I work as a consultant and freelancer across a bunch of companies, some American but mostly European ones. Last ~8 months or so, the sentiment about "Hosting our data in EU or even our own country" has drastically changed, I don't think I've seen such a clear shift in public opinion so fast before. The amount of migrations I've helped moving data from US to EU already is higher this calendar year than all the other years of my career.
Its not about public opinion, but rather data sovereignty requirements. Certain types of data must be processed within servers located in the EU, regardless of where the company's HQ is. That's why you see most SaaS platforms nowadays offer a EU-only version.
Recent erratic policies are having a profound effect on perception of US companies.
It has been brewing for a while.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/02/27/is-overreliance-on-...
The laws are already there. That's my point.
You’re probably thinking of PII (GDPR/EUDPR) and even there there are plenty of loopholes, creative interpretations, and “privacy shields”.
The push for sovereignty doesn’t just come from regulators, it comes from the companies themselves who lost trust in the US, and also from European providers who jumped on the opportunity to make a killing.
The conversation started all the way back, with the Patriot Act, but until now the dynamic was roughly: politicians write lofty laws that pay lip service to data sovereignty, then add enough loopholes so that nothing has to change in practice, and nobody really cares.
Now people do care, and they don't want to use those loopholes. It's pretty obvious why things have changed.
Inside the US, the biggest concerns similarly come with China, which I consider a bigger risk. For better or worse, if you're inside the US, you're probably better off holding as much of your presence as you can inside the US as EU requirements can actually be more harmful than helpful in terms of compliance. There are also certain protections and resistance you can take to less than formal (judicial warrant) requests. Only because if you hold an online presence in the EU, and are forced to violate EU laws, then you're in trouble on both sides.
I would assume similar in most cases, though the EU confederation is something I'm far less familiar with where national laws and EU laws conflict, etc. I'm more familiar with US state to federal structures.
EU doesn’t really have laws just directives and regulations it excepts every individual member to implement.
Sometimes there are disputes on the implementations that are then fought over in the eu courts but if the member county really doesn’t want to implement or follow them there really isn’t much outside of withholding funds eu can do. (For example see Hungary under Orban)
EU just doesn’t have the monopoly of violence like the federal government effective has in the US to enforce its will on the member states with force if necessary. EU quite literally doesn’t have a police or military force at all.
“Threat of violence”…lmao
Isn't the National Guard in the US considered to be a part of the military? I seem to recall that they were federalized/deployed at least twice recently, because supposedly state-actors/police didn't do enough to combat violence, or to protect federal workers or something like that?
Also, hasn't the current administration threaten to deploy the National Guard even more times, because the states are not following what the administration believes are the federal laws? Or what was the reason for those "threats"?
There are a lot of reasons behind some of these distinctions, and some interesting history. But the National Guard kind of serves as the official Militia for each given state... But is far from the coverage meant for what a militia should be when compared to say the first militia act under US law.
Edit: regarding any requests/threats of use... it's generally voluntary use of guardsmen from a state whose governor is friendly to the federal/presidential administration. Hence seeing national guard deployed from one state in order to handle what the president considers an emergency in another state when that state refuses a request.
And if there wasn’t a federal police force (or national guard put under federal control in the more extreme end) to enforce those decisions of such court would they matter in the more extreme cases?
EU cut Orbans funding and still he kept doing what he was doing and as there is no way to for EU to enforce its decisions beyond that he kept doing it until voted out of office.
That is a massive difference between the 2 systems. In EU the individual states are truly independent in that EU can’t force them to do anything.
For the record EU also has the courts etc but when they rule against a country it is pretty much reliant on the courty going “ok I will pay” as the court doesn’t have any means to actually enforce its decision.
Also there is 9 member states in EU that pay more then they receive from the EU so withholding funds from them will just lead to them not paying their fees. Obviously US has states like this too.
The fundamental flaw with this plan is if your fear is genuinely of the United States, your data is far more protected inside the US. The intelligence community has no restrictions operating on foreign networks and servers.
Rather than go to a FISA court for approval, we just hack your box and take your data. Or ask a European intelligence service to use the much more lax laws to compel its disclosure.
