The very interesting question will then be : how many people _do_ switch ?
For the personnal tools, people have lots of leeway (change mail provider, search engine, ai chatbot, etc...)
For the enterprise, I really wonder how you defend a "let's migrate our infra from AWS to X" in general, even for technological reason or business reason ; I don't even know how you start a conversation like "aws works fine for us, but let's switch for political reasons" (whether the political reason is good or bad is out of topic.)
Normally, if "infra as code" works as well as advertised, this would be a "convert yaml to json" exercise ; so we should see someone write "what we learned switching from AWS to EU-based X". I'll be on the lookout for that - but to be completely honest, I'm not holding my breath...
> I don't even know how you start a conversation like "aws works fine for us, but let's switch for political reasons"
Some companies may see it as "let's switch for continuity-of-business reasons", not political reasons as such. Things may get worse over the next few years. Amazon is not spending billions on https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/europe-digital-sovereignty... for _fun_; even before ol' minihands's return, some highly risk-conscious companies, particularly those in sensitive fields, would not use AWS out of caution (the US-EU data protection treaties keep collapsing, for instance see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU–US_Privacy_Shield ).
I'd say AWS is less at risk from this than most, actually, in that, as above, they have a plan, though just how watertight it is remains to be seen.
To be clear, I don't mean that there is no good reason to have such a conversation. I'm just really curious how you can't start it ; in the middle of the millions of things that your average company has to do, how do you knock on your bosses's door and tell them:
"hey, you know that "cloud" thing that you have no idea how it works, but our whole business depend on ?
We're using the same as everyone else; but we're not sure we can trust US cloud anymore, so we want to try an unknown company from country-you-can't-place-on-a-map-either.
We'll have to spend several months of engineering and incurr tens of thousands of dollars of extra licenses to try and migrate our infra.
We have no way to be sure it will work.
And it will make no discernable difference to our customers.
We have to start on Monday, so that we can be ready in time for next US presidential blunder.
I mean, sure, it'd be disruptive. That is, unfortunately, the nature of current geopolitics. There are a lot of companies who'll currently be having serious unexpected conversations about tariffs, say (if you have a profit margin of 3% and your main input has just had a 25% tariff slapped on it, then you'll be looking at big changes, more or less immediately, or else going out of business).
If the wheels come off the current arrangements that let European businesses operate on US-owned cloud services, then a lot of companies will be having similar conversations. Those companies who've investigated this _before_ the wheels come off will be in better shape. Some companies have been investigating and/or actively doing this for _years_.
> For the enterprise, I really wonder how you defend a "let's migrate our infra from AWS to X"
The current US president favours bribery by the US to foreign officials. Doesn't seem completely insane to assume that he also favours spying on non-US competitors.
If you are a big company and use US services (e.g. Microsoft Teams or Slack or GMail or the countless others), then you have to assume that the US can see all the conversations you have on those services.
Sounds like a good enough reason to consider migrating.
We migrated to Scaleway pretty easily and the main argument was that it's easier to conform to EU regulations if all your servers and data are on an European cloud.
> I don't even know how you start a conversation like "aws works fine for us, but let's switch for political reasons" (whether the political reason is good or bad is out of topic.)
Someone relatively senior sees an article, blog, whitepaper etc and mentions it. Staff at any level who agree with the politics can then push a little to make it happen — even just by keeping it as a lunchtime discussion topic.
My employer moved away from American-hosted products due to privacy concerns, except for Office 365. The relatively senior people read about legal risks, asked a local lawyer, and made it a moderate priority to get done. For Office 365 we have the standard assurance from Microsoft that our data is in Ireland, but I could see that being reviewed.
mmmm these two things are very deeply linked in that politics creates trust and bad policy very easily removes global trust just like personal relationships (literally what we're seeing in the US).
i live in asia - indonesian vs vietnam foreign policy (despite problems in domestic policy) has shown how vast the difference in policy can generate foreign trust which lead to manufacturing which lead to a lot more money being brought to VN overall.
I'd be very interested in hearing about that difference - Indonesia is a country of 281 million people (!) that's almost invisible on the world stage, while Vietnam is a manufacturing success despite being nominally Communist still.
I'm far from an expert, but you can look at Sembcorp which was a joint effort by Singapore back in '96 with Vietnam to boost foreign manufacturing[0].
What's not really shown in the Wiki is that the VN government really protected and ensured smooth efforts for these projects. You can tell it worked because of how many follow on projects they did.
The counter is Sembcorp's Indo project[1] which is in the same wiki. At a conference I was lucky enough to listen to a Bain consultant who directly advised on these policies with the VN and ID government in the early 2000's, so a bit after they got going. The Indo government setup quite similar projects with Sembcorp as VN. The problems start because the project was setup with the "federal" government (country level), but local state government wanted their piece too and started "taxing" the raw materials coming in through their ports. Obviously this new tax wasn't part of the original program. Things like this, bribes, permits (more bribes), material blocking at ports (even more bribes), etc kept creating small but material roadblocks. Complaints to the central government were heard but not enough was done. Overtime, the foreign manufacturers got fed up dealing with local politics.
Bintan today is a shell of what it was expected to be in terms of its manufacturing powerhouse. It's mostly a resort town now for Singaporeans who want a weekend away.
VN has quite a bit of domestic problems in policy and corruption (they're rightfully working on it overall), but despite all that, it shows that you really can create foreign trust via policy that benefits the country greatly. Politics and trust very much go hand in hand.
For the personnal tools, people have lots of leeway (change mail provider, search engine, ai chatbot, etc...)
For the enterprise, I really wonder how you defend a "let's migrate our infra from AWS to X" in general, even for technological reason or business reason ; I don't even know how you start a conversation like "aws works fine for us, but let's switch for political reasons" (whether the political reason is good or bad is out of topic.)
Normally, if "infra as code" works as well as advertised, this would be a "convert yaml to json" exercise ; so we should see someone write "what we learned switching from AWS to EU-based X". I'll be on the lookout for that - but to be completely honest, I'm not holding my breath...