Cloudwatt

» see cloudwatt.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Projet Andromède was announced in 2009 as a plan for a French-controlled cloud, with a target of spending 285 million euros on it. By 2012 the plan had produced two companies instead of one: Cloudwatt, which Orange ended up with, and Numergy, which went to SFR. Cloudwatt was incorporated in September 2012 with the state through the Caisse des Dépôts and the defense contractor Thales as the other shareholders, 225 million euros of capital between them.

Selling started slowly and then kept being slow. There was a storage product aimed at small businesses, advertised on French television, and a public cloud underneath built on OpenStack. The founding chief executive, Patrick Starck, left after a launch that ran late. Orange bought out Thales and the Caisse des Dépôts in March 2015, and on 1 January 2016 folded what remained into Orange Business Services through its Orange Cloud for Business arm. From that point the platform was running on Orange's own floor at Val-de-Reuil, inside a company that had a competing product it preferred to sell.

The end was announced in the summer of 2019 and executed on 1 February 2020. The farewell letter pointed customers at Flexible Engine, another OpenStack platform run by the same owner, available in France and abroad, with a richness of features the letter described as incomparable. Seven years after the state launched a cloud meant to sit outside the reach of foreign law, the migration path was a sibling product one floor over.

~ the record ~

~ the sovereignty clause ~

The point of Cloudwatt was jurisdiction. French company, French shareholders, French data centers, French law, which in the years after the Snowden disclosures was a hard procurement requirement across half the public sector. Public bodies and defense suppliers have had a box on the form about where the data physically sits for a long time, and that box is what the whole project was built to tick.

Then in 2013 Cloudwatt picked Juniper Networks, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, to supply the network underneath the sovereign cloud. The trade press of the day wrote that choice up as a measure to guarantee French data sovereignty, which it was, in the sense that the law follows the company holding the data and not the company that made the switches. The sovereign cloud ran on American iron, and said so in a press release.

~ the deactivation email ~

What survives of Cloudwatt is one sentence, quoted by the French press from the message that went to customers and posted on the site: from 1 February 2020 the platform will be deactivated, and without action on your part your data will be definitively erased and unrecoverable. No cold archive was offered and no read-only period beyond the date. The French trade press noted that this was only half a surprise, because the company had been a shadow of itself since Orange took full control five years earlier.

At least 75 million euros of public money went into it by Le Monde Informatique's reckoning. The real cost is harder to count, because Cloudwatt joined a list that already held Quaero and the Plan Calcul, state projects that each taught the next set of French officials a different wrong lesson about what a government can commission. The argument did not go away when the platform did. France kept making it afterward, with different partners and a different set of initials each time.

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