“FOSS vs. Microsoft”, the remake
Yesterday morning, our very likeable Minister for Digital Affairs, Caroline Stage Olsen, was invited to the radio show “Guest of the Week” on one of our national radio channels. Bo Fristed from the Municipality of Aarhus joined to talk about cloud services. The main topic was Caroline’s recent announcement that her ministry would “kick out” Microsoft and start using open source instead. Allegedly because we, as a society, are fed up with Microsoft’s total dominance and our total dependence on their services. Also, our local big-tech-disgust is in general somewhat amplified by Trump, his possible invasion of Greenland, the trade wars and perhaps even Netanyahu. Everybody agrees that something needs to be done.
At this point it may be worth pointing out, that some of us have in fact seen the movie before. This is a remake. And just maybe we should try to extract som learning from our past experiences.
How to build a public cloud
Edora Cloud is a public cloud offering by the Danish IT vendor Edora A/S. It is currently the only public cloud offering in Denmark as far as we know, and was built in only 3 months using Origo OS. Commissioned in September 2024 and launched December 5th.
Europe and the Nordics are at a crossroads when it comes to cloud and Big Tech. All companies use cloud services. You can continue supporting Big Tech by using Microsoft Azure or AWS, you can use a local alternative, or you can build your own private or public cloud using open source orchestration platforms like OpenStack, ProxMox or Origo OS.
Origo OS leverages standard Linux technologies like KVM, libvirt, qcow2 images and zfs to deliver an out-of-the-box private cloud experience. It is licensed as open source and available to use for free on up to 24 CPU cores. Origo OS will give you a head start if you are building a public cloud, because it can be linked to origo.io and provide services, like Kubernetes, managed databases, billing, DNS services, user synchronization and other services you otherwise would have to build yourself, out of the box.
Let us walk you through how Edora Cloud was built using Origo OS.
Do We Really Want a European AWS, Google or Facebook?
Recent actions and signals from the current US administration certainly have profound ramifications. Particularly with respect to our ability to function as sovereign, European nations, in control of our own media, information and data. It is dawning on Europe, that it is in fact the control of our own destiny, our freedom, that is at stake.
The core problem is of course that today, Big Tech handles almost all of our communications, our media and our data. The lifeblood of any modern society.
We should however keep in mind, that there are other problems with Big Tech than the fact that most of it is run by American corporations. Yes, Big Tech has had a profound impact on our societies, but if we for a moment disregard economic gains in efficiency, as it turns out, most of this impact is bad. In fact, Big Tech may be one of the reasons we ended up in the current predicament.
WordPress hosting in Edora Cloud
Looking for a Danish solution to your multi-site WordPress needs? We just released a one-click WordPress stack available in Edora Cloud and on-prem Origo OS immediately.
You can host as many sites as you like. Each site has its own separate domain name, database, plugins, themes, etc.
Read our getting started guide to learn more. The guide is in Danish because for now, we only support Danish clients in Edora Cloud. This will of course change once we have a bit more experience running a public cloud, and feel comfortable expanding our services to other regions.
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Edora Cloud, 1 month later
A little more than one month ago we launched Edora Cloud. A Danish, sovereign, public cloud. Our approach is unconventional compared to other cloud providers in that we publish our infrastructure orchestration software as open source, and offer the posibility of running this on-prem. Compared to the very few and scattered, previous Nordic attempts at building public cloud offerings, we have purposely chosen not to rely on traditional enterprise tech, but are instead relying on our own orchestration stack, built around open source building blocks like Linux and KVM. We offer both a full-featured IaaS offering for running virtual servers, as well as various services built on top op this, including a Kubernetes service.
Set up a private VPN service in 10 minutes
We take pride in extensive support for both Windows servers and Linux servers in Edora Cloud and Origo OS.
Running a single virtual server with a public IP, and using it as jump host to access potentially dozens of virtual servers with only internal IP addresses, is a very common way of running collections of Linux servers in cloud environments. This is practical because most Linux system administration is done using SSH.
For Windows servers the situation is a bit more complicated, because a lot of system administration is traditionally done using the Windows UI over RDP connections (aka Terminal Services). Using a Windows server as jump host by using nested RDP connections is of course possible, but really clunky. Instead many Windows shops choose to use a VPN connection to access their internal IP address space, and then connect directly to internal servers and services. In this post we will show you how to set up a VPN service in Edora Cloud, which can also double as firewall for your internal virtual servers.
Origo and Edora have launched a new Nordic cloud
With a bit of a delay (we’ve been busy), we’re happy to announce that as of September 2024 Origo Systems ApS has entered into a partnership with leading Danish software developer, IT consultancy and hosting vendor Edora A/S. As part of the partnership Edora A/S has invested in Origo Systems and received access to Origo technology.
Using Origo OS and drawing on Origo’s extensive experience with cloud technologies, Edora has already built and launched a public compute cloud under the brand name “Edora Cloud”, offering IaaS services as well as a full complement of cloud native services like Kubernetes.
Edora Cloud is open source, 100% Danish owned, fully GDPR compliant and available today at: https://edora.cloud.
If you are interested in more information about Edora Cloud please contact Edora.
The Danish Cloud Standoff
For those unaware of it, things in the cloud business are heating up here in the Northern part of Europe. It seems to be finally dawning on the EU, that “the cloud” is not some minor issue that should be handled as an afterthought after all the “real” market issues like industry, agriculture, fishing, oil, banking, etc. have been handled. The reality is, that the cloud is one of the most important and most pressing issues of our time, and the EU is very late to the game. Today, the cloud is how we place phone calls, discuss political issues, maintain personal relations, find information, stay updated, communicate and perhaps even more importantly, how our companies do all of their communication, financial transactions, in short all of their business. Cloud fiefdoms, search engines and social networks have replaced markets. All communication, commerce and finance today depends on the cloud. By extension, those who control the cloud, control our societies.
Edit your documents in your own space
Having a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation tool available in a web browser is very, very cool – especially for collaborative work.
Storing your documents in some tech giants’ cloud without the slightest idea about where your data is being stored and what your data is used for, and editing your documents using tools made available for you without access to the source code, in short, simply handing over all your personal documents to a giant, foreign entity outside your country’s rule of law, is not so cool.
