Why OVH and not for instance Hetzner?

Because they're deploying to north america:

Although OVH and Hopsworks are technologies built in Europe, Hopsworks serverless service is located in North America, where most Hopsworks users are located and OVH also provides cloud capacity. In Europe, Hopsworks and OVH have since become partners to provide a sovereign AI platform for developing and operating AI systems at scale.

One obvious benefit of OVH compared to Hetzner is the S3 storage, the Kubernetes framework and a number of other services provided by OVH, don't think Hetzner would provide those services.

Hetzner has S3-like storage, https://www.hetzner.com/storage/object-storage/.

Hetzner's Object Storage does not seem API complete and it was released only recently.

Long time Hetzner user, but I would not trust new system (S3 storage) in this case for things beyond playground and tests until it has at least couple of years in production - Hetzner just made it public in ~ Nov 2024.

Did you find differences in performance or reliability of the S3 and Kubernetes services already?

That's already answered in OP's article.

k8s:

> Good stability.

S3:

> AWS S3 is the premier cloud-based object storage service. It may have higher availability, but it’s three times more expensive than OVH’s S3 storage.

The reliability of OVH has so far not been a problem. Performance is mostly a factor of the VM instances that you use, AWS has much more instances to choose from, but obviously at a much higher cost, so performance per dollar is obviously better with OVH.

How large was the total data transfer? It doesn't seem to have been that big.

You'd be surprised :) We had to migrate a few thousand projects and their feature data and users' custom images. It was substantial. (eng@Hopsworks)

Any concrete plans to offer Serverless also in Europe?

We are already available in Europe; it is just our infrastructure that is currently more us-centric in that sense.

Eventually as the demand grows we will of course deploy in EU region to improve the availability.

If it is more of a sovereign aspect; we are deployable on kubernetes;one can already use our installer on OVHCloud and deploy on a European region.

How much time did it take from start to finish in terms of planning and preparing the entire operation?

The actual migration, a day or less. Now there was a 2-week sprint for testing and validating backup and restore before doing the actual migration. At the non-engineering level (management and such) of course there was a review and consideration time as well.

Good question.

I'd also like to hear more detail (budget, time, people and skills) on real cases.

When I had research students I set a few of them doing studies on migration, degoogling, data "repatriation" (ick!) and all the things I think we now call "sovereignty". But there was lots of theory and precious few solid, documented studies. There were also hundreds of propaganda pieces and Google/Microsoft/Amazon shill pieces sowing disinfo.

Surely that's changed now and the economic realities are clearer?