Yes, data collection happens on US soil. But ask anyone who has worked on the inside how much of a pain it is to view or process USPER data.
there have been several bombshell revelations in the last 1-2 decades which indisputably show that the US intelligence community also has (effectively) no restrictions operating on US citizen networks and servers, and often does so with the direct help of US companies.
the legal standards are worthless when they can just be ignored without consequence. when the standards happen to work, just buy the data from the private sector.
secondly, these changes are also about mitigating any retaliatory decisions made when the US government gets upset at how tall another country's leader is, or whatever.
We're far beyond the default assumption that NSA snoops on absolutely everything, and more about protection ourselves from trade wars, tariffs and similar blockages as what Microsoft did with the ICC.
Imagine if the control plane of the Shahed drones were hosted on AWS.
What are you even talking about?
AFAIK, the US has never done that with IP space, but if we did see evidence of that, then you'd see similar worries about that for sure. But I think most of us see it as pretty implausible to happen, since the consequences of such move would be huge, and would probably end the internet as we know it today.
I live in Denmark, a country whose primary threat at the moment is the USA, and the thought of Donald Trump effectively having a kill-switch to our highly digitalized society is absolutely frightening. Reducing our dependence on American tech means that we are less vulnerable to a hostile power using it to extort us out of our territory. We cannot remove the threat entirely, but we can make the pain less extreme.
Other EU countries are also seeing things this way, that the US no longer has a stable government and is no longer a friendly country. Who cares about American spying when the real threat is your country being turned off?
For some reason I can't fully grasp, a LOT of US citizens are ignorant to how the rest of the world is perceiving them at the current moment. There's countless US articles talking about US/Canada relations as if it is a trade dispute and that they think Canadians are eager to re-unite and go back to the way things were without ever addressing the threats to our sovereignty. Then you have comments like the parent to your post who is....wildly off the mark thinking that in a point of contention we'd prefer to keep our data on US controlled systems because their government would need to follow their own legal processes to acquire data of a foreign/hostile state??????
Indeed, the angrier the rest of the world is about the US, the more US citizens have to worry that that foreigners attempting to immigrate here for the long-term have a plan involving exercising influence on US politics from their position inside the country, in order to punish existing US citizens.
The comment I was responding to was claiming "For some reason I can't fully grasp, a LOT of US citizens are ignorant to how the rest of the world is perceiving them at the current moment." in the context of making an argument that American citizens should be concerned about people in foreign countries feeling threatened by potential actions of the US government and reacting to this by reducing their dependence on American cloud companies.
And my genuine response to this comment is that US citizens are less ignorant of how the rest of the world perceives them than the commenter thinks - because the rest of the world is still trying to physically come here (and often still trying to come here illegally, or remain here illegally - ICE is still arresting tons of people).
Immigrants who dislike the US generally don't stop talking about their problems with the US when they move here - but now they use their status as an immigrant to make a moral claim, that they are more authentically American than those who didn't move here, and so their understanding of what America is and should be is better and more moral than that of existing American citizens. You can go to any college campus and see what the foreign students are saying about the US, including what they're saying about the very policy of giving visas to foreign students to begin with. Or you can go to congress and see what the immigrant members of the house of representatives are saying about the US. There's no conspiracy.
I am not aware of any, but I would love to hear any and all plans to punish US citizens.
This is indeed a valid concern for immigrants like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Rupert Murdoch. They’ve all had a significant deleterious effect on the US.
For the average immigrant just trying to live their life, it’sa much less valid concern. You could equally point the finger at the millions of natural-born US citizens who believe that the US is a “Christian nation”, who are well organized, and are trying to change the laws in that direction.
Yes. If you look for example at people from the world leader in science and technology, China, then there is a very noticeable drop in the number of young Chinese people wanting to study in,or after graduation stay in, the US.
Lets help them via visualisation: from rank 30 to 48 in just one year
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-countries-with-the-b...
> They asked citizens across the G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S.)
They're not even asking those from the half of the world that has been bombed or coup d'etated by the US in the last half century. They're asking those who should on paper dislike the US the least.
People from those countries ranking the US below India, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey is quite something. Israel coming in at 55th out of 60, below Saudi Arabia, is also fantastic proof of how incredibly unrepresentative these "representative democracies" are of their populace. The US and Germany are even 2 of the 7 surveyed countries! Without them I wouldn't be surprised if they came in last, under Iran and China.
You are equating illegal behavior with legal behavior. We do what we can to avoid the legal ways the US government can access our data.
It’s not something that the business owners want to do, but they are being forced to from above.
In other words: physical location isn't enough, the company's HQ being in the US is in itself already a massive risk.
