Depending on a colour

Since the end of January, the established world order of the West is being torn apart, as Trump and his gang of kleptocrats are ripping out the backbone of said order. For better or worse, the deal that was so beneficial for both sides (even though some people would pretend otherwise) has been terminated.

The repercussions of these actions are complex and touch many areas. As a product software developer one question keeps bothering me: How deep is our dependence on IT systems and cloud infrastructure provided by the big US-based players like Microsoft, Google or Amazon?

After a hard reality check, one can’t help but notice that all companies offering such services at this level of maturity and with which we Europeans can interact with fairly easily, come from the USA.

However, big corporations historically do the bidding of the regime in power, especially if it is some authoritarian regime.

While all those companies offer cloud regions within Europe (or even Switzerland, which has been quite relevant for us), It becomes clear that we depend on services provided from a country which is increasingly not an ally of Western Europe anymore.

Nations and companies that heavily rely on said technology stacks in Europe can easily be pressured. For example, in Germany, countless government institutions and departments rely on Azure services.

What does this mean for the company I work for? Throughout the years we have always erred towards using PaaS offerings from Azure wherever possible, in order to delegate a lot of the ops in DevOps to their site reliability engineers. This has allowed us to keep a small development team and still manage to implement a multitude of interesting features to our customers, with very little downtime.

We are talking about services like the Cosmos DB, Event grid, Azure search, etc. that gives us the necessary capabilities in a moderately complex application while delegating the necessary work around updating dependencies, ensuring reliability, scaling, and additional operational aspects.

Can the status quo continue?

The nations of Europe cannot easily make up for the incredible neglect towards modern service-oriented software offerings. Microsoft alone generates tens of billions from the Azure platform, while investing similar-sized amounts into data centers and software.

On the other hand, one can see the opportunity in this. If the provided infrastructure cannot be deemed safe anymore from a strategic defense perspective, Europe has an opportunity to invest in alternatives. Catching up may seem daunting, but technological progress often follows an exponential curve, which means Europe could develop competitive solutions faster than it took the tech giants to build theirs.

Is there a technical angle to this?

The itch I have begun to scratch is which parts of Azure’s offerings can be recreated with containers & open source, thereby increasing the likelihood of running on a purely European infrastructure without involvement of US big tech. The foundation remains in dotnet, as this would avoid unnecessary rewrites of the software that we have been creating over the past years.

Expect more to come in this space.