French Cloud: a Change of Scenery

Last summer had a French focus. It all started with a request from Jeroen, the CTO of Tolkie, asking whether I could help them figure out if they could move to a European cloud provider.

At this moment the Sovereign Cloud is a hot topic. For some this is about being legally compliant. For others, it might be to be resilient in times of global political turbulence. This topic is also becoming more relevant for Tolkie’s clients, since many of them are (semi-)governmental organizations.

During my assignment I focused on finding a potential target architecture for Tolkie’s applications.

We started by figuring out which factors were important when choosing the new cloud provider. The eventual list included:

• A European provider, from both a legal and a physical perspective.

• Proper support for containers, so that we can easily deploy the packaged application, including large dependencies.

• Easy setup of monitoring, because we want to see problems before the users do.

• Minimizing the amount of rewrite required to make the move.

• Proper, integrated Identity and Access Management (IAM).

Then I did an analysis of the offerings of the different parties. I looked at one of my favorite providers, Hetzner, but also at options like Exoscale, STACKIT, OVH and Leaseweb.
Besides researching their marketing material and public documentation, I also asked around in my network for hands-on experience. This resulted in a large table with all factors considered.

Finally, I concluded that only Scaleway was a good option, since they are one of the few providers with a more advanced IAM solution, and they offer services like a managed container runtime, which allows us to avoid tinkering with a Kubernetes cluster.

The unfortunate conclusion was also that most European cloud providers do not have the same ambitions as the global players. They tend to be more focused on selling (virtual) infrastructure with few additional services. That Scaleway does seem to try to play along is something I really enjoy being part of.

While doing the comparison I also analyzed the architecture of the current application and drafted (on paper 😄) a target architecture.

This concluded our first part. We knew where to go, but what would be the best next step?

After I presented my findings, Jeroen gave me the go-ahead to build a prototype to see if the target architecture was feasible.

I built a very minimal application that reflected the critical features of Tolkie, like using Redis for caching and storing files in object storage. I deployed this on the container engine, including Edge Services. Of course, other components like a managed PostgreSQL database are also part of the solution.

Everything was fully defined as Infrastructure as Code using Terraform.

Soon we discovered a few open issues, like:

• If you want to expose the database to the container, you need to make the database publicly available.

• There is no way to open a remote shell into the container to start a Python shell.
  (This is why I love Django applications)

• Containers have their own secrets, which are not part of the Secrets Manager. This might result in secrets leaking into the Terraform state.

The nice thing is that after consulting the support agents (who are fairly responsive and human), I was happy to hear that most concerns are known and being addressed.

The fact that the client allowed me to verify my own advice has helped build confidence in where this is all going.
It also gave me the right feedback to consider viable workarounds for some of the issues.

Nevertheless, some of the open issues are blockers for us, so we have to be patient for a little while.

If everything goes well, the actual move will take place next year. So let’s hope this becomes an inspiring success story.

The interesting thing is that Scaleway is not AWS, GCP or Azure. It is in the EU, headquartered in France and many of their employees have access to proper baguettes and hypermarkets. Despite their limited scale and a less attractive investment culture, they are still challenging the status quo.

I hope they will succeed and that some other providers will follow their path. For the benefit of all of us.

Inspired by the French vibe, I ended the summer in the South of France, in the village of Caseneuve:
A place where within a 5-minute walk you see 4 cats and a dog. The best pizza is served in the parking lot only once a week.

Meanwhile, AI is eating the world. The electricity fails during the night.

The next day, I walk near the ocher cliffs in Roussillon; I look at the beautiful French clouds.