The big American cloud companies are trying to get around this by offering their services via "independent" EU entities who aren't owned by the US company but still offer the exact same stack, but I bet most customers are just as unimpressed as I imagine US law enforcement is going to be.
It’s just that they started to execute now?
But yeah, in recent times the sentiment became more urgent. If I were to guess, with zero data in front of me and just judging by what I remember, I think the sentiment really changed first with the ICC blockade that happened last year, then it got really fueled on by the US threats to Greenland's sovereignty, I think that's when organizations and people really got stressed out about moving ASAP.
The second Trump administration moved from "overtly bullying" to "behaving like a potential threat". In the second Trump administration, the US has used the tech monopolies against the EU and has become a military threat (not to mention the commercial war with tariffs). For many Europeans, it's not that the US are abusing their dominant position in negotiations anymore: it's that they are not an ally anymore. Not that they are seen as an enemy, but rather an unreliable partner who threatened to become an enemy.
I think that this is a very big shift, and that is why things are actually moving. And I don't think that this will change, because the risk of depending on the US monopolies has now materialised. That cannot be undone.
I haven't heard of anyone moving to this, though.
> The CLOUD Act primarily amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil.
Once that was in place, AWS could host their "EU" servers on the moon for all I and others care, still not a solution to avoid the claws of the US.
It's a rather clever idea, and it essentially prevents EU government organisations from excluding them from tenders by requiring EU-based ownership. It obviously won't convince anyone with half a brain that they are genuinely independent, but the government lawyers are going to have a really hard time writing tenders in a way which excludes them from participating.
I'm not sure this is actually the idea, it still isn't so in practice for sure, I'm not sure where this misconception comes from.
The Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security memo says the Dutch government asked AWS who ultimately owns AWS European Sovereign Cloud GmbH and AWS Luxembourg. According to that memo, AWS stated that both are indirectly owned by Amazon.com, Inc, and this is all public information: https://open.overheid.nl/documenten/36acf7a6-1ea3-401e-86ad-...
Besides, it doesn't really matter who is the parent or where it geographically is located, 18 U.S.C. § 2713 states this:
> [...] regardless of whether such communication, record, or other information is located within or outside of the United States.
It'd be a clever idea if it was actually 100% independent, but then it also wouldn't make sense for AWS/Amazon to do, it'd have to be actually independent then, not this weird mix-match of "some stuff in the US and some in EU" which they seem to be aiming for currently.
On the other hand it is also lame to shift the blame on the US. A bit like Jim stole your car after you left the doors open, the key in the ignition and the engine running. Jim is a bad man.
We in Europe are enjoying roughly 15-20% insane/stupid ratings at this point, which is not great but still a bit better.
Other methods of vote exist, e.g. if https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rated_voting was implemented I think the political landscape would be very different.
Seems strange to me that not everyone, including republicans, aren't aware of this, when he's pretty outspoken about not wanting any more elections, and how "if you vote for me this time, it'll be the last time you have to vote".
If a presidential candidate anywhere else was openly talking about wanting to remove elections and democracy in the country (not to mention triggered an insurrection [?!]), I'm fairly sure they'd almost be automatically disqualified. Really strange situation all around.
We’re two years into his term and democracy does not appear to be dismantled, or even remotely at risk of being dismantled. I also expect the same or similar accusations to be leveled at the next Republican candidate, who if elected, will also not “dismantle democracy”.
I'm not American, I dislike Democrats and Republicans in the US, they're both horrible, just to preface this. Secondly, no other president has urged people to vote for them so people don't have to vote ever again, nor has any president threatened to put previous presidents in jail, nor has any president talked about wanting to skip the mid-terms.
I dislike politicians in general, but also, I'd be blind to not see when someone is extremely dangerous to democracy in general, beyond political affiliations. I'd say the same if it was Obama or who else, because as I said, I don't like any of them.
Asking for a quote of what he said so many times, and that is so easily found with a basic web search, says a lot about your comment.
He’s speaking to evangelical Christians that do not regularly vote, and in the context of instituting voter ID to secure future elections.
ID is required to vote in most (all?) EU states.
For example, in my EU country I can vote with my passport, my drivers license, or my ID card, and they accept documents which are expired for up to 5 years. For context: this is less restrictive than the documents anyone is technically required to carry every time they leave their home! The number of people who can't meet this requirement is basically zero, and a decent bunch of municipalities offer them for free to poor people.
