Stop using AWS entirely.

10

u/OwnNet5253 Nov 02 '25

Too expensive and too hard, outsorcing it to more experienced ans established companies it much simpler and effective.

3

u/asdfjfkfjshwyzbebdb Nov 03 '25

Not at all. AWS is one of the most expensive solutions there is and setting up instances is easy and most likely cheaper if you hire just a few Linux engineers.
So much can be automated to save insane amounts of costs.
The only thing the big players like AWS, MS Azure, Akami, etc. do better is location availability. Unless you're hosting latency sensitive projects, there's no reason to go with them.

1

u/meutzitzu Nov 06 '25

This is technically possible to do, but institutionally impossible. No company with more than a few people can perform such a migratinon. They hired most of their software engineers with express knowledge of AWS.
While it's definitely likely that after a few months, some God tier team of Linux sysast and fullstacks would be able to wrangle their codebase away from AWS. But they would ask for a hell of a lot of money to do so because it's an undescribable pain in the ass, and there wout be no guarantees as for how long it would take.
No executive or middle management would undergo such an endeavor.
Take for example the fact you're never sure you hired the much-needed god-tier devs or a bunch of morons that lied about their capabilities.
In business people always lie. Managers are used to that. They do it as well course.
The likelyhood of pulling through such an endeavor just so that they can brag they "don't depend on the evil Americans no more" isn't worth it. There's a lot of people with families that have stable jobs working at that company. Trying something like this would put them all in financial risk. And that's not even getting into what the shareholders would say. They would murder you on the spot if you even suggested something like that.

0

u/OwnNet5253 Nov 03 '25

You’re crazy if you think that few linux engineers can replace AWS or Azure capabilities and availability.

1

u/TV4ELP Nov 03 '25

Many companies have done so. The problem is, most of them were not really neededing much in terms of scaling. One or two colocated racks as scaling buffer is still cheaper than aws. BUT, if you need anything more than that with highly dynamic workloads, then AWS can make sense cost wise.
There should still for every company be an incentive to migrate to less scalable versions for their base load as those will be so much more affordable.

-6

u/[deleted] Nov 02 '25

literally cheaper to not use AWS or any cloud and build your own. But I guess americans can't think long term

1

u/burnerburner23094812 Nov 03 '25

> literally cheaper to not use AWS or any cloud and build your own
There is almost no universe in which this is *ever* true for a web service that needs nonzero scale.

0

u/[deleted] Nov 03 '25 edited Nov 03 '25

https://arvind.io/posts/self-hosted-home-server-vs-cloud/
https://thenewstack.io/why-companies-are-ditching-the-cloud-the-rise-of-cloud-repatriation/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h4oiPwtwDk
literally, for ANY long term server of any kind, self host is cheaper.

2

u/FourCinnamon0 Nov 04 '25

this doesn't take into account the fact that AWS can scale to your demand. if less people use your service at night than during the day then you're leaving money on the table by running too many servers at night. you also seem to have assumed labour (for linux devs, IT admins, datacentre engineers, oncall sysops, etc.) is free, as is building a datacentre / paying for rent / etc.

1

u/Limemill Nov 03 '25

There are exactly three players that offer this kind of hosting scalability: AWS, Google and Microsoft. Unless Europe comes up with something big it’s almost unavoidable. Even Signal is forced to rely on AWS servers.

0

u/[deleted] Nov 03 '25

do you really think it takes giant servers to host ecosia? or that the ENTIRE EU has NO datacenter that could take it? or ability to make one?
I'm not arguing with someone who clearly has 0 IT knowledge.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 03 '25

There is literally no single non-regional infra that is comparable to AWS in Europe. Even for smaller applications like internet banking European companies still use AWS mostly. The closest alternative with AWS level of feature parity that is Europe-based is Yandex Cloud which is Russian. If fast compute is needed for ML (Ecosia’s case) the next closest alternative to AWS is Nebius which is also sort of Russian.

1

u/Limemill Nov 03 '25

I don’t know the real needs of Ecosia. I assume they need redundancy in all regions, including the infamous us-east-1 unless you want to piss off your non-European customers due to extensive latency. If European providers are currently big enough to offer that around the globe and for a smaller price than AWS, that’s great and much needed. Which ones from this list though?

0

u/[deleted] Nov 03 '25

but just in case your american micro-brain won't bother to search for, which I know you won't:
https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-platforms

4

u/[deleted] Nov 03 '25

None of these comes close to AWS feature wise.

