Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing(horovits.medium.com)
horovits.medium.com
Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
https://horovits.medium.com/lidl-is-taking-on-aws-the-age-of-eurocloud-b237258e3311
419 comments
Can be shown by how everyone who actually produces cloud services of value quit Gaia-X very quickly
Scaleway published an entire blog post on why they quit: https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/full-steam-ahead-towards-a-...
Scaleway published an entire blog post on why they quit: https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/full-steam-ahead-towards-a-...
As others here have pointed out, Gaia-X successfully funnels money to EU cloud companies and maybe this is what it's supposed to do. The deal is: company agrees to write some bs on how it contributes to this project and they get the money. The point is to get local cloud tech sector to grow here in the EU and maybe it's too difficult politically or otherwise to just give money to the companies directly.
This also blows my mind, instead of adding more berucracy to apply for funding to review funding to give funding.
just give tax credits based on innovation / investment criteria, to both companies and employees, Europe needs digitalization so badly, yet they find more complex ways to enable it.
just give tax credits based on innovation / investment criteria, to both companies and employees, Europe needs digitalization so badly, yet they find more complex ways to enable it.
Tax credits make sense for companies already with a steady profit margin. Cloud in particular is a capex heavy business so for a new company that is not very useful for at least the first few years.
that's why you give credit to investors not just compnaies.
Just give it to the companies. That still incentivises equity investment (it lowers risk and raises the potential upside of profitability). It also make underwriting standard loans easier too.
[deleted]
> just give tax credits
On what? The EU doesn't levy any taxes and has no authority to.
The reason they're paying with grants is because that's what they've got.
On what? The EU doesn't levy any taxes and has no authority to.
The reason they're paying with grants is because that's what they've got.
Yeah, I feel that a lot of EU projects work that way.
I've participated in a bunch of EU projects in the academic space. Most of them were catastrophic failures if you just looked at the direct outcomes (few of the lofty goals were actually achieved). But they did provide much needed funds to participating institutions, and I think they were an overall win.
They come with a lot of overheads (some had 10% or more of the funds go to a lawyer who managed the project). But they are a lot more effective than all the "unbureaucratic" Covid aid payments that mainly went to companies with close ties to political parties...
I've participated in a bunch of EU projects in the academic space. Most of them were catastrophic failures if you just looked at the direct outcomes (few of the lofty goals were actually achieved). But they did provide much needed funds to participating institutions, and I think they were an overall win.
They come with a lot of overheads (some had 10% or more of the funds go to a lawyer who managed the project). But they are a lot more effective than all the "unbureaucratic" Covid aid payments that mainly went to companies with close ties to political parties...
I've also known people who have participated in some EU funded research programs. The consensus among the researchers who apply for those funds is that you write whatever bs gets you the funding and then you do whatever research you were going to do anyway.
Wow, 5 years later and what have they actually accomplished? Look at the milestones section: https://gaia-x.eu/what-is-gaia-x/about-gaia-x/
They produced a few fluffy documents in 2022 and then nothing happened.
They repurposed the word milestone to mean agenda. It's just a list of events they're organizing. Because they have no actual milestones or goals.
They repurposed the word milestone to mean agenda. It's just a list of events they're organizing. Because they have no actual milestones or goals.
I've joined some large EU efforts in the past, and it's always like this. Lots of different parties involved focused on producing tons of absurd documents, and nothing else. Some have good intentions, but it doesn't matter. There's a great thread on X now discussing the same topic:
"25 years ago each major US company had a German and/or French equivalent. Today equivalents of US tech giants are in China and Europe is on its way to become an open-air museum. What happened?" https://x.com/MichaelAArouet/status/1827588190342979934
Some of the top replies:
"Bureaucracy, Regulation, Aversion to Innovation, Green myth of degrowth etc happened"
[...] Europe’s challenges are significant, but not insurmountable. To regain its edge, Europe will need to foster a more dynamic business environment, streamline regulations, and encourage risk-taking in its startup culture. Without these changes, Europe may continue to fall behind, watching as the U.S. and China shape the future of technology.
The EU has a lot of talent, but it lacks good leadership and good priorities.
"25 years ago each major US company had a German and/or French equivalent. Today equivalents of US tech giants are in China and Europe is on its way to become an open-air museum. What happened?" https://x.com/MichaelAArouet/status/1827588190342979934
Some of the top replies:
"Bureaucracy, Regulation, Aversion to Innovation, Green myth of degrowth etc happened"
[...] Europe’s challenges are significant, but not insurmountable. To regain its edge, Europe will need to foster a more dynamic business environment, streamline regulations, and encourage risk-taking in its startup culture. Without these changes, Europe may continue to fall behind, watching as the U.S. and China shape the future of technology.
The EU has a lot of talent, but it lacks good leadership and good priorities.
In a finite resources world, with unsustainable levels of pollution and soon of climate change, I don’t understand why much more of EU regulation and enforcement resources are not spent towards mandatory hardware re-use. All computer vendors know 90% of IT users never even scratch the surface of computational power and functionalities.
As for Gaia-X itself, governments are always on the hunt for programs to justify their spending of tax and debt money. Favorable outcome is the spending itself as a mean to subsidize this and that group.
As for Gaia-X itself, governments are always on the hunt for programs to justify their spending of tax and debt money. Favorable outcome is the spending itself as a mean to subsidize this and that group.
> I don’t understand why much more of EU regulation and enforcement resources are not spent towards mandatory hardware re-use
Beliefs like these are common in Europe and I absolutely despise them. Inefficiencies in IT exist for boring reasons like requirements that are way too complex or that keep changing, internal politics, and inexperience. If you add more regulations that don't move the needle you just get more politics, more middle men that seek to profit from the regulatory capture (advisors, consultants, resellers), and you distract industry from focusing on those things that matter most.
Complexity is the enemy of progress. IT systems fail when they attempt to codify contradictory bureaucratic processes that make no sense. The solution is to simplify. Businesses that refuse to simplify get eaten by hungry startups, and deservedly so. What do you think will happen to a continent that refuses to simplify?
Beliefs like these are common in Europe and I absolutely despise them. Inefficiencies in IT exist for boring reasons like requirements that are way too complex or that keep changing, internal politics, and inexperience. If you add more regulations that don't move the needle you just get more politics, more middle men that seek to profit from the regulatory capture (advisors, consultants, resellers), and you distract industry from focusing on those things that matter most.
Complexity is the enemy of progress. IT systems fail when they attempt to codify contradictory bureaucratic processes that make no sense. The solution is to simplify. Businesses that refuse to simplify get eaten by hungry startups, and deservedly so. What do you think will happen to a continent that refuses to simplify?
> Complexity is the enemy of progress.
You are confounding the environment we are part of and the so called “free market”. Also interests of titans of the industry, the “free market”, and general interest of the population. Mixups like these are common in developing countries.
You are confounding the environment we are part of and the so called “free market”. Also interests of titans of the industry, the “free market”, and general interest of the population. Mixups like these are common in developing countries.
> In a finite resources world, with unsustainable levels of pollution and soon of climate change, I don’t understand why much more of EU regulation and enforcement resources are not spent towards mandatory hardware re-use. All computer vendors know 90% of IT users never even scratch the surface of computational power and functionalities.
well, newer hardware is more efficient than older hardware, but the cost and e-waste resulting from replacing working but older hardware with new stuff is also non-zero.
desktop usage sure, it makes sense to keep it a good long time. in datacenter, for many situations the cost is not worthwhile because DDR5 is substantially more expensive for a given tier of memory, pcie5 is way more expensive to implement, etc. the newer platforms are really also higher-cost ones, due to the complete collapse of moore's law and hitting the limits of physics in link rates etc. On the other hand power does matter and datacenters are highly power-constrained etc.
it's completely application-specific, maybe if you do something that benefits from AVX-512 it's super worth it to upgrade, but for a lot of people it isn't, so it isn't something you can make a blanket regulation on when is the Right Time to upgrade.
MLID has good guests on sometimes and this is an interesting one. Just before this he's talking about the power issues ("they just can't get power into the datacenters quickly enough to keep up with needs"), and he balances this concern against the massive price factor confounding the newer DDR5 stuff.
https://youtu.be/evhkvGBljWI?t=588
This engineer is a good reality check on a number of sacred cows with the AMD fanbase too - for example he is excruciatingly negative on AMD's Platform Vendor Lock. He was asked if the AI market dumped if they could scoop up any cheap gear and the answer is no - they don't use GPUs currently, and they wouldn't even be able to benefit from (eg) epyc cpus being dumped because of the platform lock. They are basically e-waste (by design) once they hit the market unless the provenance is known, and even then it destroys the market efficiency (by design) since now you have separate market for Dell Epyc, Lenovo Epyc, HPE Epyc, etc. Once the value drops, surplus places won't even bother parting them out and basically the channel for that stuff dries up and they become actual e-waste.
And remember, this affects Ryzen processors now too, and platform lock is becoming much more common now as AMD makes the deals with OEM providers to get them into work desktops etc. In 5-10 years there probably won't be too much of a secondhand market left, largely because of AMD... and there's really not much that can be done since this is all hardware-locked/physically fused, short of just pushing a firmware which disables the whole thing.
https://youtu.be/evhkvGBljWI?t=5667
He also is not mincing any words about the Sinkclose/Ryzenfall exploits where an attacker can escalate from a VM guest to jailbreak/control of the PSP and BIOS persistence. Obviously that's a huge, huge issue for datacenter operators and it's bullshit that AMD just basically decided not to patch it for older chips. The amount of handwaving and corporate defense the AMD fan club runs is silly, of course those are major issues and need to be patched ASAP.
I remember the "root password lets you do root things, where's the exploit" and other insane cope/handwaving from HUB and GN and other tech media and social media. Shockingly, the people who actually own the servers aren't as keen on a VM guest being allowed to `sudo jailbreak psp`. And AMD just wanted to leave that unpatched on a huge number of chips, even though they had a working fix for that uarch they were already deploying!
It's unfortunately the same level of security focus that AMD has given to other exploits like the cache ways vulnerability or the PREFETCH+cache eviction vulnerability ("worse than meltdown", discovered by one of the researchers who discovered meltdown), which AMD simply left unpatched and insecure, and (very) quietly told people to enable KPTI if they cared. "Insecure by default" corporate mindset.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evhkvGBljWI&t=3053s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HxkLlmh4EY
https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/849paz/assassinat...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/8goyuq/amd_ships_cts_l...
well, newer hardware is more efficient than older hardware, but the cost and e-waste resulting from replacing working but older hardware with new stuff is also non-zero.
desktop usage sure, it makes sense to keep it a good long time. in datacenter, for many situations the cost is not worthwhile because DDR5 is substantially more expensive for a given tier of memory, pcie5 is way more expensive to implement, etc. the newer platforms are really also higher-cost ones, due to the complete collapse of moore's law and hitting the limits of physics in link rates etc. On the other hand power does matter and datacenters are highly power-constrained etc.
it's completely application-specific, maybe if you do something that benefits from AVX-512 it's super worth it to upgrade, but for a lot of people it isn't, so it isn't something you can make a blanket regulation on when is the Right Time to upgrade.
MLID has good guests on sometimes and this is an interesting one. Just before this he's talking about the power issues ("they just can't get power into the datacenters quickly enough to keep up with needs"), and he balances this concern against the massive price factor confounding the newer DDR5 stuff.
https://youtu.be/evhkvGBljWI?t=588
This engineer is a good reality check on a number of sacred cows with the AMD fanbase too - for example he is excruciatingly negative on AMD's Platform Vendor Lock. He was asked if the AI market dumped if they could scoop up any cheap gear and the answer is no - they don't use GPUs currently, and they wouldn't even be able to benefit from (eg) epyc cpus being dumped because of the platform lock. They are basically e-waste (by design) once they hit the market unless the provenance is known, and even then it destroys the market efficiency (by design) since now you have separate market for Dell Epyc, Lenovo Epyc, HPE Epyc, etc. Once the value drops, surplus places won't even bother parting them out and basically the channel for that stuff dries up and they become actual e-waste.
And remember, this affects Ryzen processors now too, and platform lock is becoming much more common now as AMD makes the deals with OEM providers to get them into work desktops etc. In 5-10 years there probably won't be too much of a secondhand market left, largely because of AMD... and there's really not much that can be done since this is all hardware-locked/physically fused, short of just pushing a firmware which disables the whole thing.
https://youtu.be/evhkvGBljWI?t=5667
He also is not mincing any words about the Sinkclose/Ryzenfall exploits where an attacker can escalate from a VM guest to jailbreak/control of the PSP and BIOS persistence. Obviously that's a huge, huge issue for datacenter operators and it's bullshit that AMD just basically decided not to patch it for older chips. The amount of handwaving and corporate defense the AMD fan club runs is silly, of course those are major issues and need to be patched ASAP.
I remember the "root password lets you do root things, where's the exploit" and other insane cope/handwaving from HUB and GN and other tech media and social media. Shockingly, the people who actually own the servers aren't as keen on a VM guest being allowed to `sudo jailbreak psp`. And AMD just wanted to leave that unpatched on a huge number of chips, even though they had a working fix for that uarch they were already deploying!
It's unfortunately the same level of security focus that AMD has given to other exploits like the cache ways vulnerability or the PREFETCH+cache eviction vulnerability ("worse than meltdown", discovered by one of the researchers who discovered meltdown), which AMD simply left unpatched and insecure, and (very) quietly told people to enable KPTI if they cared. "Insecure by default" corporate mindset.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evhkvGBljWI&t=3053s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HxkLlmh4EY
https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/849paz/assassinat...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/8goyuq/amd_ships_cts_l...
Doesn’t feel like that looking at Airbus and Boeing .
Only if you ignore the A380 debacle, or the bloat that A400 is. And then there is this - [0]
Boeing makes the comparison easy for Airbus.
[0]- https://spacenews.com/airbus-takes-a-charge-of-nearly-1-bill...
Boeing makes the comparison easy for Airbus.
[0]- https://spacenews.com/airbus-takes-a-charge-of-nearly-1-bill...
OP is EU has become an open air museum and all the good companies are now either American or Chinese.
> Boeing makes the comparison easy for Airbus.
What else to compare against this claim ?
Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry. It is not just aerospace, even auto is still über competitive, European manufactures are on par or perhaps better than anything Ford and GM have to offer. I am sure Europeans can come with good examples for every bad one.
The point it is easy to paint a narrative however reality is lot more complex and doesn't match with sweeping generalization .
> Boeing makes the comparison easy for Airbus.
What else to compare against this claim ?
Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry. It is not just aerospace, even auto is still über competitive, European manufactures are on par or perhaps better than anything Ford and GM have to offer. I am sure Europeans can come with good examples for every bad one.
The point it is easy to paint a narrative however reality is lot more complex and doesn't match with sweeping generalization .
Tech companies are getting insanely large valuations (I work in tech, and I think they're absurd). Europe doesn't have many large public tech companies, therefore Europe looks bad in terms of the "industries of the future"
Plus a bunch of angry USians really irritated by the anti-trust stuff the EU has been doing (DMA etc).
Plus a bunch of angry USians really irritated by the anti-trust stuff the EU has been doing (DMA etc).
It's not even all tech either. Europe has some big players in silicon or biotech for example. It does however lack giants that introduced major disruptions in the way things are done, like cloud services, social networks, gig economy etc.
Not sure why this comment was downvoted / dead? ASML and Bayer come to mind.
IMHO, Airbus is a good counterexample of how EU could do things better.
It's not perfect, but it's competitive and successful. Lots of countries contributed to its success, leaving (most) political issues aside.
It's not perfect, but it's competitive and successful. Lots of countries contributed to its success, leaving (most) political issues aside.
> Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry
First of all this is an empty statement that reeks of rhetoric. You don’t have the full grasp of the picture to quantify if a company is miles ahead of the competition. Nobody does. Ahead in terms of what? Even if we want to compare companies in more specific aspects (for the sake of comparison) — be it revenue, vision, innovation, supply chain, or efficiency — Airbus is not ahead of the pack (which includes the likes of Lockheed Martin, GE Aerospace, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Rolls Royce).
Airbus is half of the commercial airline market duopoly with Boeing. Customers really have no other choices. Airbus benefits when Boeing drops the ball. Simple as that.
First of all this is an empty statement that reeks of rhetoric. You don’t have the full grasp of the picture to quantify if a company is miles ahead of the competition. Nobody does. Ahead in terms of what? Even if we want to compare companies in more specific aspects (for the sake of comparison) — be it revenue, vision, innovation, supply chain, or efficiency — Airbus is not ahead of the pack (which includes the likes of Lockheed Martin, GE Aerospace, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Rolls Royce).
Airbus is half of the commercial airline market duopoly with Boeing. Customers really have no other choices. Airbus benefits when Boeing drops the ball. Simple as that.
> Ahead in terms of what?
Passenger safety for starters, passing safety audits, units shipped or sold, not having a 60 year old airframe to iterate its product with [1].
> Airbus benefits when Boeing drops the ball.
It also has to build airplanes of quality, price and on time that can fly economically for its customers. Duopoly doesn’t mean it has to do nothing.
[1] MCAS was needed after all because Boeing decided to stick a big new engine on a low sitting 1960s 737 airframe, instead of developing a new airframe.
Passenger safety for starters, passing safety audits, units shipped or sold, not having a 60 year old airframe to iterate its product with [1].
> Airbus benefits when Boeing drops the ball.
It also has to build airplanes of quality, price and on time that can fly economically for its customers. Duopoly doesn’t mean it has to do nothing.
[1] MCAS was needed after all because Boeing decided to stick a big new engine on a low sitting 1960s 737 airframe, instead of developing a new airframe.