Meanwhile US has no universal ID system, which allows the pro voter ID groups to carve out a list of "acceptable" IDs which just so happens to be popular with the people that are going to vote for one side of the political spectrum, while excluding the forms of ID which are popular with the other side. And of course it's not just about identification, as they also add a bunch of irrelevant details to the requirements like the information having to exactly match your birth certificate.
Combine that with the failed two-party system where even a handful of votes often completely swings the political landscape and it is pretty obvious what is going on.
It’s not hard to get, and you need it to do everything from filling a scheduled prescription, buying alcohol, entering a bar, flying on a plane, or purchasing cold medicine. You literally cannot function as an independent adult without one.
You also need to show it — along with a second form of ID — to be hired at a job.
Anyone claiming a state ID requirement meaningfully prevents anyone from voting is being deeply unserious.
If they actually believed what they claim, they’d be campaigning to remove the ID requirements that are already pervasive in our daily lives. They are not.
I’ll also note that buying a gun requires not just multiple forms of ID, but also an entire background check. If we can do that for one constitutionally enumerated right, we can damn well require a photo ID to cast a ballot.
He literally said “if you vote for me, you won’t need to vote again”. It’s not an ambiguous statement and doesn’t require extra context. Everything else you said didn’t really have anything to do with it.
1) Puerto Ricans were called publicly on a Trump rally in New York, an "island of garbage" and they massively voted for Trump.
- Second generation Latinos, whose many parents, and grand parents and other close family are illegal immigrants, were repeatedly warned of what would happen, and its one of the constitutions, that massively voted for Trump...
- Trump continued to state, as late as 2024,that the Central Park Five were responsible for the 1989 rape of a woman in the Central Park jogger case, despite the five males having been officially exonerated in 2002. - Trump was a leading proponent of the debunked birther conspiracy theory falsely claiming president Barack Obama was not born in the United States - Trump and his company Trump Management were sued by the Department of Justice for housing discrimination against African-American renters.
Donald Trump made big gains with Black voters in 2024.
- Trump is a convicted rapist and felon, and is known 44 million women voted for him...
We are past strange, and we are in the phase of electorate deserves what they voted for.
(1) Assume they’re irrational, uninformed, and wrong, or
(2) Reconsider your priors and attempt to understand why they think the way that they do.
Let’s take the “island of garbage”. It was said by a comedian during his set. The Trump campaign stated “this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign”.
The way that you framed it, however, was very careful to be true while also being misleading.
Generally, a lot of people are just not good people.
Worth remember, no one sees themselves as the "bad people", in each one of those 1/3's point of view, they're the "good people".
I mean, I would have said something exactly like that a few years ago. But first of all, history is full of atrocities committed by humans. They may all have considered themselves good people, but if they were/are objectively not, what does that matter? And secondly, I have encountered people who appear to think that decency is for sissies or something to that effect. Those people seem seriously emboldened lately. Do they think that being a good person is something to aspire to? I don't think so.
It matters less for them, and more for you. Yes, we see them as horrible, but also yes, they see us as horrible people. In the end we're all humans, and we all work towards what we think is better, but the method and goal what "better" actually is obviously differs.
> Do they think that being a good person is something to aspire to? I don't think so.
Yes, of course they do, but their definition of "good person" differs between you and them. For you, decency is "good person", for them, ignoring decency is "good person", so of course they aspire to being a good person, whatever that means for them.
I see how it may look like this from the outside. But I think it would be like saying that siblings hate each other because you witnessed an argument.
Most people in most EU countries consider the other EU countries as allies, even though they don't agree on everything. Now the fact that 27 countries argue means that they talk to each other. I think it's a lot less polarised than in the US. Or course there are extremes too.
On the positive side, this shows that the EU has gained a level of international influence that is taken very seriously by other major powers. It's not 100% certain that it will survive this current wave of assaults, but if it does, it will be even stronger.
Let's not pretend that nationalism doesn't have deep roots in Europe.
From the top of my head, Franco, Hitler and Mussolini frequently helped each other, two of them even created a somewhat famous alliance together, even though by their own "theories" they should have been fighting against each other instead.
I'm sure there are even more examples further back too.
That is also why the nationalists inside of Europe want to be friends with those other players: because if you want to make Europe weaker (because you think you are better off on your own as a European country), then your interests align with those other players.
