to shift blame
That reason is much more plausible.
EDIT If they are looking for money id like to participate a bit in the seed round