alt Hacker NewsFor the past days I've been participating(albeit over Teams) in a conference relevant to my industry (intel), basically startups and established companies showcasing their products to a closed audience of EU gov. officials.
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.
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Several organizations in my area of Canada (including ours) have this as a directive right now too, and are actively exploring options for ensuring data is hosted in Canada or Europe (or have already begun or completed their migrations).
Seeing and hearing the same. When our giant private equity owners are even pushing us down the on-prem route.
I’m hearing it from “normal” people too which is actually quite weird. To the point of going back to paper for some stuff.
I feel this and as a German company, we have our stuff hosted in the EU. But where it becomes pointless to have the host in the EU, is when Cloudflare is a requirement. Since we expose ourselfs through their certificate, we might as well host with a US company. And I’m not aware of a EU Cloudflare competitor with similar WAF offering.
Yup, I've been seeing the same development pretty much everywhere. It's become a standard question in procurement processes in all EU-based organizations I've worked for (I'm a consultant).
The fact that these "move off US infra" posts now routinely hit #1 on HN is itself pretty telling. Another example is the public outcry here in the Netherlands over selling off the company doing the infra for an important citizen-facing piece of government software (DigiD)...
this is good, there's money to be saved in many many cases with self hosting. Cloud was supposed to save money but it's gotten so overdone that now companies have dedicated devops teams just like they use to have dedicated sysadmin teams. I think you can take the opensource paas's out there and selfhost something internal that covers 75-70% of your use case at a fraction of the cost of aws/gcp/azure.
> (albeit over Teams)
Would be great if this irony was taken note of at this level.
It's interesting the economic damage a few disgruntled WASP's in US swing states can do to the US economy by electing an orange toddler.
when the shooting starts one of these must happen:
1) Move to US and be on the US side. Even if you don’t have connections to Europe or loyalty, Trump clearly show his intent to shake up anyone who wants to move to US. resident permits are now in millions of dollars. Why wouldn’t he take most of your money if you’re caught up in a desperate situation? In such situations “he has all the cards”.
2) Do an emergency switch to non-US, preferably EU based solutions. That would be much more expensive and hard than doing it now.
And if you think that shooting won’t happen, let me remind you that it almost happen a few months ago when US prepared to invade Greenland and Europeans prepared to shoot and blow up Americans that invaded Greenland. Once Iran is over, Trump will have free time, so who knows…
Learning to self-host, or host on different platforms is critical.
Designing startups from the beginning to be able to be hosted in different places will become a norm.
i mean it makes so much sense, cause of the political instability. I recently was at a reception (because of the europe day) and there I talked to some officials that told me that even they don't really know how to to tackle the problems of nowadays. Basically every european state is trying to move its IT infrastructure from the US to Europe and i read somewhere in the news that Aldi is supposed to provide infrastructure to compete with AWS...
Loss of trust towards US is one factor; another is enshittification of services; yet another are good enough monopolies that EU don't have capital to disrupt
This is not a change. It has been asked since the advent of GDPR. So nearly 10 years.
> Definitely a change, because it is not something I can recall being important just a couple of years ago.
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.