Not really a joke at all, the point is to find a cloud provider that can place resources in a guaranteed location that stays within the legal boundaries of a country.
This is for when you need to guarantee that your services cannot possibly escape boundaries of a specific country.
I think the "joke" is if the US government orders a company to hand over that data, the fact that the servers are physically in the EU won't stop anything
It's one thing if they require the copy of data, and another thing if the President wakes up in a bad mood and orders deleting all the data. Imagine if the whole computing infrastructure for power plants, public transportation, banks, payment systems, large companies gets deleted in a minute.
You should not host the critical data on other country's servers.
You obviously haven't heard of the cloud act, which american cloud providers must follow. Microsoft will do as they are told by Trump - "turn off access to the ICC's criminal prosecutor for Gaza" - "yes boss".
Sovereign cloud might theoretically mean sovereign control over data.
Does absolutely jack shit about the blocs trade deficit in the cloud services space though. Hundreds of billions of euros being sent abroad every year.
Without some kind of collective trade policy [1] sovereign cloud initiatives will continue to be a waste of time for everyone involved (including engineers). Also if you see the phrase Gaia-X ... run.
Cloud services like AWS offer VPSes (Lightsail) so the boundary is very blurry. In any case Hertzner offers load balances, firewalls, private networks, which is fairly cloudy stuff.
They’re building out more cloud capability but not anywhere near the level that AWS and the rest have.
AWS has way more managed business logic. Directory services, authentication, serverless PaaS, virtual workstations, data lakes, code deployment, the list goes on and on.
Load balancers and firewalls are extremely basic in comparison.
Hetzner has VPS servers. Has a web-based admin dashboard. Its API can create and teardown servers, virtual networks, block stores, load balancers, firewalls, DNS zones. It's similar to OVHCloud and Linode in my experience. If all these features are not sufficiently characteristic of clouds and abstractions, then I probably don't understand those two terms themselves.
Yes, we are very much of the opinion that we are a cloud provider. While historically we have been known for our dedicated servers, our Cloud continues to steadily grow in terms of feature set, users, infrastructure, and much more. We even updated our cloud offer today. --Katie, Hetzner
They have load balancers, and while they don't have an auto scale feature they do have APIs for starting instances and configuring the load balancer. So it's not that difficult to build your own auto scaling
As compared to a "traditional" offering where there's only a manual order form and getting a new server might take hours, making auto-scaling unfeasible
They have a cloud offering. Hourly billing instances with basic management features. They also have an S3 compatible storage service as part of it and a load balancer.
I mean it is not really "cloud" compared to larger ones, just a toy but they are building things now.