It seems like Oracle Cloud have tried to do something along these lines, with their "EU Sovereign Cloud". I'm not actually sure if it's open to everyone or by application only tho. https://www.oracle.com/uk/cloud/eu-sovereign-cloud/
In my opinion, the issue here lies entirely with the Australian government. International airlines including Qatar have been trying to buy additional slots into major Australian airports, but have been turned down with some pretty questionable reasoning around “protecting the Australian aviation industry” (see: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-30/qantas-qatar-airways-... )
Meanwhile Qantas - a private company, who took over a billion AUD in government support during Covid are expected to pay the outgoing CEO over 20 million AUD in bonuses.
Having flown several times between Qatar and Australia in the last couple years, I don’t think I’ve had a single flight that wasn’t completely booked out. In comparison to the following legs to Europe which have been more like 75% full.
There is a real need for additional capacity on these routes (for those outside of Australia, the gulf countries, Hong Kong and Singapore are the most popular layover countries for Australians travelling to Europe, Africa and Asia due to their location) and the way I see it is that Qatar acknowledge that, tried to buy additional capacity and failing that have had to come up with some creative solutions to work around a government that values a sub-standard flag carriers profits over what’s best for the Australian consumer.
We’ve been using Linkerd as our service mesh which does this without really much effort at all required on our part. They bind the certs to the ServiceAccount identity of each pod, which is apparently more secure than doing it via IP.
I’d like to see the option to setup something like a pre-authorised payment. Ideally the same as doing an EFT/Osko/NPP transfer, but the funds are held in a escrow like situation by the bank for a period of time the bank deems “safe”.
Giving the account owners enough time to contact the bank if the payment is unauthorised, but when the waiting period is up you can then choose to release the funds at a time that suits you (eg. for a car sale, when you hand over the keys) or you can choose to can the transaction returning the funds to your account.
Wishful thinking I know, given how much of a mess the instant payment system is at the moment. I had an account that supported PayID with Macquarie and tried to transfer money to another PayID account with Up bank and found that because one of the banks (Macquarie iirc) didn’t support whatever underlying payment system Up used (Osko possibly) I wasn’t able to use PayID and had to use regular EFT instead.
As far as I understand bank transfers here are only instant if you are both with the same bank or you use PayID/Osko, which seems to have the caveat of your bank can set their own limit as to maximum transfer size (A quick google shows anywhere from 5k to 30k) and not all banks support this (HSBC don’t).
Of course you could ask the buyer to transfer the money and wait for it to clear before handing over the keys, but that just moves the uncomfortable and stressful situation to the other party (I wouldn’t want to transfer someone money and then have to wait a few days for it to clear before they handed me the keys) and doesn’t actually solve the underlying issue.
One shortcoming that I found recently as I was selling my car is we don’t seem to have a good system for instant payments for large amounts of money.
Having lived in the UK for a while I noticed how bank transfers there seemed to be instant regardless of the amount (just my experience, never did anything over a few thousand).
But I was stuck in the position of either asking for way to much cash that I would be comfortable having to then take into the bank (and probably hard to find a bank that even had that much to withdraw in the first place) or accept a bank cheque which while most people say it’s “as good as cash” I noticed certain banks like NAB have a disclaimer that they can cancel them if they are reported lost or stolen.
I ended up accepting the bank cheque on Friday afternoon, couldn’t deposit it till Monday and then had 3 nervous days of waiting for it to clear.
While PayID and Osko seem to be taking us in the right direction, the limits are still too restrictive for large in person transactions like this.