What gave you the impression that EU members hate each other? It'd be a weird union if that was the case. Not saying it's not possible, I just haven't seen it myself, although I am a Swede so clearly I do hate the Danes and the Norrbaggar with passion, but it's love-hate, not hate-hate.
If we're talking about leaders for member states, then they're doing their job right :) They're not meant to figure out what's best for the union, we have separate elections for those people who go to EU and represent the country + care about the union. The national "leaders" of the country are quite expected to put national interests above what's best for the union :)
A Dane.
Still, love em, let the weirdos eat their snails in peace and may we always be brothers and sisters <3
In the us these groups have just stopped talking to each other. The only time that happens is over Thanksgiving and that's when it stops for some of those conversations.
At least in Europe the split is usually not within families...
Are you referring to the time when the world Cup is going on? In that case, absolutely. We all turn into monkeys climbing onto our own rock lol
The US, China, Russia, EU (as a whole) and maybe Brazil are the countries in the best position to be able to do that more than most others just by their size and positions. And even that has limitations.
For example, IMO, the US should be manufacturing at least half of it's prescription medications domestically... it should also be producing a significant portion of it's communications devices domestically as well. We're too dependent on Taiwan and South Korea for technology currently.
I would encourage every nation to consider and take steps towards ensuring their own infrastructure... this does not mean isolation, just security footing.
But especially that Microsoft blocked the work email of the ICC lead prosecutor for political reasons, that has all alarm bells ringing.
Where does this weird expectation come from that you can basically achieve your goals in a 2 week air campaign?
If the US wanted to they could probably do a lot of damage but, as you can see in Ukraine, taking over a country is a whole different thing. Unless you're willing to go in with the army and are willing to lose a LOT of people. And even then it'll take months or years for a single country
From every US administration that’s started a war since about 1945.
And we give em a couple decades to catch up.
....before being nuked for messing with the capital...
Sounds like a great idea!
Remember, part of the reason the war in Iran is going so poorly is because it has abysmal approval ratings among the US populace across the board, and wasn't even approved by Congress. (turns out, most people have middle-east fatigue and don't want to die for Israel.)
If another country actually tried to invade us, essentially the first time in a century we would be fighting a war to defend ourselves instead of one where we're going on the offensive, you would see the approval for a counter-attack be through the roof.
Sure, LLMs help a bit with the actual typing, but the hard part is still planning, alignment and actual execution, all which are best done by humans talking and working with other humans.
I don't think we're in the days of "Hey Codex migrate our AWS stack 100% to Hetzner VPS stat" yet, without issues along the way. Wouldn't claim it's impossible either, but again the easy parts were already easy, and the hard parts are still hard.
It is, but it's really hard to make the right trade-offs. Usually I'd start by basically making a list of what could potentially be done to make it easier, check lightly how hard each one of those will be, then sit down with stakeholders and figure out the balance between how fast they want to move, and how risky they want the migration to be. Some opts for less safeguards and moving sooner, others for absolutely less risk but it takes the time it takes.
What used to be a half year transition project that will be half-assed due to resource constraints, can now be properly done in a month by a skilled engineering team works on it with LLM leverage.
Of course, if America was still a trusted ally (like if Harris was president), we still wouldn't be doing it. Even if it was easy now.
It is a manifestation of the commoditization of Cloud Computing Interfaces.
Every provider offers a blob storage, kubernetes clusters, queues and what not.
I'd argue that covers 90% of SaaS needs.
Database runs in France, front end in Belgium, Operations in Spain...
EU Fairness dictates they all need to get a slice of the pie so this will be interesting (and by that I mean absurdly hilarious).
You snark, but is this not EXACTLY how a sizeable majority of modern apps are made?
Substitute in some random tech stacks, cloud providers, or buzzwords.
Database runs in AWS, front end in Nuxt, Operations in Claude.
In any case, there are plenty of EU giants (ASML, SAP, Siemens, Alstom, Rheinmetall, etc) that are rather concentrated geographically speaking. EU fairness is more a government agency distribution thing, not for private companies.
You put your Headquarters in seattle, your data center in alabama, you have your dev team in SF... every state gets a slice
Like gov contracts and how they are divided is basically the largest conversation in defense contracts, they give more of a shit who will make the nails for a tank than the security parameters of the crew members
How is that worse than headquarters in New York, incorporation in Delaware, operations in California, and datacenters in Texas?
