Well, yes, Europe is after all a collection of 44 countries, with 27 of them being in the EU, and three EFTA countries. So you're dealing with that many different sets of laws.
Some countries are extremely strict, others are more lax. Where I live (Norway), starting a business is pretty easy and straightforward. Other countries, like Germany, are notoriously difficult from what I've read.
And again, some countries have very strict laws and guidelines you need to follow, once you've started a certain type of business. Where I live it is relatively easy to start a LLC, but you'll need to put some money into it, and you can easily get fined - or even face jail - if you don't follow the laws for accounting/auditing. It becomes problematic, quite fast, if there's no unified codes for these things, if everyone's going to be able to operate cross borders.
Not to mention all the other laws (consumer laws, etc.)
How is Europe, much less the EU, supposed to do that?
Registering a business in Estonia is famously relatively straightforward, while it is an absolute pain here in Germany. But business registration is the responsibility of the countries themselves and it should remain that way
In Sweden and Netherlands it is quite easy and straightforward to register a business, speaking from personal experience. Tax filing is quite straightforward as well, especially for personal income tax.
Starting a company in Sweden requires (uploaded PDF from Bolagsverket to ChatGPT who summarized):
1. Prepare the foundation deed and the articles of association.
2. Identify the beneficial owner(s).
3. Pay the share capital and obtain the bank certificate or auditor’s statement.
4. Submit the registration application for the limited company to the Swedish Companies Registration Office (Bolagsverket) and wait for approval.
5. If applicable: submit a certified copy of your passport (non-Swedish citizens).
6. Apply for F-tax approval and VAT registration and wait for the decision.
7. Register as an employer if you will pay salaries.
8. Keep continuous bookkeeping and prepare the annual accounts each financial year.
9. Submit the annual report to Bolagsverket every year.
Optional:
1. Obtain business and personal insurance.
2. Register trademarks or protect other intellectual property.
3. Choose an auditor if you want one or when the company later reaches the required thresholds.
4. Register a cash register if you accept cash or card payments.
5. Meet requirements for import/export and obtain an EORI number.
6. Follow rules for buying/selling goods or services within or outside the EU.
7. Keep a staff ledger if required for your industry.
8. Follow reverse-charge VAT rules if you operate in construction.
9. Apply for permits if your specific business activity requires them.
This is not what I'd call a straightforward process, personally. Also speaking from personal experience. Sorry for the formatting.
I guess it depends what we mean with straightforward. If we mean something along the lines of "no ambiguity" then yes. If we mean something along the lines of "simple, easy to do" then no. Almost anything can be accomplished with a sufficiently long checklist. I just feel like the entire process could be streamlined and simplified.
I don't really get this mentality targing K8s specifically nowadays - perhaps that was true in the early days but I'm managing several clusters that are all a few years old at this point. Cluster services like Cilium, Traefik, etc are all managed through ArgoCD the same as our applications... every so often I go through the automated PRs for infra services, check for breaking changes and hit merge. They go to dev/staging/prod as tests pass.
I think services take me literally half an hour a month or so to deal with unless something major has changed, and a major K8s version upgrade where I roll all nodes is a few hours.
If people are deploying clusters and not touching them for a year+ then like any system you're going to end up with endless tech debt that takes "significant planning" to upgrade. I wouldn't do a distro upgrade between Ubuntu LTS releases without expecting a lot of work, in fact I'd probably just rebuild the server(s) using tool of choice.
> What is missing is an open source orchestrator that has a feature freeze and isn't Nomad or docker swarm.
Running Docker Swarm in production, can't really complain, at least for scales where you need a few steps up from a single node with Docker Compose, but not to the point where you'd need triple digits of nodes. I reckon that's most of the companies out there. The Compose specification is really simple and your ingress can be whatever web server you prefer configured as a reverse proxy.
Docker is not for production. Nomad at scale in practice needs a lot of load-bearing Bash scripts around it: for managing certs, for external DNS, you need Consul for service discovery, Vault for secrets.
At that point, is Nomad still simple? If you're going to take on all of the essential complexity of deploying software at scale, just do it right and use Kubernetes.
Source: running thousands of containers in production.
Kubernetes uses etcd for service discovery. It isn't that Nomad does things differently or less simply, it is just that they are more explicit about it.
The real difference is that Kubernetes has a wide array of cloud hosts that hide the complexity from users, whereas Nomad can realistically be self hosted
I'm not saying that Kubernetes isn't complex, I'm saying it's a fallacy to claim that the Hashicorp stack in any way manages to be less complex in practice. All of these moving parts are unavoidable if you want to run software at scale, Kubernetes is just way better engineered than the Hashicorp stack, if only for not depending on dockerd.
Nobody outside Pakistan knows Dawn even though it is the newspaper that was founded by Muhammad Ali Jinnah (considered founding father of the nation) and one of the largest and most prestigious as well.
It is like the NYT for the country. But the relevant detail here is the printing of the prompt in a nationally recognized newspaper. The brand, as local as it maybe, still provides more context than some random newspaper in a foreign country would.
And I have ran into Dawn newspaper on google news frontpage several times, usually on entertainment stuff.
There are dozens of stories how registering a business alone can take several months and tons of paperwork.
reply