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Re:It is no longer safe to move our governments and societie... by 0xbadcafebee on Sunday February 23, 2025 @09:17PM (#43155221)
> but move where?

For hosting their government's own specific computing needs, and assuming a respectable GDP, they can build their own datacenters (pretty trivial) and hire contractors to build cloud computing environments (more challenging).

Open source cloud isn't too hard. There's OSS for about 80% of software needed for a cloud computing service provider, and you fill in the rest with proprietary and custom stuff. There's already several providers (one in the US, several in the EU/other countries) that offer "public cloud" using OpenStack. They literally give you, the customer, your own OpenStack cluster, and bill you for what you use. It's insanely easy and powerful. Yet everybody still uses the more popular providers (DO, Hetzner, Scaleway, etc), despite the fact that they all have proprietary interfaces, without anything close to feature parity with OpenStack. I guess people really like vendor lock-in and lack of features.

The hardware is more challenging to source; the chips all come from Taiwan or China, and the US and China make most of the good hardware.

For private business in their country, they might offer grants and tax incentives to EU companies to build out more local cloud hosting services. But since it's the EU I'm sure it's massively more complicated than that.

Re:It is no longer safe to move our governments and societie... by Mossy9 on Monday February 24, 2025 @12:36AM (#43156119)
Interesting, thank you! Care to link any OpenStack providers? Do you have experience working with any of them?
Re:It is no longer safe to move our governments and societie... by matt-p on Monday February 24, 2025 @04:23AM (#43157448)
Rackspace where the archetypal provider and they sucked. The irony is I've only actually ever really seen internal open stack instances, providers for whatever reason seem to prefer to roll thier own
Re:It is no longer safe to move our governments and societie... by junto on Tuesday February 25, 2025 @03:06AM (#43169385)
They were great early on until they got bought and then they sucked.

All of the talented people left around 2013 if memory serves me right.

Re:It is no longer safe to move our governments and societie... by gilPiHlq on Monday February 24, 2025 @05:34AM (#43157991)
Re:It is no longer safe to move our governments and societie... by 0xbadcafebee on Monday February 24, 2025 @10:53AM (#43160958)
In the US:

- The one I have experience using is Genesis Hosting out of Chicago. Their website looks like it's from 1997, because it is from 1997... But they provide a nice OpenStack solution that works well.

- I haven't used Vexxhost, they seem to provide something OpenStack-related, but their website is all marketing bullshit, so I have no idea what you actually get.

- RamNode seems to provide access to the OpenStack API.

In Europe:

- OVH Public Cloud is still short on details, but based on some verbiage buried in the marketing BS, it looks like you do get an OpenStack interface.

- Open Telekom Cloud by T-Mobile seems to give you an OpenStack interface.

- Acville Cloud is based in Romania.

- Cyso Cloud (formerly Fuga Cloud) is based in the Netherlands.

- IntoVPS seems to provide its services on OpenStack, but no idea if the API is open. They build a custom OpenStack console called Fleio.

There's a lot more listed here: https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/public-clouds/

Re:It is no longer safe to move our governments and societie... by busterarm on Monday February 24, 2025 @10:18AM (#43160507)
As someone who runs OpenStack clusters and uses public cloud providers, I think it's worth noting a few things:

- Outside of the Telco sector, OpenStack is basically dead.

- Even within Telco, everyone sees the writing on the wall of OS being dead and is looking to make the jump.

- OpenStack is a cluster of poorly-interoperating, poorly-documented products -- The customer experience is fucking terrible.

- DO, Hetzner, etc all offer a superior product.

- None of those products even come close to touching the features of the big three clouds or even Oracle.

If your needs could be well-served by DO, Hetzner, etc., then your needs could be well served by racks in a colo.

Past that scale, American cloud providers are really your only option if you want that level of automation.

(Or Chinese cloud providers, but largely assuming that's a non-option)

Re:It is no longer safe to move our governments and societie... by 0xbadcafebee on Monday February 24, 2025 @10:57AM (#43161007)
Well as someone who's actually used them as a customer, OpenStack hosting providers do give more functionality than DO, Hetzner, etc, plus they have an open API. None of them compete with the "big 4" public clouds (everyone forgets Oracle is still around...) but if all you want is IaaS then you don't need them.

I know OpenStack is a tire fire to maintain, I've worked with it for large-scale on-prem data solutions. But if a company wants to kill themselves to maintain it for me, I'm happy to pay for the privilege.

