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by kristiandupont 454 days ago
>But you are fundamentally "fighting the last battle"

In your opinion, what is the current/future battle, then?

2 comments

It seems we are pushed into major conflicts and disruptions so we have to decentralise it as much as possible.

The current model is very awkward, we have been pushed into those very centralised, hyperscale solution that most businesses and individual do not really need. Most businesses do not really need much to do their job.

We are probably gonna have major connectivity disruptions on of those days or what happened when your Hertzner or Orange/Huawei datacenter is down? And I know they have "better security" but if we are attacked they are gonna be taken down anyway.

We do not wanna look at what a major cyber disruption would do to our societies. I believe just the consequences on the electricity grid and hospitals would make us wave the white flags in a few weeks.

You wanna own your hardware because if there are disruptions it is gonna be hard to get your hand on some because of supply, logistics or just monetary disruptions.

How hard is it technically to setup something like Ubuntu Microcloud [0] for your own use or local businesses you provide that service for?

From my experience the biggest risk and headache is all those EU regulations like the EU Cyper resilience Act and in some cases energy costs.

So when Ursula tell you Europe needs to prepare for war and authorise/push your country to go into even more debt so her friends can build expensive tanks that will never see a battle it is ridiculous.

They should focus on removing all the obstacle to resilience they setup themselves, find a way to reduce energy costs (pretty hard now...) and maybe encourage moving out of those big tech cloud (starting by doing it themselves).

- [0] https://canonical.com/microcloud

>It seems we are pushed into major conflicts

>so her friends can build expensive tanks that will never see a battle

I am not sure how you consolidate the two statements. It seems to me that there is a very real risk of armed conflict in Europe over the next decade.

Yes there is good chance we are being pushed into one.

What I mean is the tanks, aircraft carriers or F35s probably won't really matter.

You can create enough pain on current western societies by other means such as major cyber disruption so that the classical battlefield won't really matter.

You could have said the same about Ukraine. Assuming rational (even if transactional) moves from dictators seems naïve.
I am not OP but let me give you a Microsoft Office example.

For many years, Open Source and businesses tried to make a Microsoft Office competitor by mimicking Microsoft Office. Naturally, all clones were worse than the original.

Until Google changed the paradigm and rolled out Google Docs that had a unique feature of online collaboration.

Then was the turn of Microsoft to mimic collaboration features of Google Docs in Microsoft Office and be worse at it almost by definition.

Another example is S3.

For years, businesses tried to have POSIX-capable filesystems seamlessly scale in size and in availability. It took Amazon to roll out a simpler alternative that, by having a smaller set of features, enable so much sought properties of distributed file systems in an efficient and commercially viable way.

I think Hetzner Cloud is a sweet spot of a cloud. Instead of reimplementing AWS, EU should standardize of something like it.