That is a very myopic way of looking at it. Right-wing neoliberal parties were globalists and pro-EU for business reasons. Left-wing social-liberals were pro-EU for social and ideological reasons but were much more ambivalent about globalisation. Hard-right nationalists hate the EU but don’t see much of a problem with globalisation except when people are involved (exploiting them abroad, however, is fine as long as there is a buck to be made). If you’re a bit careful you’ll find opinions all over the place on both globalisation and the EU across the whole spectrum.
Globalisation is more something that affect individual member states than a EU issue.
And I'm not even bashing EU. The closest example still working today is probably the US's Jones Act.
It means EU sovereign cloud. That's literally the primary concern.
It has been a headache for our vendors.
Thus it’s pointless to host in the EU if everything first has to go through a US company.
> The example you mention is a tricky one...
The first time I heard that the US was "requesting" (surely a gun-to-head moment) that the Dutch Gov't restrict ASML exports to China, personally, I was stunned. Sure, the Netherlands and US have incredibly strong political, economic, security, and historical bonds, but I never expected US to interfere so deep into the Netherlands. And yet, the Netherlands capitulated. (Please don't read this as a criticism of NL -- they are ultimately "Real Politik" due to their population size.) If NL can fall, then so can any other nation in Europe (or Northeast Asia: JP/KR/TW), except Belarus and Russia.
Yes, people know we live in a globalized world, and yes, people know the US has ways to pressure Europe. The point of Europe's moves to host in Europe isn't to get immune from foreign influence ; it is to make interference a bit more costly and a bit less effective, in a way that doesn't cripple our society.
This is taking into account the worst case scenario, which isn't that unlikely to happen.
I mean, for sure there are these plans in motion already, but how hard would it be?
I suppose it's a case of 'technically possible, realistically infeasible'.
A more likely scenario might be either a from-scratch not-as-good machine that you can source locally (supply-chain wise) or a novel finding (which is hard to predict if it will happen and if so, when).
For example my manager had to reject a candidate from Iran, simply due to US policies, even if that wasn't against the EU policies, and would actually have been illegal discrimination in the EU where the position was opened, but this policy came from the US and was applied in an unwritten fashion in the EU.
The influence of the US on finance and tech is massively understated. Plenty of international EU tech companies whose business model doesn't revolve around catering to the EU market and sovereignty, will tailor their products and operations to comply with US regulations since that's where a lot of their customer base and money is made. Just read the last post of the CEO of Bird, you can disagree with him that he's a scumbag and he's full of shit, but the truth is if you want your SaaS to make money, you gotta be in the US. That's why Mistral has a large presence in SV and London. Continental EU just sucks for acquiring capital.
Even at the no-name Austrian startup I used to work before, the biggest investor was a US PE, since no German or Austrian investor wanted to invest more than 5 figures in the company, which was not enough to cover the payroll of the ML/data scientists. As long as the EU investors refuse to invest in domestic companies and their future, EU companies will forever be tied suckling to the US teat if they wish to grow and survive.
Worth specifying here you're talking about VC-infested SaaS, not just your run-of-the-mill bootstrapped SaaS. It's very much possible to run a SaaS in Europe and make money, as countless of people already do, which I'm sure you too are aware of, but probably way harder to raise similar amount of money as US companies, that I'd agree with.
Edit: Strange typo; s/infested/invested, but kind of makes sense like that too so I'll just leave it, Freudian slip or something.
> when I working in EU at another major Dutch semiconductor company
Or a bit deeper: SMART Photonics, EFFECT Photonics, Nearfield, Prodrive Tech, Neways Elec.
Which one?
> As long as the EU investors refuse to invest in domestic companies and their future, EU companies will forever be tied suckling to the US teat if they wish to grow and survive.
It's not a "silly HN game" to not want to doxx yourself. Ironic criticism from someone whose username is 'throwaway2037' lol.
>Which one?
Exactly THAT ONE you mentioned above.
>Let me respond in the most offensive manner possible: Do you prefer the teat of US or China (or Russia!)? Pick your poison.
You can't talk about being sovereign if your life depends on someone else's teat.
I’m hearing it from “normal” people too which is actually quite weird. To the point of going back to paper for some stuff.
The answer was that they simply didn't trust GCP or AWS or Azure to see their data and know how much silly money they were making in the niche industry they almost completely monopolize.
I recently interviewed with a lower-case-m megacorp in a similar situation and they host on-prem for the same reason, at great expense and hassle in facilities all over the country.