Again, this is what you said:
> Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry
So now you don’t claim Airbus is “miles ahead” of the best that US and China can offer, moving the goal post from that very generic statement to just comparing A32X with B737MAX?
So why not comparing 787 vs. A350, or C130 vs. A400, or Sikorsky vs Airbus helicopters? They’re comparable products that Airbus offer vs the competition. Did you know that 787 has got 1,900 sales and 1.300 deliveries, whereas A350 has 1,300 sales and 650 deliveries in the same time frame?
> It also has to build airplanes of quality, price and on time that can fly economically for its customers.
Did I say it doesn’t? Still, customers don’t have a choice. Boeing has been doing badly, yet the backlog of 737MAX is still more than 4.700 units and growing. No meaningful cancellation despite its problems.
> Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry
So now you don’t claim Airbus is “miles ahead” of the best that US and China can offer, moving the goal post from that very generic statement to just comparing A32X with B737MAX?
So why not comparing 787 vs. A350, or C130 vs. A400, or Sikorsky vs Airbus helicopters? They’re comparable products that Airbus offer vs the competition. Did you know that 787 has got 1,900 sales and 1.300 deliveries, whereas A350 has 1,300 sales and 650 deliveries in the same time frame?
> It also has to build airplanes of quality, price and on time that can fly economically for its customers.
Did I say it doesn’t? Still, customers don’t have a choice. Boeing has been doing badly, yet the backlog of 737MAX is still more than 4.700 units and growing. No meaningful cancellation despite its problems.
Here is what happened: fear. Fear of patriotism getting us a second Hitler. Fear of war.
This is IMO the root cause of why most public services are going down the drain in most Western Europe: people are there to work for themselves, not for their country. And the higher people are, the worst it is. Keep the status quo, embezzle if you can and shut your eyes to not see we're in economic and cultural wars against the rest of the world.
This is IMO the root cause of why most public services are going down the drain in most Western Europe: people are there to work for themselves, not for their country. And the higher people are, the worst it is. Keep the status quo, embezzle if you can and shut your eyes to not see we're in economic and cultural wars against the rest of the world.
Reminds me of a lot of the initiatives coming out of big companies. The grander the vision, the more vague they are, the more money and time they hoover up as people try to rephrase the initial vague aims in different ways.
And, bless they even have an architecture document which does nothing to bring this blurry vision into focus.
https://gaia-x.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Gaia-x-Architec...
And, bless they even have an architecture document which does nothing to bring this blurry vision into focus.
https://gaia-x.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Gaia-x-Architec...
It takes time to shape and convince people and form frameworks to move forward.
"Right now it's only a goal, but I think I can get the money to make it into an intention, and later turn it into an outcome." -- European Woody Allen
As I get older and a little lazier, sometimes I think I might want to find a way to get a completely pointless job that gives me a paycheck where all I have to do is write documents that nobody ever reads.
Then I look at something like this Gaia-X "milestones" list and think "Meh, this is probably not the job for me..."
Then I look at something like this Gaia-X "milestones" list and think "Meh, this is probably not the job for me..."
I was involved in an EU funded software research project related to air quality [1] around ~2008. The bureaucracy was very real, we had to produce a boatload of paperwork (including a literal, on paper, printout of the source code, for some reason?). But aside from the weird paperwork overhead, we were fairly free in how we approached the project, and we got a lot of shit done. This was software R&D in the true sense. I don't know what happened to the project after I left, but I suspect the universities involved benefited from the research and some of it was probably spun off.
That is to say: it's not all just paperwork and paychecks, it can be greatly rewarding work.
[1] Strangely enough I was just talking about another aspect of air quality in another HN thread. Never noticed this was a theme in my life before.
That is to say: it's not all just paperwork and paychecks, it can be greatly rewarding work.
[1] Strangely enough I was just talking about another aspect of air quality in another HN thread. Never noticed this was a theme in my life before.
[raises hand]
It's not so bad. Looooong lunches.
It's not so bad. Looooong lunches.
Any suggestions on how to land such a role? I've had the last 48 hours off work, which I think is the longest stretch in the last month, but I'll be working this evening, and tomorrow, and tomorrow evening, and Tuesday, and Tuesday evening, and...
Look for companies that are funded as part of long, multi-year projects. I have been funded by institutions like the NSF, NIH, and a bunch of smaller philanthropic foundations. After leaving SaaS-world, I just went to LinkedIn and looked for a non-profit doing work I can stand behind.
The thing that makes it so chill is that we work on very long time scales, based on the length of whatever NIH (or similar) grant we're on. If you're used to building things in the private sector, the comparison I make is that what took us 3 months at my previous YC startup would take us 3 years at the non-profit where I work now. A lot of that is because there are many moving pieces to coordinate, and because you have to be careful when dealing with sensitive data and research ethics. Blah blah blah, at least part of it is also because the breakneck pace of VC-funded software hasn't got its fingers into this pie, at least not yet.
Downside: pay cut. I make $18k less than I did 4 years ago, despite having gotten promoted in this new spot. Also, it can be frustrating trying to actually produce software at a company with no culture for it. You find out that software delivery practices are something people have to learn, and at places that aren't software-oriented, they don't know about them.
The thing that makes it so chill is that we work on very long time scales, based on the length of whatever NIH (or similar) grant we're on. If you're used to building things in the private sector, the comparison I make is that what took us 3 months at my previous YC startup would take us 3 years at the non-profit where I work now. A lot of that is because there are many moving pieces to coordinate, and because you have to be careful when dealing with sensitive data and research ethics. Blah blah blah, at least part of it is also because the breakneck pace of VC-funded software hasn't got its fingers into this pie, at least not yet.
Downside: pay cut. I make $18k less than I did 4 years ago, despite having gotten promoted in this new spot. Also, it can be frustrating trying to actually produce software at a company with no culture for it. You find out that software delivery practices are something people have to learn, and at places that aren't software-oriented, they don't know about them.
Work for government.
This is too funny.
What's to stop an American cloud hyperscaler from creating a "properly patriated" subsidiary that it simply licenses the tech to? Wouldn't that side step the "sovereign" protectionism?
An American company would run circles around this mess.
What's to stop an American cloud hyperscaler from creating a "properly patriated" subsidiary that it simply licenses the tech to? Wouldn't that side step the "sovereign" protectionism?
An American company would run circles around this mess.
Google is doing this. German and French companies are building a datacenter to GCP standards, will license the code and run essentially whitelabel GCP under full jurisdiction of the EU company. Google can only push updates with their approval and has no visibility into the operations.
https://cloud.google.com/t-systems-sovereign-cloud?hl=en
https://cloud.google.com/t-systems-sovereign-cloud?hl=en
This is actually quite funny. A sovereign cloud that they have no f-ing clue how to maintain without the mothership.
They get documentation and playbooks (which are pretty good), source code access, and of course direct channel to the "mothership" engineers for support.
I'm sure early days will be painful but there is no reason for this not to work.
I'm sure early days will be painful but there is no reason for this not to work.
Sure, as long as the mothership exists and is cooperative, it’s fine. But that’s not actually very sovereign, is it?
Maybe you are misunderstanding the gravity of this problem. Thanks to US Cloud Act and the Patriot Act and similar acts, there is no way any US citizen or any US company may EVER be involved in such projects. It's completely legal for the US to rely on extraterritorial jurisdiction leveraging any US companies and US citizens they have access to.
But on the other hand, everyone else on out there will want to avoid that, so the only way to achieve that is to avoid involving any US citizens or companies for such sovereign projects.
Google will not be able to solve it via subsidiaries, and no nice promises from Amazon, MS etc. will ever change it.
Data sovereignity means all this.
This will probably escalate a lot more, it might involve the financial infrastructure used (SWIFT) or even currency used in the process.
Deutsche Telekom hosted Microsoft Office 365 for some years in Germany as a German cloud offering.
I think this was the press release: https://www.telekom.com/de/medien/medieninformationen/detail...
This was a Microsoft 365 cloud hosted and operated by Deutsche Telekom in Germany. It was more expensive than the global version and had less features. It often took some years till new features were introduced.
They stopped this offering some years ago, I think they did not get as many customers as they expected, most of the German customers used the global version.
I think this was the press release: https://www.telekom.com/de/medien/medieninformationen/detail...
This was a Microsoft 365 cloud hosted and operated by Deutsche Telekom in Germany. It was more expensive than the global version and had less features. It often took some years till new features were introduced.
They stopped this offering some years ago, I think they did not get as many customers as they expected, most of the German customers used the global version.
Open Telekom Cloud is a whitelabeled AWS, so they are still doing this, but with other technologies.
This press release from 2020 says Open Telekom Cloud is from Software and Hardware from Huawei.
https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sich...
Do you have any source that they switched to AWS?
https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sich...
Do you have any source that they switched to AWS?
Or just plain old buy out any EU company that threathens to become successful with free reserve currency monopoly money.
That's exactly what is going on nowadays, anyway. In Poland we have Chmura Krajowa (national cloud), aimed at public, non profit and finance companies. It's basically more controlled local Azure and GPC region.
In Polish people don't use Cloud but Chmura?
In Hungarian the people I know use felhő and not cloud. I don’t know what they say in actual IT circles but to my ears “cloud” sounds very awkward if stuck in a Hungarian sentence.
https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felh%C5%91alap%C3%BA_sz%C3%A1m...
https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felh%C5%91alap%C3%BA_sz%C3%A1m...
It depends. If we’re talking about e.g. GCP we use “cloud”, but Chmura Krajowa is a Polish product and it has a Polish name, so we use “chmura”.
We basically use the original name in this context.
Interesting. In Germany government uses the word cloud . Not Wolke. TIL something new.
It seems to me Germans in general like to use English phrases, but on the contrary from other European places I know, they like to use the original pronunciation and spelling. Us, Poles, like to make it sound like Polish, add our own declension and so on.
Both, but chmura is a non-controvertial and easy translation.
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The americans are already on this path https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-european-s....
They might if there was a market for it. But who wants to pay a premium to be free of US influence? America hasn’t gone full-on Gilead yet.
Unfortunately, every democracy is one election away from Gilead.
"Gilead" ?
Republic of Gilead - fictional future fundamentalist theocracy version of the USofA
https://the-handmaids-tale.fandom.com/wiki/Republic_of_Gilea...
https://the-handmaids-tale.fandom.com/wiki/Republic_of_Gilea...
But then they'd have to obey laws and pay taxes and who wants that.
> What's to stop an American cloud hyperscaler from creating a "properly patriated" subsidiary that it simply licenses the tech to?
Nothing. Amazon already does that in China, their subsidiary licenses the tech and support services from the US company.
Nothing. Amazon already does that in China, their subsidiary licenses the tech and support services from the US company.
n_ary(6)
The core feature of Gaia-X is that it makes it easy for small EU software companies to get up to €200k in "de minimis" tax gifts.
It also funnels money into open source office software and "European data spaces", which is (very loosely) tools to replace US clouds with open source. I would say it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, making it easier for EU companies to ditch US cloud services.
And didn't exactly that happen here?
4 years ago, the "Schwarz IT KG" company was a day-1 member of Gaia-X. And now they have billions in revenue from AWS-like cloud services.
It also funnels money into open source office software and "European data spaces", which is (very loosely) tools to replace US clouds with open source. I would say it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, making it easier for EU companies to ditch US cloud services.
And didn't exactly that happen here?
4 years ago, the "Schwarz IT KG" company was a day-1 member of Gaia-X. And now they have billions in revenue from AWS-like cloud services.
Need a third party citation on that. I'm highly skeptical by the press releases they bring out and seem to be taken over verbatim with very little due diligence.
Given the fact they don't even allow public signups outside of DACH im highly skeptical of their claim they're doing billions of revenue in public cloud. It wouldn't surprise me if there is some interesting bookkeeping going on to boost the numbers.
The current status quo is that people in this thread want to try this but fail to figure out how to even sign up.
Also could you explain what part of being part of Gaia-X contributed to their success?
Given the fact they don't even allow public signups outside of DACH im highly skeptical of their claim they're doing billions of revenue in public cloud. It wouldn't surprise me if there is some interesting bookkeeping going on to boost the numbers.
The current status quo is that people in this thread want to try this but fail to figure out how to even sign up.
Also could you explain what part of being part of Gaia-X contributed to their success?
Cloud&Heat receives GaiaX funding: https://www.cloudandheat.com/news-press/gaia-x-summit-2020/
Teams up with Schwarz group to create StackIT cloud: https://www.handelsblatt.com/technik/it-internet/schwarz-gru...
As for the revenue, I would trust a multi-billion international company that if they say billions in revenue, that'll be halfway accurate. Or else, that would be massive securities fraud. Here's their (independently audited) tax filling showing 1.2 billion € in revenue 2 years ago: https://www.unternehmensregister.de/ureg/result.html;jsessio...
Teams up with Schwarz group to create StackIT cloud: https://www.handelsblatt.com/technik/it-internet/schwarz-gru...
As for the revenue, I would trust a multi-billion international company that if they say billions in revenue, that'll be halfway accurate. Or else, that would be massive securities fraud. Here's their (independently audited) tax filling showing 1.2 billion € in revenue 2 years ago: https://www.unternehmensregister.de/ureg/result.html;jsessio...
> Here's their (independently audited) tax filling showing 1.2 billion € in revenue 2 years ago: […]
Unfortunately, those links expire after a while. To everyone else: Go to unternehmensregister.de and search for "Schwarz IT KG" (located in Neckarsulm, registered at Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRA 730995) and open the document "Jahresabschluss zum Geschäftsjahr vom 01.03.2022 bis zum 28.02.2023".
Unfortunately, those links expire after a while. To everyone else: Go to unternehmensregister.de and search for "Schwarz IT KG" (located in Neckarsulm, registered at Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRA 730995) and open the document "Jahresabschluss zum Geschäftsjahr vom 01.03.2022 bis zum 28.02.2023".
I used to work for a company that gets Gaia-X money. I will not mention concrete names, so you'll have to believe this anonymous source, me, choosing to remain vague to not be identified.
All we did for Gaia-X was the paperwork to get the money. It had zero impact on anything we actually did. Somebody I know who knew what other firms receiving Gaia-X funds did told me the others did even less than us. We certainly did not take it very seriously, apart from it being a great source of free money, and I say that as someone who reported quite a few developer hours for Gaia-X.
I think at most this project is about sending some money to some European firms, with little regard for actual outcomes, kind of as a concealed subsidy. I'm not sure if those who started the project actually wanted that outcome in the first place? A lot of these things are just ways to use the current system to achieve goals that the system does not directly allow. It could just be incompetence, but it could also be the case that somebody knows exactly what they created with Gaia-X and is perfectly okay with the outcome.
All we did for Gaia-X was the paperwork to get the money. It had zero impact on anything we actually did. Somebody I know who knew what other firms receiving Gaia-X funds did told me the others did even less than us. We certainly did not take it very seriously, apart from it being a great source of free money, and I say that as someone who reported quite a few developer hours for Gaia-X.
I think at most this project is about sending some money to some European firms, with little regard for actual outcomes, kind of as a concealed subsidy. I'm not sure if those who started the project actually wanted that outcome in the first place? A lot of these things are just ways to use the current system to achieve goals that the system does not directly allow. It could just be incompetence, but it could also be the case that somebody knows exactly what they created with Gaia-X and is perfectly okay with the outcome.
It's not great, but this is far from abnormal. I worked for a company (not my current employer) that got R&D grants or tax breaks (I'm not sure which) from a government. The engineers were asked to come up with defined projects that could be justified as R&D in the way the government wanted. We did, and we actually did the projects, but might have done them anyway.
Governments want to grow areas of their economies that they think could be beneficial. It's not acceptable to just hand out cash, and that can be trivially abused, so they put a little work around it to make sure the right companies are applying, and they tie it to token artifacts to make it seem more specific. Some companies commit outright fraud, but they're likely the minority and it's just a cost of the program, some put in a ton of effort and do it properly, and that's fine, and the majority just carry on doing the work they were already doing that the government was trying to encourage, and they'll hopefully be just a bit more successful as a result of the extra cash.
It's all a bit silly, but I don't think it's malicious or actually that bad if you assume that the government isn't trying to achieve a specific outcome beyond growing a sector, despite what they say.
Governments want to grow areas of their economies that they think could be beneficial. It's not acceptable to just hand out cash, and that can be trivially abused, so they put a little work around it to make sure the right companies are applying, and they tie it to token artifacts to make it seem more specific. Some companies commit outright fraud, but they're likely the minority and it's just a cost of the program, some put in a ton of effort and do it properly, and that's fine, and the majority just carry on doing the work they were already doing that the government was trying to encourage, and they'll hopefully be just a bit more successful as a result of the extra cash.
It's all a bit silly, but I don't think it's malicious or actually that bad if you assume that the government isn't trying to achieve a specific outcome beyond growing a sector, despite what they say.
> some put in a ton of effort and do it properly, and that's fine...
I mostly agree with you, except with this statement. It's not fine, the companies that fall into this trap are wasting their time and resources on something that is not a real opportunity. This is the main source of waste imho and unfortunately happens a lot in EU projects.
Other than that, spot on.
I mostly agree with you, except with this statement. It's not fine, the companies that fall into this trap are wasting their time and resources on something that is not a real opportunity. This is the main source of waste imho and unfortunately happens a lot in EU projects.
Other than that, spot on.
The Australian government R&DTI operates this way. Nearly every job I've had I've had to fill out specific timesheets and project descriptions to fit the gov's reqs to get the tax incentive.
I’ve acquaintances who have done similar things.
The wastefulness of EU is the real reason people want their countries out of it.
There seem to be zero journalists covering EU shenanigans so everyone just get the news from people in the trenches. While our local politicians gets fired for buying chocolate on the wrong account (true story).
The wastefulness of EU is the real reason people want their countries out of it.
