Canada should build public cloud infrastructure rather than relying on U.S. tech giants
Canada should build public cloud infrastructure rather than relying on U.S. tech giants
During the 2025 election campaign, prime minister Mark Carney made a striking admission about Canada’s dependence on U.S. tech companies. The Canadian government was in the process of choosing a partner for a 25-year cloud computing contract for the federal government. The contract’s length should h...
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I think we should stop relying on cloud completely. The cloud is just someone else's computer. More should learn about self hosting and not depending on some other corporation to hold all your files and data. I already self host many things myself so as to depend less on other companies and being more independent.
There is a world of difference between self-hosting your personal life and, for example, the department of motor vehicles needing servers that benefit from economies of scale.
Well companies can also have their own servers. It would even be better than relying on a third party where when the company does a mistake then all their clients (other companies) are affected. The Cloudstrike bug would be a good example of that.
That's just not practical for a lot of businesses. Offloading the capex, operational costs and other hassles to a service provider makes a lot of sense for most companies.
I think you could easily hire people who do that job at your company or someone who maintain it at least or some contractors.
ok what do you think that costs? you've clearly given this a lot of thought to have such a strong opinion.
Depends on what you need, if you're a small business you won't need much and it won't cost as much as if you'd run a big business. Anyway, the whole point was to be more self reliant, how is being self reliant a bad thing? Why should you give all your information and trust a third party with everything you have?
You're treating data as a special unicorn. Why don't companies manufacture their own computers? Why don't they build their own delivery vans?
They don't need to go that far, I am just saying this is simple enough to do. Probably more complex for big corporations but the big corporations have the means to pay for their more complex system. As for small business this is simple enough. I am not saying they should build all their own hardware from scratch. And yes data is important and its better not to rely on some third party like I said what happened with cloudstrike affected so many and cost millions in damage. Same as so many company rely on Microsoft for everything. What's so bad about not needing to trust another big corporation with all your data and your business?
It's an ROI thing, as people are pointing out. You're hand waving that part away. A small business has to weigh an small annual fee and loss of control against buying expensive hardware and paying the salary of one or more IT professionals to maintain their in house systems. This also scales with the size of the company and their data, it's expensive for a small company to buy one or two servers and storage solutions, it's expensive for a big company to buy 20 of the same.
You also lose out on off-site backups (without more investment of course) and global availability. Will every company that has a global team roll out servers in every global region? Small companies can have global teams as well.
It's simply not cost effective for everyone to have their own infrastructure. Cloud infrastructure is the same as any other infrastructure, it is cheaper to pool resources and share
And for economies of scale and reliability and flexibility they could start pooling their computing together and then
I self host a lot of things to but I still have a cloud provider (sync.com as it is Canadian) and a Canadian web host service (hosthero.ca) for my web site and now my email. I have broken my home lab (made up of raspberry pi’s) to many times to trust running anything for my password manager so I have 1Password, another Canadian company. I stopped using google services (minus youtube) long ago so I found another authenticator app; I should maybe move all that stuff to 1Password as well, but I do like having separate apps for that stuff. I stopped paying for youtube premium and started using Unwatched so that I am not paying for ads. I have cancelled all of my US streaming services and moved to the high C’s for those things, and host them out of my home. Maybe if my Mac Pro still could connect to the internet, no idea what is wrong with it, I would use that to host more of my stuff.
I found out that my ISP has moved to an exchange server, and I cancelled most of my Apple services so hide my email is no longer available to so now I am in the process of moving everything to their own email address from my old email addresses. I already got very little spam and for the first time in months I got some spam today.
I mean that's good and all and I am sure those companies are way better than those big American tech companies but my point was about not having to depend on another company. Because you have to trust them with your information and just because it's Canadian doesn't mean they are good automatically. Another advantage of self hosting is if for any reason you lose internet access you still have access to your local network and all your files and passwords when you need them. This is also why it's important to not create a dependence on any online services. Like if this site were to shut down I wouldn't lose much, I would just lose my posts which to me aren't that important as people have read them already.