Yes, let's repatriate our data to the UK and Europe.

That way the US "Cloud Act" won't enable Trump and co. to peer over the government's and others shoulders.

Oh, it's also a good idea because you won't have to travel so far to kick a few arses when the the whole thing goes tits up.

But European cloud masters can't afford the same quality wine and steak.

Or snake oil for that matter, if we're talking about foodstuffs.

It seems that the USA potentially no longer needs to actually physically invade a country to bring down governments and inflict regime change: they can just bring down their parliamentary voting systems instead (who on earth thought that it would be sensible to outsource - and presumably remotely host - something as mission-critical as that?!!).

"Meanwhile, [1]business at the Scottish Parliament was suspended because of technical issues with the parliament's online voting system .

The outage prompted a postponement of debate over land reform legislation that could allow Scotland to intervene in private sales and require large estates to be broken up.

A senior Scottish Parliament source told BBC News they believed the problems were related to the Microsoft outage."

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3rj45n4x5eo

This is why any serious matter should be voted on with pencils, paper and manual counting by interested parties. All the possible failure modes are thoroughly documented.

Change Management not a thing at MS, then...

If you no longer do any testing or QA, Change Management must seem like overkill too.

It's not like your customers have any choice anyway..

A tenant change? Bobby Tables strikes again...

...The end-of-day timing minimized disruption...

Yep, in all locations where it was end of day :-D

We wrong-ponders got it for the most part of the day, started right after lunch and was still ongoing at end of day.

Or you could (drumroll please) Host critical systems internally so you are not reliant on a company that don't care one little bit about you to not screw up and leave you without a working system. Sure there are specific systems where some form of cloud may be the correct solution, but in the end it's the computer of someone who don't give a beep about you and your data/system.

What?

And no longer get free expensive dinners from the monopolies?

Surely you're joking?

/s

. . how you should fucking get back to managing your own systems with your own admins and stop depending on the pipe dream of someone else's server.

Yes, I'm an old curmudgeon nearing retirement. Call me boomer, I don't care. You deal with the fallout if you're so smart.

That's why I run my own version of the reg on my own server.

It covers IT issues in my house to an audience of one. It currently doesn't have many comments since I banned myself

"That's why I run my own version of the reg on my own server."

Ah, mirror sites and usenet: more elegant tools for a more civilized age… ;-)

comp.news.media.the-register , anyone?

Also, while trying to refresh my memory of what a likely Reg newsgroup name would be like, I came across this:

[1]RFD: Remove comp.unix.user-friendly

Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2025 10:21:57 EDT

RATIONALE:

Last activity in 2009

If there is need for discussion, more general groups can be used.

If even the (metaphorical or otherwise) greybeards have gone away…!

(In all honesty, I'm surprised that (m)any people would be still using usenet at all these days. It sadly (mostly) stopped being useful for me (apart from a few excepted groups which somehow still maintained strong communities), and became completely swamped with spam, and new users stopped arriving, a looong time ago…)

[1] https://www.big-8.org/wiki/Nan:2025-10-10-rfd-comp.unix.user-friendly

> In all honesty, I'm surprised that (m)any people would be still using usenet at all these days. It sadly

> (mostly) stopped being useful for me (apart from a few excepted groups which somehow still

> maintained strong communities), and became completely swamped with spam, and new users

> stopped arriving, a looong time ago…

I believe the inflection point was when it was taken over by Google.

I take your point, but we take a hybrid approach.

- We develop our systems so that they are completely independent of the proprietary dev tools of the big 3 (Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud). They are therefore completely provider independent and portable.

- We have VMs spread across multiple service providers in multiple geographic locations.

- We mirror systems across multiple service providers and locations

We don't have to build our own redundant hardware infrastructure, but we get all the benefits of being in total control of our systems. No per transaction charges so costs are predictable and considerably less than on prem. Scaling up or down is easy. You don't have to be able to touch metal to have control.

The reason that people use the proprietary dev tools of the big 3 is that it's very quick and very cheap to build a lot of functionality. But you're then completely locked in and over the barrel with your trousers around your ankles. But hey ... nobody ever got fired for using Microsoft (or Google, or AWS).

What about DNS? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Potentially a hot take here, but I don't think the cloud has necessarily made things less reliable than they used to be. Online systems frequently had outages before the cloud came along. I think what the cloud has done has increased awareness of it because a significant chunk of businesses have an outage at the same time, rather than it being isolated incidents that, by themselves, weren't particularly news-worthy

Yes there were outages, but one config change at a company on the other side of the world was unlikely to take you and half the internet down with it.

I don't think most people actually complain about uptime, but the absurd fallout when something do go wrong.

It should also be considered to be a very vulnerable single point of failure, with cost benefit ratio that would make any analyst salivate if a hostile nation / organization want to cause maximum disruption.

Wasn’t the entire selling point of cloud computing that this sort of thing could never happen? The industry promised near-mythical uptime, automatic failover, and endless redundancy - all so businesses wouldn’t be crippled by local outages or rogue server updates. Yet one “tenant configuration change” at Microsoft was enough to take down swathes of Europe’s retail, transport, and communications infrastructure. The great irony is that the cloud has become the very thing it was meant to replace: a brittle, centralised system where a single slip (or a cleaner) can bring half the internet to its knees.

Interesting question comes to mind. Does China also rely on single point failures like the west's big 3, microsoft, google, amazon? If I were thinking war strategy, I'd be thinking take out some cloud providers as a first strike.

No, those were side-promises. The entire selling point was that the vendor promises 18% savings on the customer's current costs. My friends in the "advisory" industry assured me that 18% was a magic figure - big enough to make the CFO's pupils dilate, small enough that the vendor could deliver at that price for a couple of years before hiking prices through the remainder of the contract. They were equally clear there were rarely any cost savings - a customer big enough to attract sales attention from a hyperscaler or outsource provider would by definition be big enough that they'd have realised most of the economies - efficient procurement, an existing overhead base (HR, security, legal etc), big enough that there's no people split across multiple jobs, or fractional FTE. Even so, the hyperscalers had a modest cost of sales advantage, eg on DC design, costs of failover capacity, yet that was always more than eaten up by margin, sales costs and technical setup costs.

Corporate memory has an event horizon of three years, so by the time the client was being reamed out, they'd long forgotten what it cost to provide themselves, moreover the route to re-insource your IT is very heavy on front end costs, hence the CFO would veto it.

Kind of, but a lot of the promises on savings are that everything is opex and not capex. No (or far fewer) servers, lower costs on power and cooling and potentially fewer IT staff as well.

The day will no doubt come when a much bigger outage than this, or last week's AWS outage, or another CrowdStrike will destroy faith in cloud computing, and at that time the industry won't be able to adapt the other way quickly because so many firms are deprecating on-prem products.

Because if they signed it off, then there could be serious action from big shareholders.

My anecdotal evidence is that this is actually encouraged by shareholders (who also have shares in the cloud providers). If cloud goes down, this is taken as a fact of life, thing that sometimes happen, like rain or storm.

Might be worth adding the little bit of information that Civo just so happen to have a vested interest in lobbying for a 'sovereign cloud'. Although last time I checked Azure and AWS both had UK locations, if perhaps with varying availability…