Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

This week: EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework reemerges, Berkeley brings cloud selection box, and proof that remote work is good work.

1. DPF Regenerates, but Could Fail Yet Again

First up this week: Transferring private data from the EU could become easier again. The U.S. and the EU think they’ve come up with a way to silence the privacy activists who keep nixing previous proposals.

Analysis: Third time’s a charm? Not if Schrems has his way

But privacy activist Max “none of your business” Schrems says he “can’t see how this would survive a challenge.” According to him, the fundamental issues haven’t changed and he doesn’t seem the type to just get bored and give up.

Sam Schechner and Kim Mackrael: EU to Advance Its Data-Flow Deal After U.S. Makes Surveillance Changes

“Deal still isn’t sealed”
If concluded, the deal could resolve one of the thorniest outstanding issues between the two economic giants. Hanging in the balance has been the ability of businesses to use U.S.-based data centers to do things such as sell online ads, measure their website traffic or manage company payroll in Europe [representing] billions of dollars of trade.
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The agreement would re-establish a framework that makes it easy for businesses to transfer such information again following the invalidation of a previous agreement by an EU court in 2020. As part of the new deal, the U.S. is offering—and has started to implement—new safeguards on how its intelligence authorities can access that data … including an executive order signed by President Biden that gave Europeans new rights to challenge U.S. government surveillance.
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The deal still isn’t sealed. … Some privacy activists have said they expect the new deal to be challenged, and eventually struck down, in EU courts. … Max Schrems, the Austrian privacy lawyer whose lawsuits led to the EU court’s invalidation of the prior frameworks … finds the U.S. changes to be insufficient.

There’s much at stake, says Natasha Lomas:

The draft adequacy decision for the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (DPF), as it’s called … is a key step in years of tortuous bilateral process which the EU’s executive body and U.S. counterparts hope will finally bring legal certainty to transatlantic exports of EU personal data. [But] any new deal on transatlantic data transfers will undoubtedly face legal challenges to test whether … the legal disconnect between European privacy rights and U.S. surveillance powers … has really been resolved.
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Even … the EU’s justice commissioner, Didier Reynders, [only] gave it a ‘7 or 8 out of 10’ chance of withstanding legal challenge. … Keenly watching developments will be a number of tech giants — including Meta, which is at risk of a suspension order being slapped on its EU-U.S. data transfers. [It] touches thousands of companies that rely on exporting personal data from the EU to the U.S.

Get a life, Europe. hunglee2 is not a fan:

Europe does indeed innovate, but perhaps cannot scale. … What seems to happen is European tech firms relocate to the US, or get bought out by US companies. [Or] European founders often relocate to the US at very early stage, so those companies in effect ‘become’ US companies even though founded by European founders.
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Secondly, Europe has been highly Americanised over the past two decades; the Internet is a powerful cultural propagator — and it is a US internet. … Basically, the US is making the future values, habits and behaviours Europeans hold, so US companies will not only inevitably be ahead, but also have a decisive lead if … a European competitor emerges.

2. SkyPilot and the World of Tomorrow

U.C. Berkeley has a new tool that makes clouds easier and cheaper to use. SkyPilot automagically finds the cheapest zone/region/cloud combo for your workload, automatically cleaning up idle clusters. The team claims typical savings of 3×.

Analysis: Multi-Cloud is a Must

Whether or not you choose to use a tool such as SkyPilot, being locked into one IaaS provider is bad news for your bottom line. If you’ve got no options, you’ll get hung out to dry. DevOps needs to make this a priority: Cut the cords of cloud dependency.

Jaime Hampton: UC Berkeley Launches SkyPilot to Help Navigate Soaring Cloud Costs

“Users are reporting benefits”
Cloud computing costs can stifle … projects, and many organizations are using multiple public clouds for different purposes to save money. However, a multi-cloud approach can add significant complexity. … To address this, researchers at U.C. Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab have launched SkyPilot, an open source framework for running ML and Data Science batch jobs on any cloud, or multiple clouds, with a single cloud-agnostic interface.
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The solution automates some of the more challenging aspects of running workloads on the cloud. … SkyPilot developer and postdoctoral researcher Zongheng Yang … notes that organizations are strategically choosing a multi-cloud approach for higher reliability, avoiding cloud vendor lock-in, and stronger negotiation leverage.
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The project has been under active development for over a year … and is being used by more than 10 organizations for use cases including GPU/TPU model training, distributed hyperparameter turning, and batch jobs on CPU spot instances. Yang says users are reporting benefits including reliable provisioning of GPU instances, queueing multiple jobs on a cluster, and concurrently running hundreds of hyperparameter trials.