There seem to be zero journalists covering EU shenanigans so everyone just get the news from people in the trenches. While our local politicians gets fired for buying chocolate on the wrong account (true story).
> The wastefulness of EU is the real reason people want their countries out of it.
Unless such wastefulness is directed towards your own country!
By the way, the only ones who actually voted to quit were those idiot Brexiteers who were not even aware of the EU funds invested in the UK.
Unless such wastefulness is directed towards your own country!
By the way, the only ones who actually voted to quit were those idiot Brexiteers who were not even aware of the EU funds invested in the UK.
You have a pretty big mouth, calling the majority of the United Kingdom voters idiots. But I am sure you know better than them what is good for them.
I have met several Brexiteers on Quora, and not one of them could give a sensible reason for their vote. I don't mean a reason that I would like, I mean just a reason that could make any sense.
I still hope some smart Brexiteers exist, but I've not been lucky enough to meet any of them.
Well, Scotland voted to remain in the EU, but they've had to put up with the rest thinking they "know better than them what is good for them."
I'm sure they enjoy it as much as you do.
I'm sure they enjoy it as much as you do.
I have worked with Deutsche Telekom in the past and I'm convinced that every project that involves them will never get enough traction to beat US companies.
The entitlement and refusal to listen to other people outside their direct org is mindboggling, its like if everyone at that company still thinks they are the hottest shit and they know everything better. Sadly, they are a gatekeeper. Super frustrating partner to work with
The entitlement and refusal to listen to other people outside their direct org is mindboggling, its like if everyone at that company still thinks they are the hottest shit and they know everything better. Sadly, they are a gatekeeper. Super frustrating partner to work with
> The entitlement and refusal to listen to other people outside their direct org is mindboggling
+1 on that. Same with the owner of the CSP mentioned in the article above.
It's weird because it was always only German companies that gave truly unreasonable feature requests AND were extremely pushy, despite not spending much compared to other customers.
T-Mobile is much easier to deal with, but they are also walking with their tail between their legs...
+1 on that. Same with the owner of the CSP mentioned in the article above.
It's weird because it was always only German companies that gave truly unreasonable feature requests AND were extremely pushy, despite not spending much compared to other customers.
T-Mobile is much easier to deal with, but they are also walking with their tail between their legs...
While most Western governments have gotten increasingly good at communicating with their citizens (i.e. making their web sites and forms accessible in human language, rather than bureaucrat language), and often even go so far as to offer versions in "Simple English" or local-language equivalents, the EU seems to be going the opposite way.
I'd consider myself reasonably accustomed to and able to deal with bureaucracy and formal language, and still find every interaction with official EU sites massively off-putting. Now imagine someone who isn't a native speaker in any of the EU's languages, mentally impaired, or generally quickly feels overwhelmed by bureaucracy.
I'd consider myself reasonably accustomed to and able to deal with bureaucracy and formal language, and still find every interaction with official EU sites massively off-putting. Now imagine someone who isn't a native speaker in any of the EU's languages, mentally impaired, or generally quickly feels overwhelmed by bureaucracy.
Because the EU is not a national government. It issues no passports. It has no citizens. It levies no taxes. It has no army. It's an organisation that coordinates sovereign states. Often it doesn't even set the law directly but establishes a framework that allows it to specify some requirements that national legislative bodies then have to turn into actual legislation. Frameworks for how to talk about things is very apropos for what the EU is and for how it came about.
I am not defending this state of affairs. Simply pointing out that it's a category error to compare it to national governments. I think it would be good if we had more of an EU state. It seemed to be heading there 25ish years ago. But the nation states do have little appetite to cede authority to the central institutions, so that's probably not on the table. And it's also undeniable that as a coordination mechanism the EU has been spectacularly successful. The fact that people treat it as a national government is proof of that.
I am not defending this state of affairs. Simply pointing out that it's a category error to compare it to national governments. I think it would be good if we had more of an EU state. It seemed to be heading there 25ish years ago. But the nation states do have little appetite to cede authority to the central institutions, so that's probably not on the table. And it's also undeniable that as a coordination mechanism the EU has been spectacularly successful. The fact that people treat it as a national government is proof of that.
It's amazing the EU has lasted this long really. The USA tried something somewhat similar back in 1781, and it was a complete failure: they organized a bunch of sovereign states (formerly colonies, but they became sovereign states after the Revolutionary War just before) into a confederation, where the central government had no real power at all. The resulting country couldn't even defend itself against pirates. They finally got sick of it in 1789 and threw out this form of government in favor of a constitutional republic with a much stronger federalized government. Over 235 years later, that form of government still persists, though it's really showing its warts and the Constitution really needs a rewrite IMO, but despite its enormous flaws in the modern age it's still a lot better than the decentralized mess that is the EU. If you want real economic power in the face of competing superpowers, you need centralized policy and authority, not a bunch of semi-sovereign states all squabbling with each other and no one able to make a decision.
I agree that a stronger central EU government, more like a federal state would be highly desirable and more efficient in many ways today.
But you are ignoring a ton of stuff here, too. The EU comprises territories that are far more different than the territories of the US. The EU has 24 languages spoken, and its poorest member state has a GDP that is a factor of 9 lower than its richest (excluding Luxembourg). While it would be nice to have strong decision-making, how do you make sure that the decisions are also perceived as fair and democratically justified? Imagine a president who doesn't even speak the native language of the vast majority of people in the country. Would that person be seen as legitimately representing the people? How do you even begin to organize public political discussions in a situation where most people can't read the same newspaper/watch the same content? It's far from obvious that any of this is achievable. It's easy to fantasize about a competent, legitimate central government. But how do you construct it from the pieces given?
The political analogue of the EU might be India rather than the US.
Historically, the EU also comprises the territories that for more than half the time period since the inception of the USA provided all the globally dominant economic and military superpowers, expanding the areas they ruled to the peak of colonialism in 1914 [1]. So the squabbling mess of European powers, barely coordinating under a balance of power system at home, was dramatically successful militarily and economically (at an even more dramatic human cost). Contrast the Quing dynasty, that had a central government. At least some historians I've read argue that maintaining the central government consumed so many resources that it was a major reason for the widening gulf in economic and military might between European power and China during the 19th century.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/graphics/1914-co...
But you are ignoring a ton of stuff here, too. The EU comprises territories that are far more different than the territories of the US. The EU has 24 languages spoken, and its poorest member state has a GDP that is a factor of 9 lower than its richest (excluding Luxembourg). While it would be nice to have strong decision-making, how do you make sure that the decisions are also perceived as fair and democratically justified? Imagine a president who doesn't even speak the native language of the vast majority of people in the country. Would that person be seen as legitimately representing the people? How do you even begin to organize public political discussions in a situation where most people can't read the same newspaper/watch the same content? It's far from obvious that any of this is achievable. It's easy to fantasize about a competent, legitimate central government. But how do you construct it from the pieces given?
The political analogue of the EU might be India rather than the US.
Historically, the EU also comprises the territories that for more than half the time period since the inception of the USA provided all the globally dominant economic and military superpowers, expanding the areas they ruled to the peak of colonialism in 1914 [1]. So the squabbling mess of European powers, barely coordinating under a balance of power system at home, was dramatically successful militarily and economically (at an even more dramatic human cost). Contrast the Quing dynasty, that had a central government. At least some historians I've read argue that maintaining the central government consumed so many resources that it was a major reason for the widening gulf in economic and military might between European power and China during the 19th century.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/graphics/1914-co...
These are all great points, and of course, I didn't mean to trivialize any of them. I can't say a federal state would actually work for the EU, precisely because of these issues.
>Imagine a president who doesn't even speak the native language of the vast majority of people in the country.
This actually reminds me of Spain. Their leaders, while they speak the native language of a majority, it's not a vast majority, with very significant minority-language areas (Catalan, Basque, Galician). And that country sometimes seems to be barely holding itself together, with Catalonia attempting an independence referendum a few years ago that didn't end well.
However, this is a quibble, but as an American I'd argue that if the EU did federalize, they shouldn't have a president at all. The US has a presidential system and it kinda sucks (see: frequent government shutdowns). I think a parliamentary system works better in practice, or perhaps something resembling Germany's system (since Germany also has a federal government).
>So the squabbling mess of European powers, barely coordinating under a balance of power system at home, was dramatically successful militarily and economically (at an even more dramatic human cost)
I really don't think those days are coming back. Europe was so successful back then because it was far more developed technologically. That advantage is long gone now. Plus, Europe's population just isn't what it was. And I'm not a historian, but I thought the reason China didn't develop as fast was all self-inflicted: they intentionally turned inwards and refused outside contact.
Anyway, perhaps you're right and the current state of the EU is the best they can do with their circumstances. Still, I suspect it's not enough: I don't see this as a stable system. They can't even keep one or two of their own member states from torpedoing all progress, and if the US weren't there to defend them from Russia, they appear to be powerless there too.
>Imagine a president who doesn't even speak the native language of the vast majority of people in the country.
This actually reminds me of Spain. Their leaders, while they speak the native language of a majority, it's not a vast majority, with very significant minority-language areas (Catalan, Basque, Galician). And that country sometimes seems to be barely holding itself together, with Catalonia attempting an independence referendum a few years ago that didn't end well.
However, this is a quibble, but as an American I'd argue that if the EU did federalize, they shouldn't have a president at all. The US has a presidential system and it kinda sucks (see: frequent government shutdowns). I think a parliamentary system works better in practice, or perhaps something resembling Germany's system (since Germany also has a federal government).
>So the squabbling mess of European powers, barely coordinating under a balance of power system at home, was dramatically successful militarily and economically (at an even more dramatic human cost)
I really don't think those days are coming back. Europe was so successful back then because it was far more developed technologically. That advantage is long gone now. Plus, Europe's population just isn't what it was. And I'm not a historian, but I thought the reason China didn't develop as fast was all self-inflicted: they intentionally turned inwards and refused outside contact.
Anyway, perhaps you're right and the current state of the EU is the best they can do with their circumstances. Still, I suspect it's not enough: I don't see this as a stable system. They can't even keep one or two of their own member states from torpedoing all progress, and if the US weren't there to defend them from Russia, they appear to be powerless there too.
Their leaders, while they speak the native language of a majority, it's not a vast majority,
It seems to be a pretty vast majority, actually. According to a 2019 Pew Research poll, we have the following breakdown of languages spoken at home:
It seems to be a pretty vast majority, actually. According to a 2019 Pew Research poll, we have the following breakdown of languages spoken at home:
Spanish (81%), Catalan (8%), Valencian (4%), Galician (3%), Basque (1%)
Having lived and worked in the US for a decade, as a German, and having had time to think about many things:
I think a key difference between how the US works and how Europe works lies in the private sector and the people. When you build a new company in the US, you have a lot of private infrastructure and people to be active in all of the states. In Europe, this does not exist in that form. Here, all the investors are focused on their own country. Sure we have plenty of firms active in many EU countries, but the level of support especially for new firms is orders of magnitude lower than in the US. From languages to social issues to attitude and expectations of common people, the EU is much more compartmentalized and it is significantly harder to have EU scale.
So there are two issues, and the side of the government is only one. The private sector and the investors have to do their job too and provide their own side of the EU wide infrastructure.
We also don't have EU-wide media that needs to support the development of a shared EU identity, and many other things that unite the US population as one people. Much of that has to come from the private sector, from the rich, from investors. But apparently they don't think big enough here in the EU?
I think a key difference between how the US works and how Europe works lies in the private sector and the people. When you build a new company in the US, you have a lot of private infrastructure and people to be active in all of the states. In Europe, this does not exist in that form. Here, all the investors are focused on their own country. Sure we have plenty of firms active in many EU countries, but the level of support especially for new firms is orders of magnitude lower than in the US. From languages to social issues to attitude and expectations of common people, the EU is much more compartmentalized and it is significantly harder to have EU scale.
So there are two issues, and the side of the government is only one. The private sector and the investors have to do their job too and provide their own side of the EU wide infrastructure.
We also don't have EU-wide media that needs to support the development of a shared EU identity, and many other things that unite the US population as one people. Much of that has to come from the private sector, from the rich, from investors. But apparently they don't think big enough here in the EU?
Perhaps, but I wonder how much having so many different languages contributes to that. In the US, most people all speak English (though there's a growing Spanish-speaking population, but even here most younger ones probably end up being bilingual), so there's not that much to do for your company to do business in all 50 states, depending on just how much interaction with state governments you require. And state laws are all pretty similar usually. Not so in the EU.
Lack of a common language must be a factor in scaling - the amount of effort printing required information in different languages is already an overhead (e..g instructions on medications).
Also in the US, somebody in California can give telephone support to somebody in Rhode Island; not so easy to get somebody in Sweden to give telephone support to somebody in Italy though.
Also in the US, somebody in California can give telephone support to somebody in Rhode Island; not so easy to get somebody in Sweden to give telephone support to somebody in Italy though.
Glass half full. No civil war was needed to keep the EU together. It lost a member without any bloodshed. It's exactly the kind of imperfection we admire when we compare democracies to China - less effective than central control but more free.
Arguably, the US civil war wasn't strictly necessary. If it weren't for the slavery issue, I think it's would have been better for the northern states to just let the south secede. Even with the slavery issue, and if they had not bothered fighting a war to keep those states in the union, it's arguable that the south would have failed economically before long anyway, especially if the north had instituted sanctions.
As for comparing democracies to China, the democracies of the EU are lucky China isn't next door to them. They're already completely unable to defend themselves against Russia, which is also expansionist and aggressive, but at least doesn't have China's industrial power. If the EU were next to China, they'd be completely defenseless against Chinese expansionism.
As for comparing democracies to China, the democracies of the EU are lucky China isn't next door to them. They're already completely unable to defend themselves against Russia, which is also expansionist and aggressive, but at least doesn't have China's industrial power. If the EU were next to China, they'd be completely defenseless against Chinese expansionism.
It just turns out the USA as it is wasn't created out of free will. Say whatever you like but the EU was.
> it's also undeniable that as a coordination mechanism the EU has been spectacularly successful.
I get you like the EU, but "spectacularly sucessful" isn't something many people would use. See covid response, and Ukraine war response. I would describe EU's mechanisms as moderately successful, i.e. somewhat better if states did everything on their own and bilaterally.
> The fact that people treat it as a national government is proof of that.
People with triste knowledge of how EU works do that. I do not think having most people in dark about how EU works is "spectacularly successful".
I get you like the EU, but "spectacularly sucessful" isn't something many people would use. See covid response, and Ukraine war response. I would describe EU's mechanisms as moderately successful, i.e. somewhat better if states did everything on their own and bilaterally.
> The fact that people treat it as a national government is proof of that.
People with triste knowledge of how EU works do that. I do not think having most people in dark about how EU works is "spectacularly successful".
It all depends on what (or when) you’re comparing coordination between European nations to. Having a less than ideal response to COVID or the war in Ukraine is vastly different than the openly hostile relations between European nations experienced prior to the foundation of the CoE/EEC/EU.
To come to a decision is dangerous for a career in a bureaucratic monster. Its all about creating the most impractical swiss-knife of all trades with as little personal responsibility as possible. If the whole apparatus fails, that does not result in the whole apparatus being fired. Thats the crux.
Another nice example, resulting in horrible deformed APIs: https://www.ibm.com/topics/what-is-a-digital-twin
Another nice example, resulting in horrible deformed APIs: https://www.ibm.com/topics/what-is-a-digital-twin
That sounds like an EU success story - the bureaucrats aren't getting the way so Lidl is free to set up an AWS competitor. The EU isn't supposed to be a tech company, the point of companies is that they should be doing the part where services get provided. The US government was not a direct player in setting up AWS.
The danger would be if Gaia-X were kicking goals and laying down the law ... and had banned Lidl from setting up their own cloud until all the paperwork was signed off by 13 major committees, 666 undersecretaries of The Cloud and the High Bureaucrat was satisfied that there was a genuine market need for a new AWS competitor.
The EU has a lot of clever and motivated people. If the legal situation wasn't blocking success I expect they would succeed.
The danger would be if Gaia-X were kicking goals and laying down the law ... and had banned Lidl from setting up their own cloud until all the paperwork was signed off by 13 major committees, 666 undersecretaries of The Cloud and the High Bureaucrat was satisfied that there was a genuine market need for a new AWS competitor.
The EU has a lot of clever and motivated people. If the legal situation wasn't blocking success I expect they would succeed.
Living in the EU, and having by and large a meaningless job in a meaningless division of a quasi-government org... while reading the news coming from the East, I keep imagining how a war with EU will upend this little paradise of parasites and laziness, and it gives me nightmares :) Also, EU will probably kick me out before things will start getting more serious, I struggle to imagine any other sort of motivation less drastic than that to get things going in the "right direction" :(
But Gaia-X is not the article's main focus, is it? I think it is about Schwarz Digits, which is a daughter company of Lidl.
> It represents to me everything that is wrong with the EU today. A bureaucratic monster that can't decide how to talk about things or come to any form of alignment.
I think that the EU can very well find a consensus when it wants to, going so far to push for legislature that will be clearly thrown out by the ECJ or HUDOC (see Chat Control for great example).
It's just that we also have a lot of "token projects" which serve for virtual signaling for topics where there is a lack of domestic competence. Gaia-X is one of these things, the idea of a "european cloud" as laughable to begin with, due to dependence on foreign technologies to facilitate it.
I think that the EU can very well find a consensus when it wants to, going so far to push for legislature that will be clearly thrown out by the ECJ or HUDOC (see Chat Control for great example).
It's just that we also have a lot of "token projects" which serve for virtual signaling for topics where there is a lack of domestic competence. Gaia-X is one of these things, the idea of a "european cloud" as laughable to begin with, due to dependence on foreign technologies to facilitate it.
