[llarsson]

It is interesting that this relates exactly to everything that goes as "cloud native" these days, without really mentioning the fact that due to Kubernetes and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's huge landscape of open source software that targets specifically Kubernetes, you can have a comprehensive platform on "any" infrastructure. On-premise, private cloud, public clouds that are in the EC2/S3 era of services (VMs and object storage)... it doesn't matter. You can literally run the same database that powers YouTube, it's freely available and operates great on Kubernetes.

Yes, the problem is that someone has to manage it all (full disclosure: I work for Elastisys, a company exactly in the space of fully-managed application platforms on top of the infra operated by others).

But the fact that smaller cloud providers haven't had the money to invest in their capabilities to offer managed services to the same degree as the enormous hyperscalers isn't exactly impossible to overcome. In fact, it's never been more possible. Other comments here show that very well, too. And that the particular choice of identity management services is perhaps not the best for showing where the hyperscaler options shine.

[alephnerd]

> due to Kubernetes and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's huge landscape of open source software that targets specifically Kubernetes, you can have a comprehensive platform on "any" infrastructure

Most CNCF projects and incubators are coming out of American, Chinese, and Indian teams at American or Chinese firms.

The 5G rollout in the US, China, and India in the mid-2010s meant an entire ecosystem of K8s and eBPF versed engineers exist in those geos.

There isn't a similar ecosystem in Europe, and all the major telcos in Europe decided to become resellers of white labeled American cloud products.

[arielcostas]

Totally, but IMHO it's better to use those open source building blocks on top of an european provider (or your own infra) instead of getting locked in into any domestic (or foreign) service. Why pay AWS for Cognito and get locked in there, when you can run Keycloak on top of K8s on any provider.

We can definitely reinvent the wheel, perhaps even making better products, but for the time being these open source tools are good enough, again, IMHO

[alephnerd]

The issue is you also need a fairly deep understanding of your OSS stack to take full advantage - and this is where the issue arises.

OSS is not plug-and-play (nor should it be), and the ecosystem of talent for technologies like eBPF, OTel, or Operator Frameworks doesn't exist because the primary forcing function to generate that kind of an ecosystem (5G rollouts) has lagged for over a decade in much of Europe.

Remember that Tim Cook quote about not being able to fill a room of American die cast engineers? It's the same thing in Europe and America for a lot of core technologies in cybersecurity, systems programming, and devops.

If you cannot incubate your own OSS offerings or play a major role in contributing to these projects, then you will always remain a laggard. Almost every incubated CNCF, eBPF, or Linux Foundation project has some sort of corporate backing behind it, and it's almost inevitably some company or team in America, China, Israel, or India that monetizing the offering and remains the primary contributor.

OSS is extremely political, just like creating a company, and open-core players always end up muscling or out-competing passion projects alone. And for those that they can't, they end up sponsoring those or hiring those developers and thus subsume it.

Countries like China and India have actual bureaucrats with EECS backgrounds at ministries who have worked for a decade building public-private strategies around building a Kubernetes, RISC-V, or eBPF strategy, and in the US and Israel, it's highly capitalized private sector players taking advantage of that.