At nearForm we're also very interested in this, which is why we've been working on nscale - our own deployment solution. v0.16 was released yesterday featuring autoscaling support.
"nscale is an open toolkit supporting configuration, build and deployment of connected container sets. nscale is ideally used to support the development and operation of microservice based systems." https://github.com/nearform/nscale
As an Irish person I'm happy about this. As others have already mentioned, we've got a massive number (relative to our country's size) of fortune tech companies setting up camp here for a number of reasons.
12.5℅ corporation tax. We're not a tax haven, our rate is just at a sweeter spot. This policy was introduced by an taoiseach (prime minister) Sean Lemass during the 60's to stimulate economic recovery from one of the worst recessions we ever faced. The goal was to attract foreign investment and in particular from American companies that wanted to get a foothold in Europe. This guy is sort of revered in Ireland and everyone that takes Junior Certificate History (ages 12-15ish) learns about him. He's a pretty interesting leader because he was almost singlehandedly responsible for developing our country into a modern, global economy through various policies, plans and schemes.
European Law, I'm no expert in law but as far as I know our data protection laws are well established. Let's put it this way, our own government definitely isn't trying to keep track of your visits to the toilet. Although we're paranoid that the US probably is, or at least they want to!
Climate - funnily enough our famously terrible weather has an upside. The cost of cooling a data centre is cheaper. Our country isn't incredibly cold but it never really gets hot here either. Temperatures throughout the year are relatively stable.
As a CS student with only 1 year left to graduate I couldn't be happier with the 'mini tech bubble' we're experiencing. It's practically the only sector that's seeing significant growth and wage increases in the last few years. The economic crash in 2008 had a severe effect on the country as a whole. Fast forward to today - employment in software development, engineering and other related fields is being created quicker than they can find suitable candidates. I'm happy knowing that while so many other young people are being forced to immigrate, our tech sector is so saturated with jobs that CS grads like myself are being headhunted.
As a student currently on an internship. I would really love to try pair programming. Unfortunately my supervisors are almost always abroad :/ This is something I'd really like to see myself doing when I graduate.
"nscale is an open toolkit supporting configuration, build and deployment of connected container sets. nscale is ideally used to support the development and operation of microservice based systems." https://github.com/nearform/nscale
Here's an interesting blog post written about the deployment immutable systems. http://www.nearform.com/nodecrunch/deployment-how-to-do-it-f...