I am not sure the job of the EU should even be to make technical standards in this case. The point is to develop strategy and to convince an endless amount of non-technical stakeholders on value, and that is something the EU usually does well.
EU: 440 million people, 60,000 EU bureaucrats. US: 330 million people, 2 MILLION+ US federal employees. Maybe what they need is more bureaucrats, so we don't get half-assed programs like this.
If you were not being sarcastic, it's not a fair comparison. Those 66k EU bureaucrats only deal with some of the stuff. You'll have to add some of the public administration employees from each of the countries that deal with things that in US would be considered "federal".
The flip side is a lot of governance in US which is typically centralized is distributed to states and yet there are 2M federal employees.
Also only country with comparable language complexity to EU is India, so many languages adds enormous amount of paperwork and bureaucracy, US does not simply have to deal with it.
Also only country with comparable language complexity to EU is India, so many languages adds enormous amount of paperwork and bureaucracy, US does not simply have to deal with it.
1.4M of those are defense, VA, or homeland security. It's not much of a secret that the US has a large military, and it dominates employment numbers. The highest federal employment total was 4.4M at the end of WW2. It decreased to 2M after the war ended, with clear bumps for the Korean, Vietnam, Cold, and Middle Eastern wars.
Gaia-X is a place where the hasbeens of the yesteryear can poison any reasonable developent made by saying "We have always done it this way".
A lot of busy-work for a lot of highly overpaid bureaucrats.
The EU is a bureaucratic body so the production of bureaucracy counts as success
I run a European cloud service, 80% of our customers are basically looking for a European alternative to the big clouds. The market is huge and in my opinion underserved.
What makes it very exciting is that there not too much innovation required to compete
What makes it very exciting is that there not too much innovation required to compete
I use Hetzner cloud not because it's European, but because it's great.
What I find great about the Hetzner Cloud is that you don't need a dictionary to understand which product does a specific job. With AWS, I found it much harder to take the first steps because of the names being used.
I like to think UpCloud (also EU-based) is in the same boat, servers are servers and databases are databases. No weird lingo or product names, at least when you get to actually using it all in the Hub (hub.upcloud.com)
I find AWS quite OK (Stockholm syndrome?), but Cloudflare dashboard confuses me every time. Their navigation is just not logical to me.
Same for me with OVH and Scaleway.
Way cheaper than AWS and friends, and they just work.
Way cheaper than AWS and friends, and they just work.
I'm using OVH and the notion of it "just working" is all relative. It's tolerable, but certainly a bit buggy, and with far less services than aws and co. It is also cheap, but given the limitations I doubt they can increase the prices much...
Missing object storage kinda makes it a joke. Hetzner cloud is certainly useful for some things, but object storage is something I just assume any cloud would have in 2024.
AWS launched it before EC2 even it's that valuable.
AWS launched it before EC2 even it's that valuable.
Out of curiosity are you operating at a scale where "MinIO on a Hetzner node" isn't a viable replacement? I totally believe that's possible, just curious about the use case.
I’d argue that the smaller you are, the more sense S3 makes, since its costs scales down to zero and offer a high degree of reliability from the first file stored.
Rolling your own storage comes with at least some operational expenses, if you’re counting your data/egress in gigabytes that’s likely not worth it compared to just using S3 or similar services.
Rolling your own storage comes with at least some operational expenses, if you’re counting your data/egress in gigabytes that’s likely not worth it compared to just using S3 or similar services.
S3 is so expensive at scale that it only makes sense if you're tiny or if you have extreme durability requirements and your working set is tiny.
The durability can have value at scale, because ensuring it at scale with MinIO can be a lot work. But I often recommend to clients that they deploy a Hetzner setup as a cache, often with storage all the way up covering 100% of their data depending on access partner, because the AWS egress fees are so insanely extortionate that you never really want to read data from AWS at scale other than as an emergency option.
The durability can have value at scale, because ensuring it at scale with MinIO can be a lot work. But I often recommend to clients that they deploy a Hetzner setup as a cache, often with storage all the way up covering 100% of their data depending on access partner, because the AWS egress fees are so insanely extortionate that you never really want to read data from AWS at scale other than as an emergency option.
I just use R2. Who says that if I use one company, they have to provide every single service under the sun to be useful?
Linode is quite cheap and comes with Object storage so you don't have to maintain a MinIO
Are you serious? Self-managed MinIO on a bunch of drives vs fully managed operation-less S3. Comparing apples to oranges. And the license, AGPLv3 is a non-starter for virtually any business serious about their intellectual property.
> AGPLv3 is a non-starter for virtually any business serious about their intellectual property.
What do you mean? Can you describe a scenario where this MinIO license matters?
What do you mean? Can you describe a scenario where this MinIO license matters?
I'm confusing things myself. One's okay as long as one doesn't modify the code.
If you thought "I had to publish any code changes I make to my object storage server" was bad, wait until you find out that you're not even allowed to make code changes to S3 servers!
Obviously the fully-managed nature of S3 is very valuable compared to MinIO but the licensing issues seem neither here or there. Or is there some extra part of the AGPLv3 that I'm not aware of?
Obviously the fully-managed nature of S3 is very valuable compared to MinIO but the licensing issues seem neither here or there. Or is there some extra part of the AGPLv3 that I'm not aware of?
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Yeah, that - and also managed Kubernetes. Hetzner could seize a lot of potentially lucrative opportunities, but for some reason they choose not to and pretty much stagnate in their offerings. I have been asking the support about both K8s and object storage since close to five years now, but no.
I also used to use Hetzner and I got the feeling they were capitalised to the extent their backers understood the DC/asset model and under-capitalised to software which was too intangible to invest in.
K8s probably means more s/w than hardware, more bodies (for them) more helpdesk and more documentation, more process. More up-front cost. And, they seem to be making money without it. Maybe thats their position?
K8s probably means more s/w than hardware, more bodies (for them) more helpdesk and more documentation, more process. More up-front cost. And, they seem to be making money without it. Maybe thats their position?
Their position is that k8s is the wrong layer of abstraction. They might be right, for their business model. Or it might be a case of intentional blindness.
It is cheap, good it is not.
You can complain about AWS and GCP support as much as you want, but given their sheer volume it is an accomplishment how rarely you actually need it. The situation when you need it is of course a different thing and I understand that satisfaction there greatly varies. Their support might be hit or miss, but at least their processes are streamlined and tried and tested enough to have you rarely need it.
With Hetzner on the other hand, if you use them seriously you will run into a situation where you need support sooner than later and my experience with that always has been abysmal.
You can complain about AWS and GCP support as much as you want, but given their sheer volume it is an accomplishment how rarely you actually need it. The situation when you need it is of course a different thing and I understand that satisfaction there greatly varies. Their support might be hit or miss, but at least their processes are streamlined and tried and tested enough to have you rarely need it.
With Hetzner on the other hand, if you use them seriously you will run into a situation where you need support sooner than later and my experience with that always has been abysmal.
Do you have some examples?
I do. My favourite is the one where a scraper hosted their version of Stackoverflow on Hetzner servers. For some reason they only copied the textual content but replaced all user profile pictures with random profiles pictures from elsewhere - mostly harmless ones.
I had the misfortune that mine was replaced by a pornographic one, which appeared as the first result in Google when someone searched my name.
Hetzner did nothing to help rectify the situation. Thanks for nothing Hetzner.
Hetzner did nothing to help rectify the situation. Thanks for nothing Hetzner.
You're absolutely right: a huge, underserved market exists. Are you hiring? I'd love to work on a European big cloud alternative..!
Do you compete in some kind of a niche? There is OVH in EU.
And Scaleway (Online.net/Iliad). And Hetzner.
and OTC (Open Telecom Cloud)
But I wouldn't say it's a niche if you look at the size of the EU even if it "hasn't being doing that well" it's still a lot of purchasing power
And especially in recent years there has been an increasing push away from US cloud providers and this somewhat evening out the playing field of "newcomers" compared to Amazone, MS, Google.
Also because HN is quite US/SV focused and differences in business culture especially compared to SV about e.g. businesses doing blog post and similar you don't really see much at all from this marked on HN. But that doesn't mean it's not a big marked.
But I wouldn't say it's a niche if you look at the size of the EU even if it "hasn't being doing that well" it's still a lot of purchasing power
And especially in recent years there has been an increasing push away from US cloud providers and this somewhat evening out the playing field of "newcomers" compared to Amazone, MS, Google.
Also because HN is quite US/SV focused and differences in business culture especially compared to SV about e.g. businesses doing blog post and similar you don't really see much at all from this marked on HN. But that doesn't mean it's not a big marked.
The Open Telekom Cloud was at least in the beginning running on Huawei hardware and software.
Here is a press release from 2020: https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sich...
Title: Open Telekom Cloud – die sichere Cloud made in Europe
> Im Rahmen der Innovationspartnerschaft liefert Huawei mit dem Cloud-Betriebssystem Huawei OpenStack Distribution eine zentrale Softwarekomponente der Open Telekom Cloud.
English translation: Title: Open Telekom Cloud – the secure cloud made in Europe.
> As part of the innovation partnership, Huawei provides a central software component of the Open Telekom Cloud with its cloud operating system, Huawei OpenStack Distribution.
Here is a press release from 2020: https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sich...
Title: Open Telekom Cloud – die sichere Cloud made in Europe
> Im Rahmen der Innovationspartnerschaft liefert Huawei mit dem Cloud-Betriebssystem Huawei OpenStack Distribution eine zentrale Softwarekomponente der Open Telekom Cloud.
English translation: Title: Open Telekom Cloud – the secure cloud made in Europe.
> As part of the innovation partnership, Huawei provides a central software component of the Open Telekom Cloud with its cloud operating system, Huawei OpenStack Distribution.
I know but AFIK they have moved await from it.
Software wise they where anyway OpenStack based, which is a trusteable open source project Huawei is a major contributor to but other major contributors include AT&T, Canonical, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Intel, Red Hat, IBM. This made moving away from Huawei quite viable.
Hardware wise they also moved away from Huawei, but I'm not sure if this apply to all data-centers of them. But AFIK at least some data centers are Huawei free.
Or at least that is what they told some of their business partners which wouldn't have used them if they still used Huawei hardware in the data center that specific bussiness partner uses AFIK.
Software wise they where anyway OpenStack based, which is a trusteable open source project Huawei is a major contributor to but other major contributors include AT&T, Canonical, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Intel, Red Hat, IBM. This made moving away from Huawei quite viable.
Hardware wise they also moved away from Huawei, but I'm not sure if this apply to all data-centers of them. But AFIK at least some data centers are Huawei free.
Or at least that is what they told some of their business partners which wouldn't have used them if they still used Huawei hardware in the data center that specific bussiness partner uses AFIK.
The European market has always seemed like a tertiary market compared to the US and Asia. I think that's because, despite having some raw number of euros to spend on a product, the European economy has struggled since 2008 compared to the US and Asia, and huge corps which are obsessed with growth don't see an accelerating future for Europe as a customer base.
>European market has always seemed like a tertiary market compared to the US and Asia
Well, this isn't even remotely accurate on the numbers. For virtually every big tech company the US is about half of the market, Europe about 30%, then ~15% Asian Pacific, and give or take a bit in the rest of the world.
Given that most large tech companies are locked out of China or quickly leaving the only large country with comparable purchasing power to Europe in Asia is Japan.
Well, this isn't even remotely accurate on the numbers. For virtually every big tech company the US is about half of the market, Europe about 30%, then ~15% Asian Pacific, and give or take a bit in the rest of the world.
Given that most large tech companies are locked out of China or quickly leaving the only large country with comparable purchasing power to Europe in Asia is Japan.
It's about revenue growth opportunities, not current market share. Europe in general is largely stagnant, and seems likely to trend down due to the demographic time bomb.
In Asia, South Korea is already comparable to Japan as a technology market (but also stagnating). The big Asia-Pacific growth opportunities are going to be in India, Malaysia, and Philippines.
In Asia, South Korea is already comparable to Japan as a technology market (but also stagnating). The big Asia-Pacific growth opportunities are going to be in India, Malaysia, and Philippines.
Africa will soon emerge as an important market as well, particularly Nigeria. Japan and Korea are, as you said, not only stagnating but deflating (in the case of Japan). I believe GDP actually declined in Europe recently so I think Europe will shrink as a market in the coming decades unless they can fix demographic pressures and improve entrepreneurship. The US faces similar demographic problems but we have unique solutions to those problems that means that GDP growth is stronger in the US than virtually anywhere else in the world. India is a more mature "growing economy", and at this point I think the whole world is aware of the opportunities there. As you pointed out, Malaysia and the Philippines are growing, and so are other SE asian countries like Viet Nam and Thailand (though Thailand has struggled to grow since the pandemic, it's shown good growth since 2000).
Africa is the untapped market right now; Nigeria is expected to exceed 400mil (if not 500-700mil) people by 2050. I don't know as much about their economy, so I'm not sure if this growth has translated into the kind of infrastructure which would create more demand for computing services (i.e: I don't know what smartphone or 5G penetration is like there), but I would bet that if it's not ripe yet, it will be soon
Europe needs to solve its demographic pressures by either accepting more non-EU immigrants or doing something to encourage women to have more children, which would require solving for the opportunity cost (i.e: career stagnating or ending) that women bear 90+% of the time they have children, as well as the FOMO issues (which I don't think government can solve)
Africa is the untapped market right now; Nigeria is expected to exceed 400mil (if not 500-700mil) people by 2050. I don't know as much about their economy, so I'm not sure if this growth has translated into the kind of infrastructure which would create more demand for computing services (i.e: I don't know what smartphone or 5G penetration is like there), but I would bet that if it's not ripe yet, it will be soon
Europe needs to solve its demographic pressures by either accepting more non-EU immigrants or doing something to encourage women to have more children, which would require solving for the opportunity cost (i.e: career stagnating or ending) that women bear 90+% of the time they have children, as well as the FOMO issues (which I don't think government can solve)
It's always humorous to see HN users praising the lifestyle of dense, walkable European cities. They don't realize how miserable it is to raise multiple children in the typical 2 bedroom / 1 bath flat that most locals can afford. It's not surprising that many couples have only one child.
Historically, homes in the US were very small, far smaller than what you see today. Americans have a huge misconception about this, because the historic homes they see today are the ones that survived, and the ones that rich people lived in 100+ years ago. The homes that regular people lived in have all been torn down, because they were small and unremarkable. But you can see some of this if you visit neighborhoods built in the 1950s: the houses there are much smaller than newer nearby homes.
However, despite a trend towards much larger homes in the US over the last 50+ years, Americans (at least the ones who can afford nicer homes) have been having far fewer children. So apparently Americans preferred having lots of kids back when they lived in homes with less than ~900 square feet.
As for Europe, Europeans have been living in dense, walkable areas with small homes for millennia, and didn't have any trouble raising lots of kids in that environment all that time.
However, despite a trend towards much larger homes in the US over the last 50+ years, Americans (at least the ones who can afford nicer homes) have been having far fewer children. So apparently Americans preferred having lots of kids back when they lived in homes with less than ~900 square feet.
As for Europe, Europeans have been living in dense, walkable areas with small homes for millennia, and didn't have any trouble raising lots of kids in that environment all that time.
Europeans didn't raise lots of kids in areas of dense small homes, that was happening outside the cities.
They certainly did have kids in cities: you think people living in European cities in the 1700s or 1800s somehow all managed to stay childfree? They didn't have birth control back then, nor did they have transportation allowing them to commute.
They had much less children than the people outside cities, and the absolute majority of people was not living in cities then. Many of those working in cities had their families outside the city.
Yes, people's expectations around living space and privacy have inflated. What's your point? It's not as if Americans or Europeans are suddenly going to go back to tolerating having a bunch of kids in a cramped urban flat. And it was never "preferred". They mostly only ever did that in the first place due to religion and lack of birth control.
My point is that small living spaces aren't the reason Europeans aren't having kids. Middle-class Americans aren't having kids either, even though they live in suburbs with oversized houses that they're spending all their income on.
The number of children per family is absolutely higher in suburbs than in dense cities. So your point is at least partly wrong, although there are likely other causative factors as well.
"All their income" is very funny to hear when a small house in Prague costs 2 million dollars - now check what's the average income there.
Europeans are mostly comfortable giving money to American companies, and there is not as much of a culture difference as with Asia, so there is no need for separate offerings specially for Europe. All big tech companies have several subsidiaries that seem to be doing quite well. It’s true that there are not as many European startups than American ones, but the market is there.
even if it has struggled it still is a lot of purchasing power
and cloud is an essential service for many companies
and how things played out in recent years has created increasing insensitive to not use Amazone/Google/MS Cloud
but it's marked which isn't really that visible on HN and similar US focused sites
and cloud is an essential service for many companies
and how things played out in recent years has created increasing insensitive to not use Amazone/Google/MS Cloud
but it's marked which isn't really that visible on HN and similar US focused sites
Which creates some juicy margin niches for smart developers to make a killing as independent contractors.
I believe this impression is mainly because people think of France and Germany as separate countries, not as a combined EU market.
Imagine if you'd compare only California against all of China, it would look like the US was in seriously bad shape.
Imagine if you'd compare only California against all of China, it would look like the US was in seriously bad shape.
> there not too much innovation required to compete
Yeah, sure.
This is the kind of mentality which lead us to "Cloud" being developed by an online book seller and not hosting companies. Then those hosting companies needed 10 years for open source solutions to be available to close some of the gap. Next time a random company disrupts the hosting market, it won't come from hosting companies because "there not too much innovation required to compete" and those companies will wonder what is going on.
Yeah, sure.