Seems like theres room in the market for some kind of an On Prem Private Cloud Stack that emulates GCP/AWS etc but locally maybe?
Cloud-In-A-Box anyone?
It's more like cloud-in-a-rack, but that's what https://oxide.computer/ is trying to do isn't it?
On the DB side, I can't say too much as we're a pretty obviously identifiable AWS customer if I give out any details. I will only say that nothing fits our size and scale so we have to run on bare metal. That just makes it really fucking expensive colocation.
Don't even get me started on the API Gateway sitting in front of a group of related Lambdas. Its OK once you get it setup and running but buildign/changing it amounts to stabbing yourself in the eyes.
After about a year of poking lambda to see how it actually worked (versus how it was documented) and building a cloud formation replacement (TF eventually did what I wanted, but not before I made a simple PROLOG based replacement for it). But I finally made it work after MUCH struggle.
So... +1.
I put this in our code several years ago: "WARNING: Do not look at Lambda stack with remaining eye."
Most on-prem deployments were trash and a lot of them still are. Not because it couldn't be better but because it's easier to just have some random hypervisor department do this work manually and not do the work to create it as an internal product. Even VMware with vrealize failed and that's about as 'customisable cloud platform in a box' as COTS enterprise software can get.
Maybe it's because IaC and APIs were just not in the vocabulary of the average system integrator or on-prem operating team (it's still lots of clickops and copy-paste).
Open source, and works great when small, and at scale.
https://www.proxmox.com/en/products/proxmox-virtual-environm...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=introduction+to...
The "cloud" rose to prominence from a small period of tiem where Amazon had a lot of extra cloud capacity outside of Black Friday, etc, and linux networking issues that needed architecture to be a certain way.
Those linux networking issues have been long since solved, but the "cloud" was discovered to be incredibly profitable and sticky in the name of convenience and proliferated.
A lot of the "cloud" software is open source software that was packaged to have a web and api front end, and that service renamed to something specific to AWS, etc.
It has become so bad that we're considering moving to the cloud for our on-premise workloads. Only problem is some of the cloud providers in the areas we operate from have run out of compute.
Would be great if this irony was taken note of at this level.
Designing startups from the beginning to be able to be hosted in different places will become a norm.
Im sorry to say it, but i feel a lot of Europeans have lost a good deal of trust in the US.
You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.
I don't think that's a fair characterization of the American public. I am interested in America's standing in the world. More than half of Americans do not support these lunatics. Unfortunately due to our inherently unfair electoral system which gives preference to money and land over voters, it requires about 60~70% of Americans voting against them consistently for at least a decade to overcome the lunatics. That's just a very high bar to clear.
> You guys have to work a lot harder to fix your issues.
Open to suggestions. The only ideas I have for relinquishing control of the US from the billionaires back to the people would, rightly, get me banned from HN.
Well maybe it is, but to give more "power" to a rual vote then one from a city is also something we do in Norway.
What I have problems with is the winner-take-all and that leads to a two party system. If you had 5 parties not 2. I'm sure that 80% of the voters would me more happy 80% of the time :)
The heterogeneity in the US — culturally and in terms of political-legal structures — is far greater than those in Europe and Canada seem to understand sometimes. This is now combined with a corruption of democratic legal processes (e.g., gerrymandering) that make options outside of outright civil war a needle increasingly difficult to thread. There is a reason people are bringing up Hungary — it would be absurd to equate the EU with Hungary for the same reasons it's absurd to paint the entire US with a broad brush.
Something like 90% of people in the US opposed what was going on with Greenland. Just about the only people in favor of it in the US were the presidential administration and people trying to curry favor with it. What do you expect the other 90% to do? The legislators being petitioned were busy with a deluge of other immediate domestic problems — maybe people outside the US didn't understand the scope of the unaccountable fascist police occupation going on in cities such as Chicago, Minneapolis, or Los Angeles? Protesters in Minneapolis were being murdered by these thugs. That's not even getting into the dismantling of social safety nets, rampant corruption, Venezuela, etc etc etc
People outside the US do not want a US civil war. It's happened before and if it happened again would happen along the same geopolitical lines as before. It would be devastating not just to the US but to the rest of the world.
Treating everyone in the US as the same, without recognizing the very real divisions involved, or the structural stresses involved, doesn't help anything.
Everything happening in the US could happen everywhere. If you have enough politicians distorting and destroying traditional democratic mechanisms in favor of a criminal fascist and party domination, people have fewer and fewer options left outside of things that no one wants.