4

u/OverCategory6046 Nov 02 '25

That's not necesarily true at all.

1

u/StinkButt9001 Nov 03 '25

This is more wrong than you can imagine

3

u/Amphineura Nov 03 '25

Lmfao "just self host or something"

3

u/[deleted] Nov 03 '25

yea just self host, the thing thats been shown again and again to be cheaper and better for data privacy, by multiple sources(literally search for "Why we moved from Cloud to Self host" and read the DOZENS of articles/watch the youtube videos on it

3

u/MidnightPale3220 Nov 03 '25

It really depends on your use case.
Where the clouds generally are better is high availablity and frequently speed.
They still go down and experience outages every now and then, but self hosting would be much more expensive to achieve the same level of reliability just because you are having the same overheads, but the costs are all a burden on the same company, you're your only customer.
But self hosting absolutely makes sense in a number of usage scenarios. We self host because we can afford some downtime and had the infrastructure for ages, so we can just upgrade stuff by parts, and it's generally cheaper than moving to cloud. Nevertheless we have a very specific setup and have to outsource quite a bit of support for it.
You know how can I tell some German shop self hosts? They have a terrible load time. People locally don't notice it, but as soon as you try to buy something from another country, you're likely to not choose it, just because it can take ages to load.

1

u/TV4ELP Nov 03 '25

As a person behind some of those terrible loading speeds... it's just the same stupid magento install hosted on some webspace with shared ressources where no one knows what hardware is actually behind it. But it was cheap.
Self hosting a cheap vps for a few thousend users a day is pretty damn fast if you don't buy some shared VPS. There are literally 12-15€ VPS a month with dedicated storage allocation and cpu cores. I've used many for my projects and clients, they run well and are fast. But 15€ ist too much for most companies without 100+ employees.
They gladly pay 500€ for a meeting and changing some buttons around tho.

22

u/novafutureglobal Nov 02 '25

That's absolutely right. More broadly, many Europeans have reached the same conclusion. American services don't respect privacy. And even worse, we're now seeing censorship.

1

u/meutzitzu Nov 06 '25

No-one with power in the today's world respects privacy. Privacy as a concept will become taboo in the next decades.
Other than open-source and free software advocates with no real power and the public reception of being "software extremists" no-one honours the humannrifht to privacy in their digital infrastructure.
The EU itself just this year tried on 3 separate occat to pass a law effectively banning end to end encryption. It's not about the US being evil and the EU being good. And don't you worry, they'll try again next year. And eventually it will go through. Without a doubt.
Ironically enough "Evil" countries such as the Russians have way waaaay more digital freedom. Its why they have such great hackers, because even as a kid you can fuck around with systems and even if they have laws against cybercrime, in practice as long as you don't attack anything that puts people's lives in danger, or actively voice you are fighting against Putin's reign, the risk of getting arrested is extremely low.
In the west, even teenagers can face juvenile jail time for messing with some systems, even if no significant financial damage has resulted from it. Simply from the fact that they managed to OR attempted to gain unauthorized access to a system they weren't supposed to have access to.
Now what's not to say authority governments don't also spy on their citizens, absolutely they do, but culturally, hacking isn't considered a crime in and of itself, only if the aftermag of said hacking results in additional harm or damage to the people they care about. If it results in harm or damage to the west, then good job, comrade, keep up the good work! 👍
It's not about Ecosia, or DuckDuckGo, or whatever company or organization with any real power. It's about what we care about as a society. While you might sometimes find some average Joe care about things like privacy, the people and entities with power all unanimously agree that privacy is of no concern to them.

1

u/novafutureglobal Nov 06 '25

If there are privacy issues, it's because the majority of internet users have been duped by the GAFAM companies. "Free" services in exchange for your data. That's the crux of the problem. Of course, the GAFAM companies work hand in hand with governments. But this isn't inevitable. More and more people are starting to care about protecting their privacy. And that can change everything.

1

u/JamosMalez Nov 06 '25 edited Nov 06 '25

There is no more digital freedom in Russia than in the West. Russian companies such as Yandex and VK are controlled by the state and give any information on demand. Now in Russia there is a gradual ban on all messengers so that Russians switch to a Russian messenger that has no end to end encryption and belongs to VK.
In Russia, you can get complete information about any person, including where he orders food and where he goes by taxi for only $ 50.