This is the kind of mentality which lead us to "Cloud" being developed by an online book seller and not hosting companies. Then those hosting companies needed 10 years for open source solutions to be available to close some of the gap. Next time a random company disrupts the hosting market, it won't come from hosting companies because "there not too much innovation required to compete" and those companies will wonder what is going on.
Open Telekom Cloud has at least a great part of the functionality you expect when talking about a cloud provider: VMs (even GPU ones), VPCs, managed databases, block storage, Logging, IAM, API Gateway, Container Engine etc. https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/
Open Telekom Cloud was at least in 2020 running fully on Huawei Software and hardware:
https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sich...
Deutsche Telekom used Huaweis OpenStack implementation.
I haven't found any information that this changed, so I assume it is still running completely on Huawei. At least they made sure that they still get chips from the US despite sanctions. ;-)
Deutsche Telekom used Huaweis OpenStack implementation.
I haven't found any information that this changed, so I assume it is still running completely on Huawei. At least they made sure that they still get chips from the US despite sanctions. ;-)
Telcos fell in love with OpenStack some years ago and went all in.
Biggest problem with OpenStack was you needed a lot of hardware to learn how to use it and the talent pool was quite small.
We are using that for one of our customers that insisted on using it. It works but it's expensive and a lot of their managed solutions are a bit outdated. Last time I checked they still offered Elasticsearch on a version pre licensing change that is definitely no longer supported. Their support and documentation are a bit of a mess as well. I got stuck a few times on things that just weren't working where you had to do some non intuitive thing to get things going again. My strategy with them is to keep things simple and not let them manage anything I care about. So, I run my own Elasticsearch cluster there.
Basically it's just Openstack with some customizations. The rest of our customers run on gcloud. I'm currently eyeing Hetzner as I want to lower our hosting cost.
But the point of Openstack is that it's generally fine and that the feature set it offers is a commodity. AWS definitely overcharges for this stuff. If you do the math, most of their vms will cost you the hardware it runs on within months typically. Amazon runs this hardware for many years. In some cases they host multiple vms on them. Their margin on this stuff is huge. That's why they are so rich. You pay for the convenience and the uptime of course. But undercutting their pricing profitably isn't that hard.
Basically it's just Openstack with some customizations. The rest of our customers run on gcloud. I'm currently eyeing Hetzner as I want to lower our hosting cost.
But the point of Openstack is that it's generally fine and that the feature set it offers is a commodity. AWS definitely overcharges for this stuff. If you do the math, most of their vms will cost you the hardware it runs on within months typically. Amazon runs this hardware for many years. In some cases they host multiple vms on them. Their margin on this stuff is huge. That's why they are so rich. You pay for the convenience and the uptime of course. But undercutting their pricing profitably isn't that hard.
That's only on paper though. I know a couple of people who founded a startup in the medicine sector on Telekom Cloud and most of their backend engineering work in the first years(!) went into circumventing Telekom Cloud issues like slow API, servers not starting or plainly disappearing.
Haven't talked to the guys for two years, so it might have improved in the meantime, but it's Telekom, so I heavily doubt it.
Haven't talked to the guys for two years, so it might have improved in the meantime, but it's Telekom, so I heavily doubt it.
I doubt anyone who was ever customer of their detail telecom services would free-willingly use any services from Telekom ever again.
agreed.
From Italy there is Aruba (www.cloud.it). Not bad. But quality/price ratio worst than Hetzener I think
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What are the other 20% with you for?
What is the benefit that your customers see in using an European cloud?
What is the benefit that your customers see in using an European cloud?
I'm guessing so they can keep data of EU customers stored within the EU.
You can do that with AWS regions though.
The US government can still get at that data, because Amazon is still an American company. It doesn’t matter where the data actually lives.
The US government can (and for many years did) tap the phone calls of the German chancellor; I don't think getting to data held by European cloud providers is really a big challenge for them.
Regarding the tech aspect? no. But legally it's always has been challenging. And that's where the difference lies
Unrelated, I think this also happens the other way around.
Unrelated, I think this also happens the other way around.
Meaning this is about EVERY manager being able to say "this is not my fault", not about any actual result? Literally every last one?
Sounds about right ...
Sounds about right ...
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There's published proof the US government actively will go to the extent of having submarines go to undersea fiber cables to tap into them. They have private lockers in almost all the datacenters in the world, etc. Doesn't matter if it's an American company or not.
Yes it does matter is the company is subject to US law or not. There is not 100% security but saying “it does not matter” is manichean and does not reflect reality. Yes the US have a very long arm but it’s all a cost/benefit even for three letter agencies.
Every time they make use of a zero day or a backdoor they run the risk of it being discovered. The harder it is to get a new one, the more they will think twice about using it for mass and low stakes surveillance. A non-US company will be less inclined/forced to cooperate with them, making it harder for them to siphon data out, hence lowering probability.
No one is 100% safe, agreed though. Probabilities and threat models is all we got.
Every time they make use of a zero day or a backdoor they run the risk of it being discovered. The harder it is to get a new one, the more they will think twice about using it for mass and low stakes surveillance. A non-US company will be less inclined/forced to cooperate with them, making it harder for them to siphon data out, hence lowering probability.
No one is 100% safe, agreed though. Probabilities and threat models is all we got.
There are potholes and drunk drivers on road. It does not matter if you use seatbelt or not.
The main benefit of using a 100% European cloud is to be 100% GDPR compliant.
No matter how you slice it and how lawyers/companies try to wiggle around it, it's not possible to host data with a US company and be GDPR compliant, because of US laws.
Customers do ask about it, and it's always iffy to have to justify your GDPR compliance when using US cloud companies.
Customers do ask about it, and it's always iffy to have to justify your GDPR compliance when using US cloud companies.
Which is why the big cloud providers have European data centers that comply with all relevant European laws where many big European companies, including some banks, medical companies, etc. choose to host their stuff. You know, the type of companies that would actually care a lot about such things and let their lawyers make sure they are doing all the right things.
AWS actually joined Gaia-x years ago. I think MS and Google did as well. They want to be compliant. Keeping their European customers happy is important to them. They use European legal entities as well to do business here. Because that is indeed required. No need to switch cloud provider. Just make sure you use them correctly and do all the right things. Which in any case is 100% your responsibility as you will be on the spot if you get that wrong. This job doesn't change if you switch cloud provider.
AWS actually joined Gaia-x years ago. I think MS and Google did as well. They want to be compliant. Keeping their European customers happy is important to them. They use European legal entities as well to do business here. Because that is indeed required. No need to switch cloud provider. Just make sure you use them correctly and do all the right things. Which in any case is 100% your responsibility as you will be on the spot if you get that wrong. This job doesn't change if you switch cloud provider.
As far as I know, the companies / service providers would love to be able tell their customers that 100% of their data is only stored and processed in the EU. It makes everything GDPR-related simpler for companies, and could be turned into a good advertisement for consumers.
STACKIT is the Lidl cloud.
Both companies are part of the Schwarz Gruppe.
Their offering is here: https://www.stackit.de/en/ You have to be a company to make business with them. You can not just sign up, you have to contact them first.
There was a discussion about STACKIT some years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30853778
I do not see anything about Gaia-X on their directly website, only when I search for it there are some older press releases.
Their offering is here: https://www.stackit.de/en/ You have to be a company to make business with them. You can not just sign up, you have to contact them first.
There was a discussion about STACKIT some years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30853778
I do not see anything about Gaia-X on their directly website, only when I search for it there are some older press releases.
> You have to be a company to make business with them. You can not just sign up, you have to contact them first.
This is not necessarily a bad strategy if they want to do something different than OVH/Scaleway/Hetzner.
For instance, I understand you cannot possibly run a decent mail infra on the above hosting vendors IP ranges because they are so popular cheap self service hosting service they have been used a lot by spammers.
So definitely not targetted at the lone developper starting a side gig but more as a vendor for the many larger EU institutions/companys that mostly kept their stuff on prem until now because of patriot act.
This is not necessarily a bad strategy if they want to do something different than OVH/Scaleway/Hetzner.
For instance, I understand you cannot possibly run a decent mail infra on the above hosting vendors IP ranges because they are so popular cheap self service hosting service they have been used a lot by spammers.
So definitely not targetted at the lone developper starting a side gig but more as a vendor for the many larger EU institutions/companys that mostly kept their stuff on prem until now because of patriot act.
Interesting fact, it seems that their price catalog is a PDF https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/240814_STA... and not the usual price calculator other providers offer
Pricing calculator was easy to find https://www.stackit.de/en/pricing/cloud-services/iaas/stacki...
Menu -> Compute Engine -> Pricing
Menu -> Compute Engine -> Pricing
That feels on-brand for an organization that's still selling to each customer rather than providing a self service offering. If you need to talk to a person to get their services they'll surely be helping you understand your pricing.
Even the article doesn't claim any connection between Lidl and Gaia-X.
> This is something AWS is scrambling to address with its recent announcement of a €7.8 billion investment in an AWS European Sovereign Cloud, expected to launch its first region in Germany by the end of 2025. But will that be enough to regain the trust of European corporations
Given the CLOUD Act and FISA, no it should not be enough to regain the trust of those European corporations that look for data sovereignty. As long as those exist, all proposed "sovereignty" guarantees by vendors that have their (or their parent company's) HQ in the US are entirely worthless and should be ignored.
Given the CLOUD Act and FISA, no it should not be enough to regain the trust of those European corporations that look for data sovereignty. As long as those exist, all proposed "sovereignty" guarantees by vendors that have their (or their parent company's) HQ in the US are entirely worthless and should be ignored.
These sovereign clouds generally put the root in trust with a local operator so they physically can't be compelled to release information.
What difference does that make, if the parent company is in the US and its executives can be physically compelled to send orders to the local operator?
They license the software to run the cloud , they don’t act run it . Basically a white labeled solution for DC software like OpenStack
This is not a new idea and is how Azure(or AWS) always operated in China. The Azure Fabric software is licensed to DCs owned and operated by 21vianet a Chinese company. Microsoft has no control over what happens there.
No amount of legal[1] US pressure can make Microsoft give access to those DCs as they don’t have it in the first place
This is why you cannot just provision hardware in China in AWS/Azure, you have to enter into separate contract with the Chinese operator first and comply with any government restrictions that the Chinese state may require
[1] illegal/unauthorized tapping is a different matter and preventing that is not the intent of sovereign clouds .
This is not a new idea and is how Azure(or AWS) always operated in China. The Azure Fabric software is licensed to DCs owned and operated by 21vianet a Chinese company. Microsoft has no control over what happens there.
No amount of legal[1] US pressure can make Microsoft give access to those DCs as they don’t have it in the first place
This is why you cannot just provision hardware in China in AWS/Azure, you have to enter into separate contract with the Chinese operator first and comply with any government restrictions that the Chinese state may require
[1] illegal/unauthorized tapping is a different matter and preventing that is not the intent of sovereign clouds .
Thanks for explaining. But it sounds like the European version will be less watertight. European customers will be able to “store sensitive data and run critical workloads on AWS infrastructure that is operated and supported by AWS employees located in and residents of the European Union (EU)” [1].
1. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-european-s...
1. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-european-s...
The operator isn't under the other company, so if they say "we need this data" they can just say no.
Now potentially they could try to trick the operator, but I'm not sure a company could be compelled to do so under US law. While there doesn't appear to be any relevant cases, this would fall under compelled speech (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compelled_speech) and it seems like it would fall on the impermissible side to me.
Now potentially they could try to trick the operator, but I'm not sure a company could be compelled to do so under US law. While there doesn't appear to be any relevant cases, this would fall under compelled speech (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compelled_speech) and it seems like it would fall on the impermissible side to me.
But somehow the money still flows to Amazon Inc in the US? I don’t get it…
It seems like they're doing it differently than they did for e.g., China.
Note that the money is simply a matter of a contract (e.g., we will hire your company, which is located in China to operate our cloud region. We'll give you X dollars, and you'll give us Y revenue).
For the Germany region, they're using a mixture of technical controls (e.g., the AWS user has to sign off on accesses in a way that's technically not circumventable (think like a phones unlock screen or something protecting the data on the device) and only allowing AWS employees located in the EU to operate it (presumably the goal being that employees physically located in the EU can't be compelled in the same way as those located in the US).
You can read more here https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-european-s...
For comparison, the structure in China is more like what I was describing above: https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/about-aws/china/
I'm not as familiar with it, but it looks like GCP is going with an operating company approach, see eg., https://cloud.google.com/t-systems-sovereign-cloud?hl=en for Germany.
Note that the money is simply a matter of a contract (e.g., we will hire your company, which is located in China to operate our cloud region. We'll give you X dollars, and you'll give us Y revenue).
For the Germany region, they're using a mixture of technical controls (e.g., the AWS user has to sign off on accesses in a way that's technically not circumventable (think like a phones unlock screen or something protecting the data on the device) and only allowing AWS employees located in the EU to operate it (presumably the goal being that employees physically located in the EU can't be compelled in the same way as those located in the US).
You can read more here https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-european-s...
For comparison, the structure in China is more like what I was describing above: https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/about-aws/china/
I'm not as familiar with it, but it looks like GCP is going with an operating company approach, see eg., https://cloud.google.com/t-systems-sovereign-cloud?hl=en for Germany.
Amazon licenses the technology to the other company and finances their related infrastructure, in exchange for most of the profit they make from it, or something along those lines, I would guess. It’s a contractual agreement.
Do you mean a local subsidiary, e.g. "AWS Europe" or "Microsoft Europe"? Those are included in those acts all the same. If not, what kind of local operator are you thinking that e.g. AWS will use?
Microsoft tried the same (working with Deutsche Telekom) a few years ago. It offered only half the services (mainly "raw" compute, not the cloud services) and was about 30% more expensive and (by design) did not interact with the "regular" Azure. You can imagine how that went.
A separate company doesn't interact with Azure either. If you want to be "sovereign" there's a price to be paid.
I think their intention is to be an alternative to OEDIV [0] (Oetker* Daten- und Informationsverarbeitung KG), targeting European companies and governments.
If you understand German and want to take a look at OEDIV's remarkable datacenter, der8auer posted a video [1] around two years ago giving a tour through their datacenter. Small but high-quality. This is what Schwarz Gruppe is after, though not as closed as OEDIV.
[0] https://www.oediv.de/en/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMFo74rArBw
* Yes, Oetker, the pizza-maker.
If you understand German and want to take a look at OEDIV's remarkable datacenter, der8auer posted a video [1] around two years ago giving a tour through their datacenter. Small but high-quality. This is what Schwarz Gruppe is after, though not as closed as OEDIV.
[0] https://www.oediv.de/en/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMFo74rArBw
* Yes, Oetker, the pizza-maker.
> der8auer posted a video
Does anyone remember 'derBauer', the Flash god?
Does anyone remember 'derBauer', the Flash god?
Every single time I see the YouTube handle with the "8" in it linked/posted...
There are a few videos of their previous homepage designs available on YouTube, it's an amusing window into the past. Right below the first one was another video about 2Advanced, which I also hadn't heard of since 20? years.
There are a few videos of their previous homepage designs available on YouTube, it's an amusing window into the past. Right below the first one was another video about 2Advanced, which I also hadn't heard of since 20? years.
>der8auer
Presumably pronounced derachter?
Presumably pronounced derachter?
You lost the "au" on the way? 8 could be l33t for B, making it derBauer (the farmer).
More like builder or maker, then farmer.
I have never heard any native German say "Bauer" for builder. "Bauer" is definitively Farmer unless it is used as a suffix.
Yes, it's not the common usage, but it's still a legit meaning according to the dictionary.
But the relevant point here is, that Youtuber has a channel about building and testing Hardware. I don't know whether he has any relation to farming, but considering the content I would think his intention was a wordplay on building, not farming.
But the relevant point here is, that Youtuber has a channel about building and testing Hardware. I don't know whether he has any relation to farming, but considering the content I would think his intention was a wordplay on building, not farming.
I agree.
Looks more like he replaced B with 8 (derBauer)
Otherwise it would be der8er
I remember a night some moons ago the update of our prod system hosted by OEDIV was scheduled. I spent most of the time in calls with them walking them through the disgusting number of installers for our components and supporting them with issues during upgrade. It took from 10pm to 10am the next day.
I'm not entirely sure how this is something you can 'shift' to. It doesn't compete with the three big ones at all (not in features, not in price and not in scalability, and it has no integration or ecosystem to speak of), but if we were to see it for what it is, it might be more of a competitor to DigitalOcean.
If what you need is a DigitalOcean, then yes, you could shift to this. But when you need a DigitalOcean, you're probably in the wrong place if you were using an AWS/GCP/AZ instead, which is also where this article seems to create a failed comparison.
The play itself does make enough sense, there is a significant duplication in effort across companies, even if you're not doing hyperscaler things and using 'enterprise hardware', the people, processes and technology involved are pretty much the same in all places (which means you wonder what value is added by doing it internally at all -- spoiler it's usually legacy reasons, legacy governance and aversion to change).
When there are enough regions and scalability (capacity, higher resolution consumption pricing, shorter cycle times) you could probably use this as a datacenter-in-the-cloud type of deal, which while 15 years too late is definitely still an improvement in so many businesses. We have some larger companies like Hetzner, OVH and Leaseweb which also try to pivot to more of an XaaS but that in itself is just adding to duplication and a fractured ecosystem. Will this actually work out? Only time will tell...
If what you need is a DigitalOcean, then yes, you could shift to this. But when you need a DigitalOcean, you're probably in the wrong place if you were using an AWS/GCP/AZ instead, which is also where this article seems to create a failed comparison.
The play itself does make enough sense, there is a significant duplication in effort across companies, even if you're not doing hyperscaler things and using 'enterprise hardware', the people, processes and technology involved are pretty much the same in all places (which means you wonder what value is added by doing it internally at all -- spoiler it's usually legacy reasons, legacy governance and aversion to change).
