Re: Cloud
Almost anything that requires recurrent payment should be run by government.
Design and manufacture their own servers?
This is one off. No need unless there is a national security concern.
- Create their own hypervisors, integrated into custom silicon?
No need. There are open-source and free hypervisors. Current commercial offerings of silicon are adequate.
- Run their own global fibre networks?
This is an exception. But surely government could build a backbone network to connect data centres in different countries and could rent out surplus capacity.
- Design custom electrical substations?
Energy supply should be run by the government. We should have a national supplier.
- Design their own CPUs?
- Design their own AI accelerator chips?
- Create their own distributed databases and analytics tools, heavily integrated into the infrastructure stack?
No need, though of course software development should be in-house as hiring big consultancies is expensive and delivers poor quality. Though this would need a reform of finances, as currently public sector by design cannot employ specialists as they are unable to pay market rates.
Being a cloud is an awful lot more than building out a datacentre, even a clutch of gov-wide datacentres. Clouds long ago moved beyond providing a bunch of servers and storage in a datacentre - AWS now has over 200 customer facing services, all orchestratable by API, all integrated into IAM / billing / SDN / monitoring etc. etc., all very effectively capacity managed so you can almost always provision within minutes, seconds or less. These are big building blocks that enable you to e.g. build a highly scalable transactional app with mobile and web identity management, event driven feeds to a data warehouse, a data lake, a contact centre, maybe some media transcoding services with redundancy across three availability zones and if data protection regs allow to another region. Provisioned in large part with a few lines of Terraform and without so much as speaking to procurement.
Nothing that cannot be built and tailored for government use and bring massive savings long term. Not to mention local jobs.
Anyone who views this through the lens of "who's running the datacentres" has thoroughly missed the point. Teams creating business services don't consume datacentres: they increasingly consume complex, integrated technology stacks that require engineering effort and operational investment way higher than a single mid-sized government can afford.
That's nonsense. It can only fall apart by corruption.