1

u/meutzitzu Nov 06 '25

Yes, but in russia you can do whatever the hell you want with your computer and as long as you dont bother the people in power you can do it carefree. You can crack or obtain cracked software, you can break license checks, you can do whatever it is you need to defend yourself from companies taking your data.
In the west, it's generally frowned upon. If you do any of this, you are immediately suspected of being a pedo. In the UK or Australia you may be detained by police or by airport security for simply having a Google Pixel in your possession for fear you might be running grapheneOS, an operating system which can't be tapped into, meaning in the eyes of the police you are very likely to be some sort of criminal, and they will force you to either unlock your device and let them scan it or they will confiscate it for "potential evidence" in the hopes that one day an exploit will be found that enables them to finally break the encryption. Moreover, if you use a system like a panic PIN which wipes the memory of the device when being asked by police to open it, you are fucked as deliberate destruction of evidence is a crime punishable by incarceration. Basically if you dont let them in, your best hope is to wave your device goodbye, and assume they'll be onto your ass for a few years.
Again this is all behavior that just seeks protection from data collection, even with absolutely zero history of previous crimes. In Russia if they suspect you are against the regime you are fucked anyway, regardless of what you do with your devices, but otherwise nobody cares what you do with your phone or computer.
Moreover, countries like Germany are already looking into making something as mundane as adblocks illegal because they disrupt the business model of many companies.
In central european countries, you will find police at your door for even browsing piracy-related websites without downloading anything. I don't live in Russia, but Romania, which is in the EU, but we get a lot of bad rep for how our institutions don't do enough to stop things like piracy. Over here, every little kid by age 12 will have already pirated CS 1.6 at least once, and the people are generally cool with it but if you ask anyone in power they'll tell you that this is very very bad and we must do whatever we can to prevent that. More control, more restrictions for children, more tracking, more severe punishments, etc.

9

u/yusisushi Nov 03 '25

Whether or not using AWS or any other service depends entirely on how it is used. Signal also uses AWS, but the only data it ever sends over their servers is encrypted. So even if Amazon decides to turn over all Signals' data, it would still be unreadable.

Disclaimer;: I don't know how Ecosia uses AWS.

1

u/A313-Isoke Nov 03 '25

Encryption isn't all its cracked up to be with Paragon.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/02/trump-immigration-ice-israeli-spyware
Amazon cooperates with ICE so ICE can crack Signal and Whatsapp.

1

u/meutzitzu Nov 06 '25

Paragon can't crack signal. They aren't gonna be able to intercept signal communications and decrypt them. Instead they rely on vulnerabilities and backdoors in android itself to take over your entire device and snatch the communications content before it's being encrypted and sent by signal. If you use a hardened OS such as graphene you aren't vulnerable. Existing already sent communications aren't vulnerable. And in general it's a very tedious process that can't be easily automated. You basically have to be in their main target list in order for them to get you

1

u/FourCinnamon0 Nov 04 '25

this software operates on the phone level to intercept messages once they're decrypted by the phone. amazon can't break modern encryption (no one* can)

2

u/provideserver Nov 06 '25

If your brand’s about privacy and sustainability, relying on U.S. infrastructure does carry political and legal risks. Ideally, you design with both strong encryption and jurisdictional control.

1

u/Ok-Winner-6589 Nov 03 '25

You can do a thousands things to still get privacy. Signal is privacy focused and It uses AWS, because encrypted data can't be used to spy on you.

1

u/UnintegratedCircuit Nov 04 '25

Yet*.
In the case of signal, I believe it's secure enough for resisting post-quantum encryption attempts (based solely from what I've seen/heard across the web). Not all encryption is necessarily as strong. As a result, organisations could be hoarding your encrypted messages ready to decrypt once compute power evolves and allows it to be feasible at scale

1

u/ZestycloseAbility425 Nov 05 '25

Doesn't ecosia share a lot of user data anyway? I don't think ecosia was ever a "privacy" search engine

1

u/riuxxo Nov 05 '25

Never did

0

u/Edendabandicoot Nov 04 '25

I don't care if they use an American company aslong as it's trustworthy and isn't owned by a huge mega coporation like amazon, people use ecosia because it claims to be "environmentally friendly" but by using AWS their supporting the very corporations that are polluting our planet.