Cloud? Schmoud. Drew M. drew his own conclusions: [You’re fired—Ed.]

All cloud costs are insane. … Just wait until you see how much cheaper it is to host your own machines.
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Here’s the comparisons to the cloud in order of cheapest to most expensive:
Google n2d-highcpu-32-preempt us-central-1 is 2.8x more expensive than our hardware solution (we use these preempt instances to burst into the cloud to handle peaks) For some weird reason AMD in us-central-1 is crazy cheap compared to other zones
Amazon c5.2xlarge-spot (Variable pricing) generally comes in this area, but because the pricing is variable, it varies
Oracle Cloud E4 32core 128G is 10.5x more expensive than our hardware solution
Google n2d-highcpu-32 us-central-1 is 17x more expensive than our hardware solution
Azure F32s V2 est Xeon 8168 is 17.3x more expensive than our hardware solution
Amazon c5.2xlarge 17.3x more expensive than our hardware solution
Digital Ocean 8VCPUs 20.7x more expensive than our hardware solution
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Bandwidth for most of the cloud providers is on the order of 50-100x more expensive than what a datacenter will charge.

But that’s naïve, says acdha :

Savings is a really complicated thing to measure, especially when you’re trying to accurately account for internal costs which aren’t cleanly broken down. … It’s very easy to get an itemized bill from a cloud provider which looks much larger than your internal service because the latter numbers don’t include staffing or overhead costs. … Almost every time someone tries to get those internal numbers it goes the other direction by a significant margin because they weren’t accounting for things like how much staff time they spend managing systems, especially for the compliance type stuff.
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Network bandwidth is definitely the most egregious point to complain about with commercial cloud providers and it’ll cancel out any other savings for some applications. You can negotiate significant discounts with most of them. … I’d mention [it] to your sales rep as a deterrent any chance you get.

3. Remote Work Brings Better Meetings

Working from home actually increases staff engagement. The assumption that remote work reduces spontaneous water-cooler moments is wrong.

Analysis: WTH? Can we stop the in-office mandates now?

So says research among software development employees. Meetings got better across all axes: Frequency, length and size. And there were significantly more meetings that weren’t pre-planned.

Andrew Brodsky and Mike Tolliver answer the question you weren’t asking: No, Remote Employees Aren’t Becoming Less Engaged

“Challenge your assumptions”
One of executives’ biggest worries about remote work is the reduction in spontaneous meetings and conversations with employees. But is this worry justified? … We found quite the opposite. … The findings from this research study … challenge the idea of what may be “lost” about the in-office experience.
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New research on meetings shows … employees are finding new ways to connect with each other. [They] have gotten more — not less — engaged over the past three years since remote work became the norm. … Remote meetings have become more frequent … shorter … smaller [and] more spontaneous. … Remote interactions are shifting to more closely mirror in-person interactions.
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There are steps organizations can take to encourage them: … Encourage synchronous work schedules for remote workers, … make it easier for people to meet [and] try to reengage employees who are disengaging. … Challenge your assumptions about remote work.

Shorter, smaller meetings you say? Sign dcollins up:

Meetings are a time-sink, representing a negative state compared to actual work. Possibly managers perceive the opposite: see Paul Graham’s essay.

Perhaps the researchers are overthinking this? 4RealFreedom cuts to the chase:

[They] point to meetings being more frequent, shorter, and smaller as the basis for employees being more engaged. I just think meetings have gotten better.

The Moral of the Story:
If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain

—Dolly Parton

You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or [email protected].

Image: George Dagerotip (via Unsplash; leveled and cropped)