When there are enough regions and scalability (capacity, higher resolution consumption pricing, shorter cycle times) you could probably use this as a datacenter-in-the-cloud type of deal, which while 15 years too late is definitely still an improvement in so many businesses. We have some larger companies like Hetzner, OVH and Leaseweb which also try to pivot to more of an XaaS but that in itself is just adding to duplication and a fractured ecosystem. Will this actually work out? Only time will tell...
I don't get what's new about this apart from the typical EU related buzzwords. France alone already has OVH and Scaleway, which are actual cloud providers in the "AWS" sense, not just hosting providers.
Like I get that this is part of the platform's marketing but I don't see the sovereignty (which is a rather cringy term imo, as it implies that something as big as the EU isn't sovereign) angles to this.
Like I get that this is part of the platform's marketing but I don't see the sovereignty (which is a rather cringy term imo, as it implies that something as big as the EU isn't sovereign) angles to this.
There's no way I could describe it without sounding conspiratorial, so I'm just gonna lean into it: imagine the EU-US relationship suddenly turning very hostile (like Russia-EU relationship already did), how long would it take before all of EU's tech suddenly stopped working? Not saying that's gonna happen or is even likely to happen, but I don't think investing money into bootstraping some sort of a backup is necessarily a bad thing.
China's tech is already self-contained, to a lesser extent so is Russia's, the US is investing a lot in semiconductors just in case something happens to Taiwan, and India has already banned pretty much every Chinese app. The EU, on the other hand, is completely reliant on the US for core tech infrastructure and trying to address that.
None of it makes sense economically, but essentially every superpower is doing something towards at least making it a possibility to "self-contain" their own tech sector. I don't even think this has anything to do with the current political climate (Russia-Ukraine war included), I think it's more in preparation for when climate change consequences start ramping up.
China's tech is already self-contained, to a lesser extent so is Russia's, the US is investing a lot in semiconductors just in case something happens to Taiwan, and India has already banned pretty much every Chinese app. The EU, on the other hand, is completely reliant on the US for core tech infrastructure and trying to address that.
None of it makes sense economically, but essentially every superpower is doing something towards at least making it a possibility to "self-contain" their own tech sector. I don't even think this has anything to do with the current political climate (Russia-Ukraine war included), I think it's more in preparation for when climate change consequences start ramping up.
> EU-US relationship suddenly turning very hostile
The economies are too integrated for this scenario. There are big R&D centers of many American corporations in Europe, doing big part of their tech. They won’t move, instead in a very hypothetical “Russian” scenario they will change owner and continue to operate. I’m sure EU regions of AWS or GCP won’t cease to exist, for example. There are some services that are operated from USA, e.g. CloudFront, but that won’t be too hard to replace.
The economies are too integrated for this scenario. There are big R&D centers of many American corporations in Europe, doing big part of their tech. They won’t move, instead in a very hypothetical “Russian” scenario they will change owner and continue to operate. I’m sure EU regions of AWS or GCP won’t cease to exist, for example. There are some services that are operated from USA, e.g. CloudFront, but that won’t be too hard to replace.
> The economies are too integrated for this scenario.
This exact reason was put forward by political thinkers in the 1910s to "prove" that a major war in Europe was completely impossible. It was then put forward again in the 1930s to "prove" the same thing; for real that time.
This exact reason was put forward by political thinkers in the 1910s to "prove" that a major war in Europe was completely impossible. It was then put forward again in the 1930s to "prove" the same thing; for real that time.
There’s one plausible escalation scenario: Trump wins and America becomes authoritarian state the same way as Russia did, gradually destroying democratic institutions and opposition. In such scenario EU will be forced to reconsider the relationship with America and pursue strategic autonomy. It is still not a matter of days, months or years.
Oh it's much simpler and immediate than that: Trump wins and stops funding Ukraine, like he has already promised to dozens of times. That would instantly lead to the EU having to double their spending, which would certainly mean increased unrest within the EU and a whole lot of grudges towards the US.
And it wouldn't be the first time Trump specifically caused grudges. The US just giving up on the Iran deal has certainly already done the same. Not only was the EU also a signatory, but so were the UK, Germany and France individually. And then he moved the embassy to Jerusalem, which was also openly opposed by the three I've already mentioned. So now the EU has to second-guess every treaty the US signed, because apparently that signature means less than it used to mean.
But those two past actions would be nothing but a sentence in history books compared to at least a paragraph about the US cutting funding to Ukraine.
And it wouldn't be the first time Trump specifically caused grudges. The US just giving up on the Iran deal has certainly already done the same. Not only was the EU also a signatory, but so were the UK, Germany and France individually. And then he moved the embassy to Jerusalem, which was also openly opposed by the three I've already mentioned. So now the EU has to second-guess every treaty the US signed, because apparently that signature means less than it used to mean.
But those two past actions would be nothing but a sentence in history books compared to at least a paragraph about the US cutting funding to Ukraine.
>That would instantly lead to the EU having to double their spending
Not going to happen. This will result in partitioning of Ukraine and non-aligned status of it. It is a satisfactory outcome for everyone in the West in such circumstances. That war is already lost by everyone except EU, so whatever is American strategy there, it won’t do much harm.
Not going to happen. This will result in partitioning of Ukraine and non-aligned status of it. It is a satisfactory outcome for everyone in the West in such circumstances. That war is already lost by everyone except EU, so whatever is American strategy there, it won’t do much harm.
It is a satisfactory outcome for everyone in the West in such circumstances.
It is absolutely not a "satisfactory outcome" for anyone in the West if Russia's neocolonial aggression is allowed to succeed.
Except for certain segments of the populist right and far left, who are bizarrely unified on this issue.
It is absolutely not a "satisfactory outcome" for anyone in the West if Russia's neocolonial aggression is allowed to succeed.
Except for certain segments of the populist right and far left, who are bizarrely unified on this issue.
Cloud act and it's various variations
People used to say this about the energy infrastructure of Russia and Germany too, now see how that went. Or Chinese supply chains during Covid. Change comes rapidly sometimes. It just takes one lunatic president…
I don’t think comparing energy and IT sectors is correct. „Russian“ scenario is about being forced to have full autonomy in software, and that is happening now. For example, see how fast they started rolling out alternatives to Miro - I know about at least two products in this field. ERP, CAD, office tools, certified Linux distros… Yes, Russia has a focus and policy consistency advantage in IT, but I don’t see why Europe in crisis could not build a comparably efficient task force.
I think you misunderstood me. I made the comparison to the Russia/Germany situation to point out how quickly a political situation can tear apart even countries interleaved by business relations in critical industries. Germany was completely oblivious to the danger of Russia axing their energy supply, citing the same thought expressed in the grandparent post: ”Surely they wouldn’t do that, it makes no economic sense!“
The EU should therefore not rely on the USA staying a reliable partner just for the sake of the market relations, especially with the possibility of a second Trump term. America is self-centered, unreliable, and politically ruined—you can’t work with populists.
All this is to say: Technological sovereignty is the right direction.
The EU should therefore not rely on the USA staying a reliable partner just for the sake of the market relations, especially with the possibility of a second Trump term. America is self-centered, unreliable, and politically ruined—you can’t work with populists.
All this is to say: Technological sovereignty is the right direction.
> People used to say this about the energy infrastructure of Russia and Germany too, now see how that went.
Those people were completely clueless. I don't have a better way to phrase it. Nordstream 2 was an insane idea the second it was announced.
Those people were completely clueless. I don't have a better way to phrase it. Nordstream 2 was an insane idea the second it was announced.
At a personal level, it feels better to have something of your own to hold on to instead of someone else’s, so I think beaucrats will also respond accordingly.
In a way, we’ll probably see more cloud fragmentation in the future, especially as other countries develop their IT sectors more and feel like they want more control over their own infrastructure, and whatever tertiary benefits can be extracted from that.
Relationships don’t even have to turn sour, there just has to be enough protectionism and popular appeal to support it. Just like saying “build it here”.
In a way, we’ll probably see more cloud fragmentation in the future, especially as other countries develop their IT sectors more and feel like they want more control over their own infrastructure, and whatever tertiary benefits can be extracted from that.
Relationships don’t even have to turn sour, there just has to be enough protectionism and popular appeal to support it. Just like saying “build it here”.
Let‘s not call it „cloud fragmentation“ please. It’s cloud competition. Cloud is an utility and probably should resemble energy market regarding the choice of suppliers and simplicity of the switch.
> The economies are too integrated for this scenario.
So are the US and Chinese economies. Yet, here we are.
> I’m sure EU regions of AWS or GCP won’t cease to exist, for example.
The servers, maybe. I highly doubt AWS will continue to provide access to its platform. Actually there is zero chance they do. The servers are not useful much without the AWS platform.
So are the US and Chinese economies. Yet, here we are.
> I’m sure EU regions of AWS or GCP won’t cease to exist, for example.
The servers, maybe. I highly doubt AWS will continue to provide access to its platform. Actually there is zero chance they do. The servers are not useful much without the AWS platform.
One historical example:
After the second world war, Europe was developing space launch capability (multiple governments and companies in Europe joined together to do this). USA said, don't waste your money on that, you can use American launchers. So it didn't continue. Some time later, European commercial sats that competed with American ones couldn't get launch opportunities on American rockets. So then Europe developed its own launcher.
EDITed to remove caveats, after checking that it really is accurate: https://www.inventingeurope.eu/knowledge/the-unfinished-symp...
After the second world war, Europe was developing space launch capability (multiple governments and companies in Europe joined together to do this). USA said, don't waste your money on that, you can use American launchers. So it didn't continue. Some time later, European commercial sats that competed with American ones couldn't get launch opportunities on American rockets. So then Europe developed its own launcher.
EDITed to remove caveats, after checking that it really is accurate: https://www.inventingeurope.eu/knowledge/the-unfinished-symp...
> imagine the EU-US relationship suddenly turning very hostile
It doesn't need to be suddenly hostile, it already is for decades. This is about economical competition and not trusting foreign agencies (like NSA, CIA, etc.) which are known to spy on European data and abusing it for the benefit of US-companies. Since Snowden there are several long-running discussions about independence of data, and USA being unreliable in their laws and actions.
It doesn't need to be suddenly hostile, it already is for decades. This is about economical competition and not trusting foreign agencies (like NSA, CIA, etc.) which are known to spy on European data and abusing it for the benefit of US-companies. Since Snowden there are several long-running discussions about independence of data, and USA being unreliable in their laws and actions.
> (which is a rather cringy term imo, as it implies that something as big as the EU isn't sovereign) angles to this.
How will the sovereign EU stop the US from exercising the CLOUD act over the data stored in AWS in Europe?
How will the sovereign EU stop the US from exercising the CLOUD act over the data stored in AWS in Europe?
Unrelated except it's the same company, reminded me of the failed SAP migration, https://www.retaildetail.eu/news/food/lidls-failed-it-projec...
Yea this is so gonna work with them paying 50-60k/pa for engineers. Seriously DACH mentality and influence has been devastating on serious tech development in Europe
> Seriously DACH mentality and influence has been devastating on serious tech development in Europe
German corporations (and politics) are full of bean counters, bureaucrats and underachievers. It's filled with people who love to talk, excessively plan, draw flowcharts and build frameworks - essentially everything except getting shit done.
German corporations (and politics) are full of bean counters, bureaucrats and underachievers. It's filled with people who love to talk, excessively plan, draw flowcharts and build frameworks - essentially everything except getting shit done.
From my experience this is true for big German corporations, but is it really different for big corporations from other countries?
While I agree, that DACH mentality in big German corporations "has been devastating on serious tech development" at these companies, I don't see how this would affect the whole of Europe. It's an opportunity for other countries/companies to do better.
While I agree, that DACH mentality in big German corporations "has been devastating on serious tech development" at these companies, I don't see how this would affect the whole of Europe. It's an opportunity for other countries/companies to do better.
From my experience, this is true for big corporations anywhere. It seems that when a company reaches a certain size it becomes incapable of digging itself out of that hole.
German shit is done in Poland, Romania, and Belarus, and for less than 50-60k EUR pa.
No longer true. 40-60k would be reasonable in those countries as well.
Yeah but don't count on more. Belarusians are quite desperate with current geopolitics, can easily push them below 40k.
Eh I'm in s similar country and around 30k for a more senior position is the normal
I'm in Latvia and senior developers are paid 60-90k here.
> Schwarz Digits generated €1.9 billion in sales last year
It's already working.
It's already working.
How much of that is in sales to Schwarz group + SAP only?
What is Dach mentality? I've googled the definition but can't seem anything that fits in this context.
Probably the old-school mentality of pay hierarchies: Managers must earn more than subordinates. Thus if the salary expectation of a high skilled engineer is higher than some of the management class, it's often viewed as obscene. Usually as an engineer you achieve certain salary levels only with additional management duties.
Not only that but them being stubborn and with a superiority complex. DACH companies rule EE with their capital and often manage to prototype and execute very much innovative features focused on convenience in the EE region (with local engineers etc). But this will never transform into something bigger because management wont allow non DACH people to assume executive roles + conservative market in their countries.
This is a very accurate, and very depressing, summary of why EU is stuck since the 2000s.
Most EU tech and non-tech companies, with some notable exceptions like Spotify, have this mentality.
Most EU tech and non-tech companies, with some notable exceptions like Spotify, have this mentality.
It's an interesting phenomena but to be honest you need a leader with a vision to change the course of history. Circa 2006-2012 everyone orbiting the DACH sphere of influence believed they need to speak german even in tech jobs and then due to USA's influence and huge market we realized we actually dont give a crap about DACH that much. Thus it spawned companies in EE,Baltics and everywhere else with a focus on mostly american market.
And then all of a sudden due to lack of workers and other factors even DACH began to change and basically accepted English as the defacto working language in tech.
Unfortunately it's a small change, too little too late as they say. Without proper transeuropean companies and unified market we will never be able to challenge competitors from Asia let alone the USA.
And then all of a sudden due to lack of workers and other factors even DACH began to change and basically accepted English as the defacto working language in tech.
Unfortunately it's a small change, too little too late as they say. Without proper transeuropean companies and unified market we will never be able to challenge competitors from Asia let alone the USA.
Also by default DACH companies are very limiting to foreigners to go higher. Sure they hire a lot of engineers but you will never see overachiever Indian CEO or Asian CEO or even board members.
What a silly thing. A good manager is worth quite a lot, but most of them aren't and a mediocre engineer is worth way more than a mediocre manager.
DACH means Germany (D), Austria (A) and Switzerland (CH). Data is not the new oil, and this gets reflected in how much engineers earn.
Though companies like the Schwarz Gruppe or OEDIV tend to understand their value so I don't think parent's comment is valid.
Though companies like the Schwarz Gruppe or OEDIV tend to understand their value so I don't think parent's comment is valid.
Germany, Austria, Swiss (swiss-german) mentality
In a nutshell: German speakers mentality
In a nutshell: German speakers mentality
But I mean what is that mentality
As a french speaking Swiss I'm pretty biased, but I'd say it comes down to salary thriftiness to the detriment of innovation, practicality to the detriment of flexibility, and perfection to the detriment of velocity.
If you happen to want your supplier to be slow, extremely reliable, and you don't mind paying for the high profit margin they expect to be able to extract, you'll be a perfect customer of a DACH-mentality company. There are hundreds of niche categories where they dominate the market, including machine tools, forging, factory automation, etc.
But don't write off DACH: there are plenty of companies in DACH that run circles around their competitors by blending typically DACH traits with agility.
If you happen to want your supplier to be slow, extremely reliable, and you don't mind paying for the high profit margin they expect to be able to extract, you'll be a perfect customer of a DACH-mentality company. There are hundreds of niche categories where they dominate the market, including machine tools, forging, factory automation, etc.
But don't write off DACH: there are plenty of companies in DACH that run circles around their competitors by blending typically DACH traits with agility.
> But don't write off DACH: there are plenty of companies in DACH that run circles around their competitors by blending typically DACH traits with agility.
For future career possibilities worth investigating, would you care to name a few good examples/companies you are aware of?
For future career possibilities worth investigating, would you care to name a few good examples/companies you are aware of?
French speakers are a serious mystery to me. They are much better stewards when it comes to tech and cooperation but they are so much stuck up with their need to "speak french" that it hinders any progress.
At least DACH made the progress of opening up. It would be ideal to combine DACH liberalism for language and french attitude towards tech and innovation.
At least DACH made the progress of opening up. It would be ideal to combine DACH liberalism for language and french attitude towards tech and innovation.
> they are so much stuck up with their need to "speak french"
But.. ..why would you want to speak anything else? Who settles for the mediocre?
But.. ..why would you want to speak anything else? Who settles for the mediocre?
"How dare these people want to speak their language rather than mine?"
Cheap. Loving embrace of arbitrary rules.
In a stable manufacturing business, it’s a superpower. In tech, not so much.
In a stable manufacturing business, it’s a superpower. In tech, not so much.
> 50-60k/pa for engineers
Is that, like, actual information, or just an educated guess based on some industry average.
Is that, like, actual information, or just an educated guess based on some industry average.
it's definitely not industry average
at least for jobs which often are referred to as engineers (through legally speaking are not as enginer is a protected title having little to do with software development)
maybe for jobs of people which mainly idk. replace hardware in servers all day but don't really administrate the servers at all
at least for jobs which often are referred to as engineers (through legally speaking are not as enginer is a protected title having little to do with software development)
maybe for jobs of people which mainly idk. replace hardware in servers all day but don't really administrate the servers at all
I too have noticed this difference in mentality but I'd be curious to hear what do you think are the most salient differences.
What do you mean by DACH mentality?