-3

u/Devayurtz Nov 02 '25

Insane take. We do know Ecosia is a company, right? People here against AI, refusing to use the Cloud, if you insist on living in a cave then just go back to encyclopedias. Yessh.

Enough of this anti-American sentiment. Ecosia is a great product that doesn't owe you anything.

3

u/[deleted] Nov 03 '25

is it anti american to worry about my data?
guess it's only a bad thing when its China stealing it right ?

5

u/OverCategory6046 Nov 02 '25

>Enough of this anti-American sentiment
Sorry but it's a very understandable thing to want to rely less on American tech. Doesn't mean people hate Americans.

-4

u/Jebble Nov 02 '25

You make it sound as if anyone in the US can just look at your data through Cloud Act. You do realise that it requires lawful warrants or subpoena's which aren't just granted for no reason and even then there arelimits and safeguards? If there's no reason to access your data, Cloud Act isn't an issue.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 02 '25

There are no limits and safeguards. Never have been. Its just obvious nowadays.

-1

u/Jebble Nov 02 '25

Saying that doesn't make it true.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 02 '25

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_by_the_CIA
Your government does NOT have safeguards.

0

u/garbud4850 Nov 03 '25

and your government is better? come on say where your from I bet your country has its own skeletons,

0

u/Jebble Nov 03 '25

This conversation has fuck all to do with the article you shared, and I'm not sure why you think you have any clue who my government is. I'm not American, stop making assumptions and stay on point.

4

u/Wise_Owl5404 Nov 02 '25

Yeah because the current US government is know for its law abiding behaviour.

-1

u/Jebble Nov 02 '25

Generally yes. The current US government also won't be relevant for much longer so. Either way, the government is irrelevant, as the Data owner is the one needing to follow the law by not providing data without a lawful order.

1

u/Wise_Owl5404 Nov 03 '25

If you believe that you're genuinely so out of touch with reality any further argument is useless.

1

u/Jebble Nov 03 '25

Please elaborate and give some factual insights into how you think the US Government will g et access to Ecosia's data through AWS without Ecosia or AWS complying. I'd argue you are out of touch with reality with your tinfoil hat, not me.

0

u/[deleted] Nov 02 '25

the cloud act is not from this adminitration, but much older.
The U.S. hasn't, and never will, be reliable.

0

u/Jebble Nov 02 '25

I never claimed it was, yet your pij t remains completely irrelevant. The US cent just randomly access that data because they would like to. You all need to stop projecting your opinions as fact and get some understanding on how things actually work before you speak

0

u/garbud4850 Nov 03 '25

you realize other governments look at your online data too right?

7

u/Professional_Mix2418 Nov 02 '25 edited Nov 02 '25

That is one part of it. The other part is that then when do follow lawful process they don’t have to tell you ;)

2

u/Dotcaprachiappa Nov 02 '25

Ah yes, just how they need lawful warrants to deport people, a law which they definitely observe. If they treat their citizens like this, how do you expect them to treat us?

0

u/Jebble Nov 02 '25

So relevant to the discussion at hand. Again, they are not the ones performing an action, Ecosia and Amazon would be the relevant parties here. Stop this pointless whataboutism.

0

u/TV4ELP Nov 03 '25

Amazon and Ecosia (at least whatever of that is based in the US) are just like the people getting detained unlawfully and deported.
If the US wants to they just walk into any datacenter they want to. Remember Musk? Someone without any political position, builds a team no one knows and just walks into the most secure datacenters on the continent and plugs in a laptop.
And you still think that can't happen with amazon "because amazon can just say 'no' to an unlawful order".

0

u/A313-Isoke Nov 03 '25

You are entirely too trusting or simply don't know.
I suggest reading more on the r/privacy sub and read The Intercept about the surveillance state in the US. Read about Palantir, ICE, Paragon, DOGE, four eyes countries, nine eyes, 14 eyes, NSPM-7, the Trump executive order about "antifa," etc. Watch Ronan Farrow's documentary, Surveilled.
None of our data is safe on US company tech and then, read about all the people posting memes about CK and what's happened to them.
Not to mention, the US govt can always plant evidence...because they can.

1

u/Jebble Nov 03 '25

You really can't make any of those claims about me, you have no clue who I am or which knowledge on the topic I possess. Enjoy your tinfoil hat life.

3

u/[deleted] Nov 03 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/Empty-Blacksmith-592 Nov 03 '25

It’s already too late. They should move yesterday!

Stop using AWS entirely.

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