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You must have been hiding under a rock if you haven’t noticed how cloud computing has become the default in IT. I have started to wonder about the future of cloud computing. Certain international events have the potential to disrupt cloud computing in a major way. I’m going to play out two scenarios in this post and illustrate what the possible problems may be.

Bear In The East

Russia expanded their conflict with Ukraine in February 2024. This was the largest signal so far that the leadership of Russia wanted to expand their post-Soviet borders to include some of the former USSR nations. The war in Ukraine is taking much longer than expected and has eaten the Russian military, thanks to the determination of the Ukrainian people. However, we know that Russia has eyes elsewhere.

The Baltic nations (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) provide a potential land link between Russia and the Baltic Sea. North of those nations is Finland, a country with a long & wild border with Russia – and also one with a history of conflict with Russia. Finland (and Sweden) has recognised the potential of this expanded threat by joining NATO.

If you read “airport thrillers” like me, then you’ll know that Sweden has an island called Gotland in the Baltic Sea. It plays a huge strategic role in controlling that sea. If Russia were to take that island, they could prevent resupply via the Baltic Sea to the Baltic countries and Finland, leaving only air, land, and the long route up North – speaking of which …

Norway also shares a land border with Russia to the north of Finland. The northern Norwegian coast faces the main route from Murmansk (a place I attacked many times when playing the old Microprose F-19 game). Murmansk is the home of the Russian Atlantic fleet. Their route to the Atlantic is north of the Norwegian coast and south between Iceland and Ireland.

In the Artic is Svalbard, a group of islands that is host to polar bears and some pretty tough people. This island is also eyed up by Russia – I’m told that it’s not unusual to hear stories of some kind of espionage there.

So Russia could move west and attack. What would happen then?

Nordic Azure Regions

There are several Azure regions in the Nordics:

• Norway East, paired with Norway West
• Sweden Central, paired with Sweden South
• One is “being built” in Espoo, Finland, just outside the capital of Helsinki.

Norway West is a small facility that is hosted in a third-party data centre and is restricted to a few customers.

I say “being built” with the Finish region because I suspect that its been active for a while with selected customers. Not long after the announcement of the region (2022) I had a nationally strategic customer tell me that the local Microsoft data centre salesperson was telling them to stop deploying in Azure West Europe (Netherlands) and to start using the new Finnish region.

FYI: the local Microsoft data centre salesperson has a target of selling only the local Azure region. The local subsidiary has to make a usage commitment to HQ before a region is approved. Adoption in another part of Azure doesn’t contribute to this target.

I remember this conversation because it was not long after tanks rolled into Ukraine and talk of Finland joining NATO began heating up. I asked my customer: “Let’s say you place nationally critical services into the new Finnish region. What is one of the first things that Russia will send missiles to?” Yes, they will aim to shut down any technology and communications systems first … including Azure regions. All the systems hosted in Espoo will disappear in a flaming pile of debris. I advised the customer that if I were them, I would continue to use cloud regions that were as far away as possible while still meeting legal requirements.

Norway’s situation is worse. Their local and central governments have to comply with a data placement law, which prevents the placement of certain data outside of Norway. If you’re using Azure, you have no choice, you must use Norway East, which is in urban Oslo (the capital on the south coast). Private enterprises can choose any of the European regions (they typically take West Europe/Netherlands, paired with North Europe/Ireland) so they have a form of disaster recovery (I’ll come back to this topic later). However, Norway East users cannot replicate into Norway West – the Stavanger-located region is only available to a select (allegedly) three customers and it is very small.

FYI: restricted access paired regions are not unusual in Azure.

Disaster Recovery

So a hypersonic missile just took out my Azure region – what do I do next? In an ideal world, all of your data was replicated in another location. Critical systems were already built with redundant replicas. Other systems can be rebuilt by executing pipelines with another Azure region selected.

Let’s shoot all of that down, shall we?

So I have used Norway East. And I’ve got a bunch of PaaS data storage systems. Many of those storage systems (Azure Backup recovery services vaults) are built on blob storage. Blob storage offers geo-redundancy which is restricted to the paired region. If my data storage can only replicate to the paired region and there is no paired region available to me, when there is no replication option. You will need to bake your own replication system.

Some compute/data resource types offer replication in any region. For example, Cosmos DB can replicate to other regions but that comes with potential sync/latency issues. Azure VMs offer Azure Site Recovery which enables replication to any region. This is where I expect the “cloud native” types to be “GitOps!” but they always seem to focus only on compute and forget things like data – no we won’t be putting massive data stores in an AKS container

Has anyone not experienced capacity issues in an Azure region in the last few years? There are probably many causes for that so we won’t go down that rabbit hole. But a simple task of deploying a new AVD worker pool or a firewall with zone resilience commonly results in a failure because the region doesn’t have capacity. What would happen if Norway East disappeared and all of the tenants started to failover/redeploy to other European regions? Let’s just say that there would be massive failures everywhere.

Orange Man In The West

Greenland is an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. Being a Danish territory makes it a part of the EU. US president-elect, Donald Trump, has been sabre-rattling about Greenland recently. He either wants the US to take it over by economic (trade war) or military means.

If the USA goes into a trade war with Denmark, then it will go into a trade war with all of the EU. Neither side will win. If the tech giants continue to personally support Donald Trump then I can imagine the EU retaliating against them. Considering that Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are American companies, sanctions against those companies would be bad – the cost of cloud computing could rocket and make it unviable.

If the USA invaded Greenland (a NATO ally by virtue of being a Danish territory) then it would lead to very a unpleasant situation between NATO/EU and the USA. One could imagine that American companies would be shunned, not just emotionally but also legally. That would end Azure, AWS, and Google in the EU.

So how would one recover from losing their data and compute platform? It’s not like you can just live migrate a petabyte data lake or a workload based on Azure Functions.

The Answer

I don’t have a good answer. I know of an organisation that had a “only do VMs in Azure” policy. I remember bing dumbfounded at the time. They explained that it was for support reasons. But looking back on it, they abstracted themselves from Azure by use of an operating system. They could simply migrate/restore their VMs to another location if necessary – on-prem, another cloud, another country. They are not tied to the cloud platform, the location, or the hardware. But they do lose so many of the benefits of using the cloud.

I expect someone will say “use on-prem for DR”. OK, so you’ll build a private cloud, at huge expense and let it sit there doing nothing on the off-chance that it might be used. If I was in that situation then I wouldn’t be using Azure/etc at all!

I’ve been wondering for a while if the EU could fund/sponsor the creation of an IT sector in Europe that is independent from the USA. It would need an operating system, productivity software, and a cloud platform. We don’t have any tech giants as big or as cash rich as Microsoft in the EU so this would have to be sponsored. I also think that it would have to be a collaboration. My fear is that it would be bogged down in bureaucracy and have a heavy Germany/France first influence. But I am looking at the news every day and realsing that we need to consider a non-USA solution.

Wrapping Up

I’m all doom and gloom today. Maybe it’s all of the negativity in the news that is bringing me down. I see continued war in Ukraine, Russia attacking infrastructure in the Baltic sea, and threats from the USA. The world has changed and we all will need to start thinking about how we act in it.

The post Will International Events Impact Cloud Computing first appeared on Aidan Finn, IT Pro.