DACH would be: (D)eutschland (A)ustria (C)onfederatio (H)elvetica...
This acronym manages to use three different languages, german for Deutschland, english for Austria (which is Österreich) and the latin name for Switzerland...
Don't ask me, it is very dubious to use this DACH hodgepodge term here, as definitely mentalities are different: the state of IT is in no way identical between these three countries.
Also, Dach stands for "roof" in German, I guess that's why they like it. maybe
Those are the EU plate letters for each fwiw
Not exactly. Only D and A. Switzerland is not in the EU (it's in the EEA but not EU) and doesn't have number plates following the EU design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of...
OK fine, it’s the international plate code for Switzerland: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_vehicle_regist...
[deleted]
DACH = Deutschland (D) - Austria (A) - Switzerland (CH)
but DACH mentality? Perhaps hard-working like people in Germany, Austria and Switzerland? Or overengineering or being stubborn and old-fashioned?
but DACH mentality? Perhaps hard-working like people in Germany, Austria and Switzerland? Or overengineering or being stubborn and old-fashioned?
The German social contract for a long time was that the working class gets low wages, which keeps German exports competitive and combined with the large internal market, prices low. In return for making the owning class wealthy, workers also get a relatively good social support system and job security.
I'm not sure this model ever applied to A & CH, and might be starting to collapse in D as well.
I'm not sure this model ever applied to A & CH, and might be starting to collapse in D as well.
For anyone who is unfamiliar with the German unions: job security is really extremely high.
For example even when a larger company gets acquired (or a merger happens) it could take a decade to consolidate overlapping services.
For example even when a larger company gets acquired (or a merger happens) it could take a decade to consolidate overlapping services.
> Or overengineering or being stubborn and old-fashioned?
Exactly this
Exactly this
Low salaries to me indicates they believe it is a Germanic ideal to pay subpar wages for highly skilled engineers? I don't think it's a mentality thing, personally, I think it just speaks to the weakness of the European economy for the last 20ish years
Highly skilled engineers leave to places where they get their money's worth (i.e. not germany/eu).
Lots of people in this thread talking about low salaries in tech in the EU, but maybe it’s the case the US is the outlier? And not even the US as a whole, more like SV?
Are there any other countries where tech engineers are among the best paid workers?
Are there any other countries where tech engineers are among the best paid workers?
I don't think Silicon Valley has really been the standard bearer for software engineering jobs in at least 5 years, I'd reckon as far as 10 years. The pandemic also has hollowed them out as well. You can find high paying software engineering jobs in plenty of low cost of living states these days. That city has very sharp problems that it is failing to solve and when given a choice, many people choose not to live/move there
yes, someone mentioned Belarus, but also likely in Hungary and India too.
Belarus is irrelevant since 2020.
in what sense? it was irrelevant even before that too.
Between 1998 and 2020 its IT industry grew to a sizeable share of economy. By 2010, the average salary in IT was 10x the average salary. Moreover, the industry worked mostly within the global economy. with many Belarusian firms subcontracting to FAANG, German powerhouses or growing into big successes in the mobile industry.
Unlike in Armenia or Georgia, the Belarusian IT industry was never a major tax contributor, but its internal spending power was enormous and it transformed the country into a much more livable place.
Since August 9, 2020 this all collapsed. Out of slighly less than 9mln population, 300,000 left the country out of fear of prosecution. Many of them -- from that same IT industry that once defined the bright future of the country.
Unlike in Armenia or Georgia, the Belarusian IT industry was never a major tax contributor, but its internal spending power was enormous and it transformed the country into a much more livable place.
Since August 9, 2020 this all collapsed. Out of slighly less than 9mln population, 300,000 left the country out of fear of prosecution. Many of them -- from that same IT industry that once defined the bright future of the country.
honestly if you include other costs e.g. for acceptable health insurance, having children, eating reasonable healthy, general quality of live things etc. the sallies often aren't bad at all
Sure if you are one of the best of the best and are willing to take high risk for high reward and in general give up QoL/Work live Balance then especially in SV you have better chances to make a lot of money.
But for most skilled engineers they can get their money worth in the EU, through depending on their priorities and goals in live.
Like to put it in context to have a similar quality of live in US I think I would need to earn around 50% more before tax and that is even through US has much less tax. Through that 50% more also would allow me more flexibility for reducing my QoL at the current time, invest it and long time have more money (or much less if you mess up). So again a question of priorities.
Sure if you are one of the best of the best and are willing to take high risk for high reward and in general give up QoL/Work live Balance then especially in SV you have better chances to make a lot of money.
But for most skilled engineers they can get their money worth in the EU, through depending on their priorities and goals in live.
Like to put it in context to have a similar quality of live in US I think I would need to earn around 50% more before tax and that is even through US has much less tax. Through that 50% more also would allow me more flexibility for reducing my QoL at the current time, invest it and long time have more money (or much less if you mess up). So again a question of priorities.
Quality of life is pretty high in the US for salaried workers (health insurance is good at these jobs usually). Work/life balance depends on the company. If you work in a low CoL city, life is very nice (compared to larger, more expensive cities like SF and NYC)
That shouldn't the USA as there are more people moving from there to Germany than vice versa.
Depends. If you want to live a good life you stay in the EU. If you have the will and ability to do great things professionally (not many do) then in most industries you need to move to the US to do it. There’s just not enough high-risk capital here for exciting projects to be done. I suspect comes from market size. Financiers won’t take high risk without high reward, and the reward is not here.
Please think about context. GP thinks, there was a weak European economy, esspecially about Germany in the last 20 years. This was not the case and even during the current struggle in Germany (not German swiss), more people from the US move here
I meant that the European economy is not growing; Germany has had 0 or negative GDP growth for about a year now. People move from the US to Europe for a lot of reasons, not necessarily because of economic opportunities. I think the most common kind of expat I see is someone who works remotely for a US-based company and enjoys the relatively lower cost of living in Europe. This is not an indication of strong European growth, it's an indication of the buying power of the dollar compared to the Euro
Definitely the latter.
german speaking countries
Nitpick: Luxemburg, Belgium (around Eupen), Italy (Tirol) and France (Alsace) are also German speaking countries.
Historically, too: Poland, Czechia, Hungary and Romania, but German speaking communities have disappeared or are in massive decline.
Disclaimer: this list of German speaking countries might be incomplete.
Historically, too: Poland, Czechia, Hungary and Romania, but German speaking communities have disappeared or are in massive decline.
Disclaimer: this list of German speaking countries might be incomplete.
As a Polish person I have no idea how you can come out in public and state that Poland was ever a German speaking country.
you forgot Ibiza ;) "countries with a german speaking majority" might be more correct
Ibiza doesn't count or all countries of the world would be English speaking.
Recently there's HN discussions about Hetzner's strategic pricing based on their spartan business approaches [1]. On the back of my mind thinking that it's very similar to how Lidl operates its supermarket outlets and if Lidl ever operates hosting it would be very similar to Hetzner [2].
But now lol and behold unbeknownst to me that there's actually a Lidl cloud and it's not an April fool news.
[1] Hetzner Pricing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41179371
[2] How does Aldi keep their prices so low | Aldi Vs Lidl: Supermarket Wars | Channel 5 [video]:
https://youtu.be/AhwycD3GMlM
But now lol and behold unbeknownst to me that there's actually a Lidl cloud and it's not an April fool news.
[1] Hetzner Pricing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41179371
[2] How does Aldi keep their prices so low | Aldi Vs Lidl: Supermarket Wars | Channel 5 [video]:
https://youtu.be/AhwycD3GMlM
Being a European, I’d love to try this. Many businesses operate completely local. I think there is a market for a Europe-only cloud provider.
How do I try this? Do they have a free tier?
How do I try this? Do they have a free tier?
You can sign up on their website: https://www.stackit.de/en/
While there are no free credits the services are priced pay per use to the minute with a much simpler pricing model than the large hyperscalers like AWS. See prices for EC2 here: https://www.stackit.de/en/pricing/cloud-services/iaas/stacki...
You can find the docs here: https://docs.stackit.cloud/stackit/en/knowledge-base-8530170...
While there are no free credits the services are priced pay per use to the minute with a much simpler pricing model than the large hyperscalers like AWS. See prices for EC2 here: https://www.stackit.de/en/pricing/cloud-services/iaas/stacki...
You can find the docs here: https://docs.stackit.cloud/stackit/en/knowledge-base-8530170...
Note that you need to be Incorporated in Germany, Austria or Switzerland to use it. And they dont allow individuals to open accounts. Only companies.
"The European cloud" that doesn't allow sign ups from Europe is extremely ironic.
I don't know how they keep getting all this press without actually delivering anything
"The European cloud" that doesn't allow sign ups from Europe is extremely ironic.
I don't know how they keep getting all this press without actually delivering anything
Lidl got SAP's award for best customer a few years before admitting they have wasted half a billion on SAP implementation.
It's the same thing again.
It's the same thing again.
> award for best customer
I've never heard of this. Does it mean best cash cow?
I've never heard of this. Does it mean best cash cow?
I expect nothing less from SAP
I came here to state exactly this.
As a dutch individual that has 'cloud' high on his CV, I would like to create an account and test this to see if it is something I should invest my time in to make it part of my cv.
But ... they won't allow that.
Ah well, next!
Ah well, next!
Their pricing page is funny. Can I have 2 RAMs please?
My physics teacher would get spitting mad at them for not specifying the unit.
Of course their billing is also 'hours'. Instead of 'hourly'.
My physics teacher would get spitting mad at them for not specifying the unit.
Of course their billing is also 'hours'. Instead of 'hourly'.
Hetzner and OVH are top of mind, Gandi is nice too. Not Amazon-scale, by far, but European companies hosting in Europe with decent service.
OVH is a joke (their data center burned because they had wooden roofs), Gandi is no more, and Scaleway gave up. There is no French host anymore. Only Hetzner is left in this business.
OVH is still in business, even if they had a fire 3 years ago. Both AWS and Google have had rather large fires.
OVH is quite good, actually.
We are using their K8S offering and S3 to build a service. It works well.
How exactly did Scaleway give up? They keep releasing new cloud and serverless products.
There's also IONOS.
There's also IONOS.
The fire occurred in their old datacenter, built in an era when OVH was aggressively cheap and experimental. It is in no way representative of today's OVH.
Dassault has a cloud offering with 3DS Outscale
Exoscale has a simple sign up, with a credit of EUR 20 to get you started.
(I work there, and my job tomorrow is to get my 2 apprentices new accounts so they can start following the self-paced training in the Exoscale Academy.)
(I work there, and my job tomorrow is to get my 2 apprentices new accounts so they can start following the self-paced training in the Exoscale Academy.)
See also:
https://www.scaleway.com/
They have three zones, Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw.
Not sure if they have a free tier, but I still pay about 1€/month for two (really) small instances that I used for testing their service (and kept around for personal stuff).
They have three zones, Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw.
Not sure if they have a free tier, but I still pay about 1€/month for two (really) small instances that I used for testing their service (and kept around for personal stuff).
And there I was hoping to find that Lidl had seen the light and started to sell some type of home server under one of their many 'brand names' - Medion (not only Lidl but still), Silvercrest, Parkside, etc. A solidly built box of hardware with a reliable power supply, some slots for storage. A pre-installed Linux distribution with Proxmox on top, a container with Nextcloud (all German companies so they´d probably be willing to participate in this project). Some optional extras which make the thing function as wireless AP and router, media player, IoT hub etc. A number of downloadable container images for running your own mail/XMPP/Torrent/Blog/Search/Media/etc. services. A distributed encrypted backup option were you get to use other's storage for your backup purposes just as long as you offer your own storage for that purpose. That would be true 'sovereign computing'.
Hm, maybe I should pitch this to them instead.
Hm, maybe I should pitch this to them instead.
> A distributed encrypted backup option were you get to use other's storage for your backup purposes just as long as you offer your own storage for that purpose.
Add an option to enable encrypted backups with Shamir's Secret Sharing [1] to some of your closest friends/relatives, so that a few of them together can decide to decrypt your stuff in the event of your untimely demise.
Gimme a shout if you're hiring ;-)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing
Add an option to enable encrypted backups with Shamir's Secret Sharing [1] to some of your closest friends/relatives, so that a few of them together can decide to decrypt your stuff in the event of your untimely demise.
Gimme a shout if you're hiring ;-)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing
As an European: cloud is someone else computer, sovereign computing means users own their iron, sw and data, as government, so a sovereign computing means a State own hw, sw and data belonging to it.
That's ALMOST the case for most EU states so far, but less and less the case, and more and more with private partnership engendering public IT, which is public information, nervous system, witch is the OPPOSITE of sovereign computing and Gaia-X (a failed project anyway) it's the apex of such disgraced model. Oh BTW to be sovereign ALSO DESKTOP must be FLOSS, witch is almost not the case in any public administration. The hw since it's full of fw to the point of being de facto connected black box, network hw included, mush be open or state-made. Witch is not the case in the 99.9% periodic of the cases.
That's ALMOST the case for most EU states so far, but less and less the case, and more and more with private partnership engendering public IT, which is public information, nervous system, witch is the OPPOSITE of sovereign computing and Gaia-X (a failed project anyway) it's the apex of such disgraced model. Oh BTW to be sovereign ALSO DESKTOP must be FLOSS, witch is almost not the case in any public administration. The hw since it's full of fw to the point of being de facto connected black box, network hw included, mush be open or state-made. Witch is not the case in the 99.9% periodic of the cases.
As a fellow European, I'm perfectly content to use someone else's computer, as long as they have a legal responsibility to respect my privacy, i.e. not submitting to the USA Cloud Act.
Speaking of: Is there an EU alternative to Netlify where I can basically upload/host a small static website for free, including custom domains and free SSL?
While 'for free' is something we all want (who wants to spend their money right) it is not a sustainable business case.
And with prices of it/server/hosting in the EU being a lot higher then in other parts of the world, what you want is not going to be easy to find.
it's cloying how people (individuals and SMEs) forget that in the present time in vast part of the world we have FTTH with enough bandwidth and low enough ping that's MUCH better than a cheap VPS or someone else server. The only needed thing is a fixed IP, witch is pretty available anyway.
A homeserver is much cheaper, not less monitored, much powerful and much more flexible than living on someone else computer. Since IPv6 it's not an option but a need, it's about time to IMPOSE a public global per host to any ISP, without clauses to avoid legally hosting a server because hey, that's how internet work, it's not a damn mainframe.
A homeserver is much cheaper, not less monitored, much powerful and much more flexible than living on someone else computer. Since IPv6 it's not an option but a need, it's about time to IMPOSE a public global per host to any ISP, without clauses to avoid legally hosting a server because hey, that's how internet work, it's not a damn mainframe.
Yes, self/home hosting is an option for some. but maintaining a server is not as easy as you make it sound.
Power, cooling, noise, spare hardware, network etc are all factors that are taken care of by a provider, that are not easy to replicate.
And even if you can self-host, fighting against (D)DOS attacks is not something I have seen done at any consumer ISP.
And even if you can self-host, fighting against (D)DOS attacks is not something I have seen done at any consumer ISP.
At a personal|SME level? Who might want do DDOS John Smith or Pop's store? How much iron you need for such usage? That's without counting the various "datacenters horror stories" about how badly many providers are really without appearing.
My homeserver is a simple NixOS, so I have to maintain just a config, easy to replicate anytime without manual setups or complex orchestration, it's a small celeron machine with 32Gb ram and two sata classic disks + 2 nvme on a PCIe adapter card, total cost around 300€ few years ago, cooling is juts the home cooling, power it's free on sunny days (domestic p.v.) and otherwise it's still cheaper than the cheapest VPS, plus it can do much more. It's run my HA, Asterisk (for having some VoIP numbers on my deskphone and diverting call to my mobile when I'm not at home, nothing more), a small video-surveillance setup, fetchmail+maildrop+notmuch to serve mails via muchsync, etc etc etc a minimal equivalent VPS setup would costing me around 100+€/month, performing much less. If my server die I have a spare motherboard+cpu a little bit outdated but powerful enough drives are both mirrors from different brands, I have some cold spare anyway shared if needed with my main desktop etc in case of a complete crash I have my config, few kb of text, and I can replicate it anywhere. For personal usage is MUCH more than any classic hosted setup.
The only real issues is for most:
- knowing the software stack they need, witch is rare, because yes maintain a classic Arch or FreeBSD server it's much less comfy than NixOS/Guix System especially if you never heard of them but heard a gazillion of recommendations to use k*s or docker, proxmox and co AT HOME some even trying on raspi sbc...
- some minor legal and hw things, depending on your home and how much the temp mount in summer inside.
Essentially for most it's just about knowing the sw stack witch is a big issue since no university seems to be interesting in really teaching FLOSS nowadays and most professors themselves have very little practical knowledge.
My homeserver is a simple NixOS, so I have to maintain just a config, easy to replicate anytime without manual setups or complex orchestration, it's a small celeron machine with 32Gb ram and two sata classic disks + 2 nvme on a PCIe adapter card, total cost around 300€ few years ago, cooling is juts the home cooling, power it's free on sunny days (domestic p.v.) and otherwise it's still cheaper than the cheapest VPS, plus it can do much more. It's run my HA, Asterisk (for having some VoIP numbers on my deskphone and diverting call to my mobile when I'm not at home, nothing more), a small video-surveillance setup, fetchmail+maildrop+notmuch to serve mails via muchsync, etc etc etc a minimal equivalent VPS setup would costing me around 100+€/month, performing much less. If my server die I have a spare motherboard+cpu a little bit outdated but powerful enough drives are both mirrors from different brands, I have some cold spare anyway shared if needed with my main desktop etc in case of a complete crash I have my config, few kb of text, and I can replicate it anywhere. For personal usage is MUCH more than any classic hosted setup.
