Europe needs hyperscalers (lots of them) [LWN.net]

Europe needs hyperscalers (lots of them)

Posted Feb 11, 2026 9:00 UTC (Wed) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to: Europe needs hyperscalers (lots of them) by rbranco
Parent article: FOSS in times of war, scarcity, and AI

We don't need hyperscalers, but we do need competition. The biggest issue currently is that if you have your infrastructure setup in (for example) AWS using Terraform, it's non-trivial task to convert that to any other cloud provider. It's basically vendor lock-in, cloud-style.

Until it's easy to transport your infra between cloud providers there can never be true competition. FOSS can help there.

The most portable setup I've come across so far is having your application run under K8s, and then using the cloud-providers to supply a K8s environment. Because it's all standard you can run the same application anywhere. But of course this ignores 90%+ of the services cloud providers provide.

Europe needs hyperscalers (lots of them)

Posted Feb 12, 2026 9:52 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (6 responses)

I haven't worked with K8S that much but my impression is that it is literally the anti-thesis of standardization, every little subsystem has multiple options that are mutually completely incompatible and often proprietary and undocumented and there isn't even any sort of default.

Even the few subsystems like storage and ingress where some vague resemblance to standardization exists are often only maybe 90% compatible. And good luck getting any kind of tooling to replicate a setup that uses the same configuration format on another provider or locally.

Europe needs hyperscalers (lots of them)

Posted Feb 12, 2026 19:03 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (5 responses)

The problem with K8s is that it's extremely flexible. It can be used for anything from a single-node "cluster" to deployments with millions of nodes and multiple concurrent rolling deployments.

Europe needs hyperscalers (lots of them)

Posted Feb 16, 2026 9:42 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (4 responses)

It feels like one of those technologies where those who need millions of nodes are pushing some of their costs onto those who do not even need HA in the first place via hype to be honest.

Europe needs hyperscalers (lots of them)

Posted Feb 16, 2026 20:32 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

To an extent. K8s is a bit over-engineered in that regard. For example, it uses etcd to be resilient against the database failures for its control plane. Hardly anybody really needs this.

But it's not _all_ over-engineering, a lot of K8s complexity is justified once you get to a ~10-20 node cluster. Things like resource-based scheduling, gradual rollouts, and automatic rollbacks become important.

And just like with Linux itself, the set of features that are important to you, is often very different from the set of features that are important to me. So it's hard to create one definitive "standard" minimalistic set of features that would satisfy everyone.

Europe needs hyperscalers (lots of them)

Posted Feb 17, 2026 6:42 UTC (Tue) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (2 responses)

etcd is not mandatory. On my home cluster I'm using k3s, with single PostgreSQL as a data store. Works perfectly on trash old laptops I've used as nodes.

Europe needs hyperscalers (lots of them)

Posted Feb 17, 2026 18:55 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, but K3s is not K8s. And the design of K8s is severely affected by etcd limitations, even though all the large players have versions of K8s that use different storage backends.

Europe needs hyperscalers (lots of them)

Posted Feb 17, 2026 20:19 UTC (Tue) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

K3s _is_ k8s – it passes conformance test suite and has CNCF's certificate. But I recognize this is a nitpicking not contributing to the discussion, so I'll yield here.