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when people think When it comes to the cloud computing industry, three names come to mind: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Still, smaller cloud companies are still doing well. French company OVHcloud, founded in 1999, is one of them.
Of course, cloud computing didn’t even exist in 1999. The company has remained relevant over the years thanks to its dogmatic approach to hosting and internet infrastructure. A few days ago, the company’s founder and chairman met with Octave Klaba.
“There’s a difference between the impossible and the improbable. Maybe we’re an unlikely company, but we exist,” he told me.
We talked about his long-term vision for OVHcloud, including Data Center as a Service, private 5G networks, satellites and quantum computing.
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If you have “only” 2,800 employees and no side business to fund your cloud department, how do you compete with companies like Amazon and Microsoft?
OVHcloud’s vision can be summed up in two words. Leveraging open source as the foundation for product innovation and uncompromising sovereignty. The company’s data center-as-a-service project is a good example of these two points.
“There will be more supermarkets using robots. Companies like Auchan and Carrefour will have fulfillment centers that will be robotized. There will be Renault factories with more IoT. Airports. and container terminals, we need to put intelligence and automation into different places,” said Octave Klaba.
We also believe that computing resources should be located close to the end client. Enterprises decide where to place their “cloud”. He calls the concept “operational sovereignty.”
“Today, customers don’t have a choice. They choose our data centers or we don’t know where AWS’s data centers are,” Klaba said. “Operational sovereignty does not exist today because there is no right to choose.”
We are refactoring the entire data center stack to operate autonomously even when the data center is disconnected. octave clava
Essentially, OVHcloud wants to be able to offer the best of both worlds. Some clients want the abstraction layer of public cloud infrastructure and the flexibility of an on-premises installation. They want to choose their own data center colocation or convert their own data center into his OVHcloud enabled data center.
With this service, cloud companies deploy their own server farms to handle hardware updates. We run a pre-integrated cloud services system on these servers, so they act like a dedicated his OVHcloud data center.
Also, being a service, the client pays monthly bills. You don’t need a bank loan to amortize your hardware over several years.
“Some of our clients have very sensitive and secret data. They want to operate their data centers without external connections. rice field.
“So we are refactoring the entire data center stack so that it can operate autonomously even when the data center is disconnected. I’m here. And eventually it will be open source.
When updating the software stack, someone goes to the data center with a NUC mini PC and a USB key. Updates are quickly deployed to all servers in your data center.
“That’s why we became a public company and why I raised €350 million. We’re open sourcing the software stack so you can download and deploy it yourself,” he said. Klaba said. “I want to give it away for free so you can do my work.”
There are two main advantages in that case. First, cloud companies continue to reinvent the wheel. For example, all cloud companies offer database-as-a-service products, but they typically don’t share the code behind these services. Everyone keeps developing the same thing over and over again.
Second, a strong open source community is usually more efficient than private companies developing their own components. OVHcloud wants to be the center of the community for this open source data center software.
“It’s a crazy bet. You can only make a bet like this once in your life. But we think we’ll make it,” Klava told me.
Private 5G, Satellite and Quantum Computing
When talking about edge computing, Octave Klaba was a little offended by the industry hype. “There’s a lot of bullshit on the edge. So many people talk about edge computing, but they don’t know what they’re talking about,” he said.
He then gave me an example of what edge computing means. Like other cloud computing companies, OVHcloud wants to offer a private 5G network.
“We have large warehouses, airports, inland ports, refineries, large factories…they need some kind of connection that covers large areas with low latency and lots of bandwidth. It should be easy and connected to the cloud,” says Klaba.
So many people talk about edge computing, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. octave clava
In that industry, OVHcloud competes with traditional telcos and manufacturers, but Klaba said these companies don’t necessarily know how to build things that are stable, always up-to-date, and always online. I don’t think so. “Now they have to use Kubernetes and they’re thinking, ‘Oh my God, how is he going to manage Kubernetes?'” he joked.
“On the one hand, Microsoft, AWS, or Google are investing heavily in these areas. They’re buying companies. They say they can do everything for you for free.” But then it connects to the infrastructure, the value-added services are sold and billed, which is a great hack,” Klaba said.
OVHcloud has developed a proof-of-concept for a private 5G network, although it doesn’t necessarily want to follow the same strategy. Again, it’s all about staying in this market and edge computing race in general.
When it comes to satellites, OVHcloud doesn’t want to compete with Starlink as a telecom company. Instead, we want to focus on Earth observation satellites.
As satellite sensors get better and better, it’s getting harder and harder to bring the data home. Currently, satellites mainly rely on radio transmissions.
“We are working on a ground station that can receive this data, but using light,” said Octave Klaba. And he believes that OVHcloud will be able to use France’s overseas regions around the world for this new network of ground stations.
Klaba was also particularly enthusiastic about quantum computing. “It’s incredible what’s happening with quantum computing,” he told me.
He said it’s only a matter of time before quantum computers appear. And he encourages all large European companies to start investing in this topic now.
“If they don’t make the effort now, when quantum computers are here, it will take three to five years to start using them. Competitors are ready: Banks will say we use quantum computers and risk calculations are faster and cheaper,” said Klaba.
In that case, OVHcloud primarily wants to create an ecosystem of companies working on quantum computing. But recruiting physicists working on this topic can be difficult. According to Klaba, there is still a shortage of talent.
“I think it’s the next big thing. During the last century the big things were Einstein, atomic theory and nuclear power plants. Today it’s quantum and it’s going to be exponential,” he said. I got
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