Late summer this year, one of the most high-profile public cloud initiatives in the Nordics launched:
Before that, 2–3 years had been spent with development work and capital injections:
It looked really exciting — finally, an initiative with proper funding and big ambitions. Yesterday I finally had time to try it out. I managed to “sign up” and “sign in” with my credit card. So far, so good. Small steps — but at least, on paper, we finally have a public cloud in the Nordics with self-service!
So how does it work? Are we dealing with an AWS killer? No, is the short answer. It’s a very minimalist experience. Like the German provider Hetzner, you can basically only launch a virtual Ubuntu server — that’s it.
Like Hetzner, they also offer managed object storage (S3). And the only somewhat interesting feature is that you can run some small language models. It all feels a bit unfinished, however it should be noted that they themselves describe it as a beta version. Going forward, they plan to offer databases, block storage, and Kubernetes clusters — but for now, that’s still in the future.
Interestingly, they appear to have chosen to base their entire infrastructure on Kubernetes. This means, among other things, that you can use kubectl and YAML to manage your resources. That’s certainly an interesting choice — let’s hope they don’t drown in complexity and in the massive changes Google is planning for Kubernetes 2.0, including (it seems) the discontinuation of kubectl and YAML.
There are virtually no how-to guides, no customer references, and on top of that, it’s really expensive — more than 17 times the price of Hetzner. Okay, perhaps it’s not entirely fair to compare with Hetzner, since they’re ridiculously cheap, but still — a 1700% price difference!
vs.
Let me finish by again noting that, in my opinion, the way forward for Europe is not to create poor copies of the large, centralized American clouds. We’re way too late to the party, and we have way too little money. We need new ideas and new thinking. The Internet was built to be decentralized — let’s hold on to that. We must dare to recreate an open Internet for our citizens, with a well-functioning ecosystem of providers that compete on quality and price.
