alt Hacker NewsOne interesting fact I've heard recently (I live in Poland; we share a border with Ukraine as well as with a part of Russia).
Russia went all in on "digital sovereignty." This is partly because the Russian government cares deeply about censoring what their citizens can see (which they can't do if those citizens consume content from American services), partly because the American services themselves cut Russia off because of sanctions-related concerns.
This makes Russian datacenters a much more attractive target for the Ukrainians. While Russia can (and does) bomb Ukrainian datacenters, the fact that Ukrainians are so reliant on US infrastructure (and could rapidly move local workloads to western clouds if the need was great enough) makes such operations far less attractive. It's much easier for Ukraine to strike some facility near Moscow than it is for Russia to strike Ashburn, Virginia.
Given the geopolitical concerns from both the east and the west, this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.
Replies
This very well illustrates an inherent property of distributed systems – resilience.
Turns out digital sovereignty is a bad idea in terms of state security.
Don't put all eggs into one basket they told ya!
China and America also care about digital sovereignty. Its hardly a shock that each of the big three, want to be in complete control of the core platforms. Each is an extension of the government policy.
This does not have to be an "either-or": you can be sovereign and still interoperate with others, while retaining your own infrastructre to fall back on or in parallel.
> Given the geopolitical concerns from both the east and the west, this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.
I mean, if Russia is striking datacenters in London/Dublin/Frakfurt/Paris/Amsterdam, then we've got really big problems.
And is the US even allied to Europe, or is Europe going it on their own? They might do better to move to datacenters in China at that point.
Barring that kind of a situation, moving European data back to Europe makes the most sense.
Putting datacenters in the Baltic states might not make the most sense, tho.
Russia will most likely migrate/mirror to asian data centers. Is it bad or good for the west? I would say bad. China would become even stronger in a long term
Ukraine can have servers outside of Ukraine. No meed to have servers in the USA. I dont think these issues are so connected. As long as the servers are somewhere Russia does not dare to bomb.
I'd heard (from someone trying to use them) that net connections into the Chinese clouds was very busy in the days around the start of the war, so the suggestion is they have critical stuff mirrored there.