"The complete disinterest in international allies" is a dishonest statement, and I can only assume reflects total ignorance of what is happening in the US, and/or a self-serving defense mechanism to avoid really confronting the difficulty of what those in the US are faced with.
Ukraine can never trust the EU again after this. There can always be another Orban.
Trust is broken forever.
Well, EU and the rest of the world owes nothing to Ukraine, yet they have provided much help. Blind trust is stupid anyways. Especially between countries.
>"Trust is broken forever."
This sounds like a drama queen. Look at your own politicians first.
As an American, that's pretty funny seeing how allies of the USA are constantly hostile toward Americans at every turn (unless we're buying a tshirt or something) and have been for many presidential administrations. Why would Americans be interested at all in what allies have to say when it's always negative anyway? When someone tells you you're their enemy long enough you begin to believe them.
As for the discussion of moving tech stacks to Europe, if that's where your company is why did that not make obvious sense day 0? Why would you place your critical infrastructure in another country not beholden to your laws? If you're based in Europe then you should host in Europe, and even further, host in your country.
457 British solders dead in Afghanistan supporting US operations beg to differ.
Mate, seriously, step away from the propaganda and pay attention to what is happening to your democracy. Then you might understand why your allies are losing trust.
The 2003 protests against the war in Afghanistan were the biggest in UK history. Approximately 1 Million people (1 in 60 of the UK population) made their way to London to protest, and hundreds of thousands protested in other cities on the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_Iraq_War_prot...
You are right that there have always been a hostility against these kind of actions, but now you are doing it against allies. So you are breaking the trust.
/lives in the US
It often feels like US people never trusted the EU and now feel offended when EU people say "we don't trust the US anymore". I find that interesting.
and nothing of value was lost. What did the US get out of the relationship?
I thought that was exactly what is being talked about here.
But also influence through alliance. Even a superpower can't go it alone and use their military to bend others to its will.
Even if Trump is replaced by a Democrat, the conditions that made Trump happen are still there. That won't change from one day to the next. And don't forget he already happened twice.
10-20 years of decent administrations will make things ok again. But of course our economies will be much more decoupled by then. That process has been set in motion now and won't easily stop. That can start going the other way again but things will have to meaningfully change then over time.
As for Hungary I still don't trust them as far as I can throw them. I would have been happy to bump them back to candidate EU member during the Orban reign and let them prove themselves. Don't forget this Magyar guy is still super conservative. Just less anti EU. But unfortunately EU law didn't provide for the ability to throw a country out. That was a huge oversight.
Btw. You can ask Canadian people what they thought about their annexation threats.
When I was young there was still a lot of ill will and distrust against the Germans and that was 40+ years after the war.
We were still joking about wanting our bikes back (the nazis stole everything metal at the end of the war to make weapons). And didn't like them at beach resorts etc. People would much rather buy American than German products.
That's over now but it took a very long time. Which was exactly my point. Time and consistently good politics will heal this but time it will take.
Of course the sooner you turn things around the better but the disconnection has already been set in motion and big ships turn slowly.
Unless Europeans can never trust Hungary again and move away from them at lightspeed, I'm smelling hypocrisy.
And yes I don't trust Hungary.
Does that really matter? They can not un-member it. And if current economic situation persists you will find more with the Orban like thinking.
It's the US population that's the problem, since they voted to put him into power TWICE, which means that they can also do it again, and again, and again, for other candidates not named Trump and not always Republican, but who could be even more unhinged, so we need to do everything to decouple from them so that their election decisions will impact us less.
No offence guys, but you do bare the responsibility of your democratic choices, as do we.
Any democratically elected leader can cause huge problems during their mandate, not just Orban or Trump. You have to wait for elections or their term limit to kick them out peacefully.
The difference is whatever the person in the US president seat does, massively affects the whole world, not just the US, which is why we talk a lot more about the huge problems Trump caused rather than what problem the president of Romania, HUngary or Greece cause in their own countries.
The issue remains the voting population to not elect people like Orban or Trump at the next elections. The EU can cancel or sway elections in Romania or Hungary to make sure the right candidate wins, but it can't sway US elections in their favor.
One thing I noticed right away, is that all companies were asked "Can we fully host this from within EU or our country" from the various people in audience. Every single one. Many of the startups had slides prepared for this.
Definitely a change, because it is not something I can recall being important just a couple of years ago.