> DNB Director Steven Maijoor announced last October that he intended to “set a good example” and switch to a European cloud, though he acknowledged that it “is not yet as robust or high-quality as the one from the U.S.”
> Last year, the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) and the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) warned that the Dutch financial sector had become too dependent on foreign IT service providers
I wonder how much if this is a personal choice, and how much is pressure from the government. Banks are famously the first target of politicians, and it's common in China for exec's to publicly choose a national option under pressure from the CPP.
Years ago I was making the case that instead of digging ourselves into the Amazon eco-system with S3 storage, EC2 instances, DynamoDB and various other Amazon specific cloud products... we should just host virtual machines and have everything in there using open source products.
People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.
Calculations from me and others have proven that cloud providers use 5-10x multipliers when selling you things. The less you use them, the better is your bottom line. At the beginning it maybe makes sense to use cloud credits to get you moving, but when credits expire or your organization grows, it is wise to invest in people that can setup things on their own. The biggest lie that cloud providers managed to sell to the world, that you don't need knowledgeable people to run things in cloud.
The title is heavy clickbait. To say I just bought a Porsche when it was actually a Volkswagen is also wrong. Just because they belong to the same owner doesn't make it the same brand.
Ok so nothing has actually happened. It's also not specified whether this is in addition to their AWS footprint, or if it's a migration. It will be interesting to see an update in 5 years on how this goes.
Ok so nothing has actually happened. These migrations are difficult and expensive, and often fail. It will be interesting to see an update in 5 years on how this went.
Isn't this how AWS also started? They built internal devops tools for them that were so good and expandable that they decided to give others access to them.
The missing background piece is that the European Commission awarded a 180m EUR sovereign cloud contract to 4 European providers [0]. This framework agreement made the choice of national banks a lot more straight forward.
Makes sense. I never worked with this particular provider, but I must say that for many (many) use cases, Europe has very capable providers, and the big US players are not necessarily the best choices.
I've got experience with the LIDL cloud aka STACKIT and work for a STACKIT partner. Just drop me a message if you are interested. Two fun solutions implemented (fully automated via Terraform):
Site-to-Site VPN between STACKIT and Azure using a LibreSwan VM and an Azure VPN Gateway
FortiGate HA cluster in STACKIT - not a single ICMP packet got lost during failover
I used to have quite a few customer hosted at Rackspace in the early 2010’s and I always thought it sad they dropped the ball when they got bought out by private investment and they fired most of the talent. I loved their API and the docs were really good.
Fortunately for them, Lidl's middle aisle deal this week happened to be cloud computing.
(Tesco cloud compute will price-match the lidl cloud-compute, but only if you remember to scan your Tesco clubcard at the self-checkout while buying it.)
Hurray ... except no, this is just about the only way it could go that is worse than American Tech empires.
All of the discussed alternatives (stackit, scaleway, aldi) are owned by European billionnaires.
Stackit is owned by Dieter Schwarz (who inherited everything he has ever owned)
Aldi cloud is owned by Beate Heister and Karl Albrecht (both children of the real founders, Karl and Theo Albrecht. Together they are probably the richest Germans)
Scaleway is owned by Xavier Niel (free.fr, who was born high middle class and at least can be said to have built out his empire)
The only owner here that is even remotely interested in the business is Xavier Niel. To add insult to injury, all 3 are known for being extremely cheap when it comes to wages (Xavier Niel less so than the others, but it's not great)
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 51.3 ms ] thread> Last year, the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) and the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) warned that the Dutch financial sector had become too dependent on foreign IT service providers
I wonder how much if this is a personal choice, and how much is pressure from the government. Banks are famously the first target of politicians, and it's common in China for exec's to publicly choose a national option under pressure from the CPP.
People looked at me like they saw water burning but that would have made the dependency on the US a lot easier to sever. Just move the VM's.
It’s very much not a discount cloud provider. They are costly unlike their physical discount grocery stores.
Ok so nothing has actually happened. It's also not specified whether this is in addition to their AWS footprint, or if it's a migration. It will be interesting to see an update in 5 years on how this goes.
Ok so nothing has actually happened. These migrations are difficult and expensive, and often fail. It will be interesting to see an update in 5 years on how this went.
https://stackit.com/en
[0] https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/commission-...
Site-to-Site VPN between STACKIT and Azure using a LibreSwan VM and an Azure VPN Gateway
FortiGate HA cluster in STACKIT - not a single ICMP packet got lost during failover
Companies should have native capability to work computers, especially those whose business is pure information, like banks.
I used to have quite a few customer hosted at Rackspace in the early 2010’s and I always thought it sad they dropped the ball when they got bought out by private investment and they fired most of the talent. I loved their API and the docs were really good.
(Tesco cloud compute will price-match the lidl cloud-compute, but only if you remember to scan your Tesco clubcard at the self-checkout while buying it.)
All of the discussed alternatives (stackit, scaleway, aldi) are owned by European billionnaires.
Stackit is owned by Dieter Schwarz (who inherited everything he has ever owned)
Aldi cloud is owned by Beate Heister and Karl Albrecht (both children of the real founders, Karl and Theo Albrecht. Together they are probably the richest Germans)
Scaleway is owned by Xavier Niel (free.fr, who was born high middle class and at least can be said to have built out his empire)
The only owner here that is even remotely interested in the business is Xavier Niel. To add insult to injury, all 3 are known for being extremely cheap when it comes to wages (Xavier Niel less so than the others, but it's not great)