Instead of simply encouraging the buildout of a private Canadian cloud, the government should invest in the expansion of a public cloud—built and run by a Crown corporation with public financing to serve government needs, but potentially to expand beyond that too. The government already has data centres of its own, but in recent decades it’s more often looked to the private sector to supply more of its computational needs instead of developing in-house capacities as it did with older forms of information technology.

Ok, but they aren’t allowed to use consultants. We don’t need another ArriveCAN or Phoenix.

I don’t really think cloud compute is a social good deserving of a government agency to be honest. I think the government should build out its datacenters and use it to build stuff, like a federal instant payment system that replaces Interac. But I don’t really buy the argument that the government should bother to sell some of its capacity.

Whatever the government tries to sell here is going to be akin to IBM Cloud platform. It’s going to be clunky, evolve slowly, with lame support. No sane business should choose that. It makes more sense to pick a non-US company with Canadian-located datacenters. Who should choose a slowly moving bureaucratic provider? The government itself. So just keep it private.

The government should not be hosting a public cloud service; if they really want to do something like that they should do a public private thing with Canada Post, maybe.

I personally have moved all of my hosting off of US servers, my ISP uses exchange for their email server where ever it is hosted I do not know so I have been moving all my email things onto the Canadian host. I started using apple’s hide my email years ago so I have decided to do a more extensive hide my email setup with my host. I have a pi hole system setup so with the 120+ emails so my internet data is worthless to Google and all the other US advertisers.

I don’t really buy the argument that the government should bother to sell some of its capacity

I agree … the reason Amazon started AWS is because their compute need fluctuates throughout the year and they needed to build out their data centers to meet their peak need… most of the year it sat unused.

The government doesn’t have that problem, they can build out for their projected need and not have tons of waste.

You might be interested in this piece as well: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/european-cloud-modules/