Re:It is no longer safe to move our governments and societie... by busterarm on Monday February 24, 2025 @12:09PM (#43162018)
Being a customer of an OpenStack provider isn't exactly a picnic. I could show you a long stack of support tickets from all of the things constantly going wrong.
Re:It is no longer safe to move our governments and societie... by evolve2k on Monday February 24, 2025 @02:53PM (#43164123)
Given a long list of support tickets vs Effectively relying on responsible stewardship by Musk and the King of America, I suspect there will be many a developer who find the long list of ticketed issues to be the less hard problem to tackle.
Re:It is no longer safe to move our governments and societie... by busterarm on Monday February 24, 2025 @03:05PM (#43164288)
There are sadly a lot of "sky is falling" type people out there yes. This is why we have to determine a threat model before we implement a security response...

But that's also the point of my other comment in the thread -- a French company builds basically all of the physical infrastructure that datacenters run on. This attitude can be applied both ways.

Re:It is no longer safe to move our governments and societie... by nyrikki on Monday February 24, 2025 @01:32PM (#43163050)
> OpenStack is a cluster of poorly-interoperating, poorly-documented products -- The customer experience is fucking terrible.

I assume you were unfortunately a victim of Mirantis/Fuel/Puppet/Mcollective... or one of the 'converged' solutions.

While I wouldn't call OpenStack "fun" Especially in the Essex to Icehouse era, where vendors seriously impacted the code stability...It is just a well documented collection of separate components that interact using REST api's and RPC like calls over a message bus.

Nvidia, Cern, JPL, and lots of smaller companies that need private clouds and have the expertise are still running OpenStack.

For me the main value is the ability to have portability between public and private.

If you just use the ansible playbooks included in every OS repo, it is pretty easy to roll your own deployments that are quite easy to maintain if and only if your company is mature enough to follow that model and isn't subject to the soicotechnical issues that plague containers too.

While the workflow changes, the hard parts of OS and k8s, including networking, monitoring, etc,.. are exactly the same.

As a random example of what always screws this up let me point at kubespray, which is not unique at all.

Note the: > Remove docker requirements https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray/issues/6400

That is because, like many projects, they didn't respect the natural boundaries of the node components, and they are now paying the price for that debt.

k8s and OS from an infrastructure point of view are equal in complexity. It isn't instantiating a container with CRI foo, or libvirt command bar that is the hard part.

It is the distributed computing, virtual networking , resource allocation, federation, API's etc... that is hard.

Note, if you think that the "OS is dead" for all needs, especially in the telco space, you may want to dig into what containers actually are. They are just namespaces running on an OS, and it will still be horses for corses as to what is appropriate.

Especially if you are using the easy ways of instantiating hardware for k8s, almost all of them are highly insecure by default and you are going to have to dig into the same style of systems with similar components or you will have a leak of data at some point.

I wish there was something better than OS, but if you use a dev mindset and not a glass house IT mindset it is a very useful tool that may be the least worst option for you for some needs.

Re:It is no longer safe to move our governments and societie... by busterarm on Monday February 24, 2025 @02:16PM (#43163659)
No and No. It's not about the complexity of it or being any worse/better than K8s.

It's about the endless bugs and regressions and laundry list of stupid problems caused by inadequate processes by OpenStack developers.

For example, let's say you're running Cinder v3. Cinder 3.59. You want to get the volumes that you have attached to an instance, so you curl the API:

/cinder/v3/<instance id>/attachments. You get a 404.

You get a 404 because you didn't pass this header: "OpenStack-API-Version: volume 3.27". Because Cinder defaults to Cinder 3.01 behavior even when you're running 3.59. Attachments were only added in 3.27. So even though you're trying to curl a route that wouldn't even exist in 3.01 and you're running a version clearly later than 3.27, the API responds as if it's Cinder 3.01 unless you specifically tell it to do otherwise.

And this is just one of the laundry list of stupid situations that I can remember off the top of my head.

When the thing isn't otherwise failing all the time.

Re:It is no longer safe to move our governments and societie... by nyrikki on Monday February 24, 2025 @04:45PM (#43165311)
That isn't a bug, that is correct behavior under their contract model (which I will admit isn't my favorite).

It is common for message based systems for the target system to own the contract, and they have both the / and /v3/ endpoints that you can grab the version information from.

This is documented BTW:

https://docs.openstack.org/api-ref/block-storage/v3/index.ht...

While I personally prefer the URL method, when versioning through custom headers, if you bump the API without that custom header, you will break way more than returning correct behavior for the minimum supported version, enforcing backward compatibility for API's is generally considered a best practice.

Note:

> If the OpenStack-API-Version header is not provided, act as if the minimum supported version was specified.

https://specs.openstack.org/openstack/api-wg/guidelines/micr...

Once again, fully documented, expected behavior.