The only real issues is for most:
- knowing the software stack they need, witch is rare, because yes maintain a classic Arch or FreeBSD server it's much less comfy than NixOS/Guix System especially if you never heard of them but heard a gazillion of recommendations to use k*s or docker, proxmox and co AT HOME some even trying on raspi sbc...
- some minor legal and hw things, depending on your home and how much the temp mount in summer inside.
Essentially for most it's just about knowing the sw stack witch is a big issue since no university seems to be interesting in really teaching FLOSS nowadays and most professors themselves have very little practical knowledge.
I won't bore you with the details of my home setup, and I do host from home with both static IPv4 and IPv6 and everything (ok ok, two details: it's all freebsd on enterprise hardware)
I will repeat: it is an option for some. and if you fall in the small group that has everything on green for a home hosted setup, it is the best option.
But thinking this is for more then a very very small group of people is not confirm reality.
And I really applaud you for having a setup that generates enough power so for you it turns out to be free. If only I could get a setup like this. For the biggest part of the population this is, unfortunately, not an option.
Also, there is a very big difference between running k*s, docker, whatever at home in a homelab, and hosting your stuff at home. A homelab is to learn, learning means breaking stuff all the time. hosting things dont really combine with that. Most people that actually host things at home have 2 setups, one that hosts the online tools and one homelab where they can break stuff at their will.
At the end of the day, for the majority of people throwing a couple of dollars per month to a company to handle all this crap is the better option :)
But thinking this is for more then a very very small group of people is not confirm reality.
And I really applaud you for having a setup that generates enough power so for you it turns out to be free. If only I could get a setup like this. For the biggest part of the population this is, unfortunately, not an option.
Also, there is a very big difference between running k*s, docker, whatever at home in a homelab, and hosting your stuff at home. A homelab is to learn, learning means breaking stuff all the time. hosting things dont really combine with that. Most people that actually host things at home have 2 setups, one that hosts the online tools and one homelab where they can break stuff at their will.
At the end of the day, for the majority of people throwing a couple of dollars per month to a company to handle all this crap is the better option :)
Well, while both option exists and obviously anyone is (almost) free to choose, I still fail to see convenience in living on someone else computer. Anyway, allow me a different scenario: you are Foo Bar, you have a bunch of documents and many photos/videos/music etc no computer skills beyond clicking around. You ask someone more knowledgeable, local or remote, but still a single human, if he/she can create your infra to own your data. he/she gives you a list of stuff to buy, instructions to assemble or came to you/send it assembled and ready to you, a usb stick with a live system to deploym the config (NixOS/Guix system) on it. You are now operational, your infra it's still a black box for you but you own the config, so you can give it to someone and in case of trouble or the need of changes you know who to contact. You pay a certain capex and small opex. Your infra evolve following you. Your contact disappear, another came and propose to rebuild anything, no data loss, he/she can use your iron, your data and knowing anything from the config. You are on again and the event loop keep running.
How different is from choosing let's say FileHoster inc who works well enough, albeit much less than your infra, and have no capex, than it experience a big issue (cfr. Gandi/FR two times few years ago) all your data are lost, you still have some here and there you get up again on another one, than it became too expensive, you switch from another, ...
In the two scenario:
- on one side you spent in capex more than in opex, so you spent at a specific point in time, in an inflationary economy, instead of being vampirized every month;
- you are tied to your infra reliability and consumer grade assembled iron it's pretty reliable for such usage, as most well know giants are for the same usage/point of view BUT on one side the reliability is in your infra, something you can tune, learn and check, on the other it's about third party decisions who can happen at every point in time without anything you can do.
You've certainly read countless of time about $BigName impromptu ban for instance. You've certainly experienced terms of use unilateral changes, sometimes ok for you sometimes not. Where is the balance?
If you live in a Korean goshiwon -alike you can't host while you might still have docs/photos etc you have no choice, but when you have it and honestly MOST people who need IT at a certain level do have the choice, at least formally, if he/she knows it exists, then where is the convenience? Trusting the market on one side, with little to no capex but much bigger opex and uncertainty or more capex, less opex and uncertainty? Think about schooling: what we do in most part of the world? A big initial capex (long school time) than profiting for life on the acquired knowledge or a jump in the wild than we will learn on the go?
In the mean people are honest, so trusting someone else IF you can verify or the exposure it's low it will generally end up well anyway, otherwise... I trust myself more than someone else shielded under a corp name, eventually in another country (so legal protection issues, geopolitical risks and so on)...
How different is from choosing let's say FileHoster inc who works well enough, albeit much less than your infra, and have no capex, than it experience a big issue (cfr. Gandi/FR two times few years ago) all your data are lost, you still have some here and there you get up again on another one, than it became too expensive, you switch from another, ...
In the two scenario:
- on one side you spent in capex more than in opex, so you spent at a specific point in time, in an inflationary economy, instead of being vampirized every month;
- you are tied to your infra reliability and consumer grade assembled iron it's pretty reliable for such usage, as most well know giants are for the same usage/point of view BUT on one side the reliability is in your infra, something you can tune, learn and check, on the other it's about third party decisions who can happen at every point in time without anything you can do.
You've certainly read countless of time about $BigName impromptu ban for instance. You've certainly experienced terms of use unilateral changes, sometimes ok for you sometimes not. Where is the balance?
If you live in a Korean goshiwon -alike you can't host while you might still have docs/photos etc you have no choice, but when you have it and honestly MOST people who need IT at a certain level do have the choice, at least formally, if he/she knows it exists, then where is the convenience? Trusting the market on one side, with little to no capex but much bigger opex and uncertainty or more capex, less opex and uncertainty? Think about schooling: what we do in most part of the world? A big initial capex (long school time) than profiting for life on the acquired knowledge or a jump in the wild than we will learn on the go?
In the mean people are honest, so trusting someone else IF you can verify or the exposure it's low it will generally end up well anyway, otherwise... I trust myself more than someone else shielded under a corp name, eventually in another country (so legal protection issues, geopolitical risks and so on)...
Not for free, but for negligible cost.
Like Schrems sentences you can't get that from USA companies, legally, but you can't get technically for ANY third party, because you are not on their servers, and no one else is there to control them.
How can you verify what any company state in a GDPR nightmare letter response? I've sent one time ago where a bank asking me to drop an RSA physical OTP for an Android app, that alone violate PSD2 (since the app it's not only a soft-token but also allow to operate on the same device, the reason why banking piracy was a thing again and more then ever), they respond accordingly to the law, but I can only choose to trust or not their response, I can't prove anything and I have nothing tangible to push some public inquiry on them.
Oh, you might feel protected if you upload ONLY encrypted contents, at least feel protected for an unknown amount of time, potentially very long but potentially not enough long.
So no, you can choose to trust someone else, but it's a choice that demand trust, you can't verify, so it's a vulnerability.
How can you verify what any company state in a GDPR nightmare letter response? I've sent one time ago where a bank asking me to drop an RSA physical OTP for an Android app, that alone violate PSD2 (since the app it's not only a soft-token but also allow to operate on the same device, the reason why banking piracy was a thing again and more then ever), they respond accordingly to the law, but I can only choose to trust or not their response, I can't prove anything and I have nothing tangible to push some public inquiry on them.
Oh, you might feel protected if you upload ONLY encrypted contents, at least feel protected for an unknown amount of time, potentially very long but potentially not enough long.
So no, you can choose to trust someone else, but it's a choice that demand trust, you can't verify, so it's a vulnerability.
Looking forward to cloud week at my local Lidl store.
what's in the "middle of lidl" this week? Drill bits, car shampoo and a kubernetes cluster. Nice.
Seems like "beauty" health products and bedroom stuff this week. Monday well drill bits and tools...
Which reminds me that I need to pick up some cheap pliers...
Which reminds me that I need to pick up some cheap pliers...
Kitchen and Garden stuff over here.
Someday it might be interesting to see article or video on just how Lidl's logistics and supply chain works on these special products. There is the staples, but how these shorter run campaigns are rotated around.
Would be curious to know if there’s an overlap with other retailers. Many “discount” supermarkets in Germany (Aldi, Penny, Lidl, Netto) have such aisles. As far as I can see in the UK, both Aldi and Lidl have similar things here, but not that vast of a variety?
I'll trust them with my cloud infra when they can keep the high protein yoghurt in stock consistently.
The Ballad of Lidl (and Aldi) - a classic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL7jyXCQ2Zc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL7jyXCQ2Zc
You'll know because they'll inform you with a paper leaflet.
Obviously no one knows anything and only time will tell, but if I had to gander, my conclusion would not be that of the author’s:
> As I pointed out in my previous blog post about the shifts in AWS, the one-stop-cloud-shop approach has shown cracks. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba et al. won’t be able to cover all grounds, neither in tech domains, nor in geo’s.
This doesn’t make much sense to me. What cracks? Aren’t aws regions the solution to geographic control to where your data and infra reside? Also, what tech domain does aws not have a solution for?
I’m not saying the underdog can’t catch up. I’m saying that when aws made this major switch to offer their cloud, it was certainly a first-of-its-kind offering. Lidl offering competitive services to aws doesn’t sound that scary, especially considering that I don’t believe for a second that lidl’s cloud offering comes even close to what aws provides. At that point, if this competitor’s only real value proposition is that they’re “in Europe,” then I’m not sure how compelling of a selling point that is for me to give up everything else I get with my aws offering.
Note: I am using aws as my example solely because it’s what I know best, not affiliated in any way with them as of this writing.
> As I pointed out in my previous blog post about the shifts in AWS, the one-stop-cloud-shop approach has shown cracks. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba et al. won’t be able to cover all grounds, neither in tech domains, nor in geo’s.
This doesn’t make much sense to me. What cracks? Aren’t aws regions the solution to geographic control to where your data and infra reside? Also, what tech domain does aws not have a solution for?
I’m not saying the underdog can’t catch up. I’m saying that when aws made this major switch to offer their cloud, it was certainly a first-of-its-kind offering. Lidl offering competitive services to aws doesn’t sound that scary, especially considering that I don’t believe for a second that lidl’s cloud offering comes even close to what aws provides. At that point, if this competitor’s only real value proposition is that they’re “in Europe,” then I’m not sure how compelling of a selling point that is for me to give up everything else I get with my aws offering.
Note: I am using aws as my example solely because it’s what I know best, not affiliated in any way with them as of this writing.
Actually Lidl (or the mother company Schwarz Group to be more precise) tried to implement SAP and could not get it to work. So after burning more than 500 Mio. Euro they oficially quit with SAP in 2018 and decided to invest a lot in their own systems, both infrastructure and software. So in 2021 they bought XM Cyber, a cloud security specialist company from Israel and guess who is a big client of this company that is now owned by the Schwarz Group: SAP
Europe has OVH, Scaleway, etc, but why don't they grow as fast as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud? Besides being a cloud provider, there are some essential cloud-native applications missing. Take for example the area of Data Science: is Databricks or Snowflake available in any European cloud provider? It's not only a question of IaaS, it's having the same PaaS and SaaS offering as the others.
Iirc a while ago i saw an article about lidl offering it services (mainly server collocation) and the price was indeed interesting.
Also, if lidl plays this right, there are a bunch of engineers in Europe, currently working for faangs in places like Dublin and London, highly skilled and and quite desperate to go and live somewhere with a lower cost of living.
Also, if lidl plays this right, there are a bunch of engineers in Europe, currently working for faangs in places like Dublin and London, highly skilled and and quite desperate to go and live somewhere with a lower cost of living.
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Shouldn't underestimate what determined group of people can achieve.
As for feature parity is concerned, AWS was pretty small at the beginning. Just like some 12 years ago. Even VPCs didn't exist at one point and you could scan whole cloud from your VM.
I have yet to see a company fail because the engineering team failed to build, whatever monolith, MEAN, micro services.
It is almost always the product tier that fails to articulate and envision the product and place it on a pedestal where people can immediately and clearly see the value proposition.
I hope that doesn't happen here.
Some good products in this realm would be Hetzner and Scalway for example which is certainly good engineering no doubt but great product management apparently.
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As for feature parity is concerned, AWS was pretty small at the beginning. Just like some 12 years ago. Even VPCs didn't exist at one point and you could scan whole cloud from your VM.
I have yet to see a company fail because the engineering team failed to build, whatever monolith, MEAN, micro services.
It is almost always the product tier that fails to articulate and envision the product and place it on a pedestal where people can immediately and clearly see the value proposition.
I hope that doesn't happen here.
Some good products in this realm would be Hetzner and Scalway for example which is certainly good engineering no doubt but great product management apparently.
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Has anyone first hand experience with gaia-x? Has anyone interacted with the association? On a very first look it seems like a public fund black hole, more and more money gets in nothing comes out, can anyone confirm/deny?
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Should call it Lidl Cloud :)
There is hardly a company I trust less than Lidl in the realm of tech
"Case Study 12: Lidl’s €500 Million SAP Debacle" (2020): https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d...
They're already generating revenue so congratulations to them, but would I put my infrastructure in their hands for the long run?...
"Case Study 12: Lidl’s €500 Million SAP Debacle" (2020): https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d...
They're already generating revenue so congratulations to them, but would I put my infrastructure in their hands for the long run?...
Aren't there already European could providers? Scaleway, OVH, hetzner, what are they missing that only digital schwarz can provide?
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This is always hard to compare because cloud offerings never exactly match (some include storage with their VMs, some include IOPS with their capacity, some bill bandwidth) but at first glance, their compute is cheaper than OVH and their storage is more expensive than OVH.
Seeing how they don't even seem to have a terraform module, I would say this will not grow to anything.
They have a Terraform provider: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/stackitcloud/stackit...
The original from Financial Times is much better: https://www.ft.com/content/08eb1b45-91c2-4312-9d3c-ac5e4e557...
Lidl has their own IT company that is not mentioned in the article as far as I can see: https://it.schwarz/ (linked from the "Digits" page, though)
Their self-checkouts run MS-Windows 7. That's just one step up from Vista. Their payment terminals run ancient OpenSSL versions. Their website until recently blocked searches for products whenever a substring matched a generic catch-all SQL injection blacklist.
And their in-store discounts require you to have an Android or Apple device and install their proprietary app on it from Google Play or iTunes, and sign up for an account using your e-mail address and personal cellphone number (landlines and non-geographical numbers are disallowed). It also collects your data and sends it to Google and Facebook.
This is the worst IT of any store I've seen.
And their in-store discounts require you to have an Android or Apple device and install their proprietary app on it from Google Play or iTunes, and sign up for an account using your e-mail address and personal cellphone number (landlines and non-geographical numbers are disallowed). It also collects your data and sends it to Google and Facebook.
This is the worst IT of any store I've seen.
A POS device at a Target store was used to exploit systems in a completely different part of the Target infrastructure to allow CC details to be dumped. I think most supermarkets have lacklustre security.
More and more customers are looking for solutions that could keep their data as near and safe as possible. I view this move as a very logical economic opportunity.
Anyone with experience?
Hetzner seems to be holding their ground so it seems at least theoretically possible.
Going to be hard to beat the scale effects of US big tech though
Going to be hard to beat the scale effects of US big tech though
Where are the pub/sub magic overlays over kafka ?
How does spark work on this ...
does not seem very fit for large scale.
How does spark work on this ...
does not seem very fit for large scale.
My company's clients dislike US companies so much that we had to switch from very cheap AWS SES, European region, only used to send emails to very expensive (10x at least) European competitor. The AWS entry in the GDPR DPA was generating so many meetings that it was just worth it.
This makes sense from a governance perspective.
I would worry that it becomes a mandated / feature poor service whose customers are guaranteed not by competitiveness, but by government requiring it.
I would worry that it becomes a mandated / feature poor service whose customers are guaranteed not by competitiveness, but by government requiring it.
Wait, are we that close to eradication by biomass eating killer robots?
This is not about privacy or sovereign clouds because at least AWS and Azure have those already in Europe.
It’s about protectionism and tweaking the law to favor local companies.
It’s about protectionism and tweaking the law to favor local companies.
If AWS gets a letter from an American 3-letter agency to plz turn over this and that data and don't tell anyone, they're going to comply, no matter what kind of paper "privacy shield" agreement the politicians negotiated this time around.
You can name the NSA, it’s not illegal to do it (not in Europe at least —- pun intended)
I didn't mean to be vague, I meant to be general. I don't know which other agencies have this kind of unchecked power.
Probably a few we've never heard of.
Some might even have a different number of letters in their acronyms, to fly below our radars. :-)
AWS does not yet have a sovereign cloud in Europe, they're planning to launch in 2025: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-plans-to-invest-e7... (linked in the article)
Not with direct control from the US - with AWS there is no privacy or sovereignity difference between EU-CENTRAL-1 or US-EAST-1 - you might tick a compliancy checkbox though. But sooner or later there will be more pressure and AWS and Azure will create legally independent companies in the EU to manage clouds in the EU.
Sadly iirc the US laws that makes GDPR compliance problematic cover subsidiaries so making them independant enough is probably more or less impossible in practice.
AWS and Azure's "sovereign clouds" still effectively fall under the CLOUD Act and FISA, rendering them as sovereign as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic.
How so - Lidl created something for their own demand, and started selling it to externals and found demand. Nothing protectionist in that
There are some protectionist-like tendencies in europe and that’s fine. Both laws trying to push for as much local parts as possible and buying agencies preference for local providers by tweaking purchasing terms here and there.
They’re not protectionist, they’re about self-sufficiency and about lowering dependency on third parties, and it’s a good thing in my opinion.
Protectionism and self-sufficiency is the same thing. And so agree it’s a good thing.
> Protectionism and self-sufficiency is the same thing
please revisit the dictionary
please revisit the dictionary
There’s no local industry to protect if you ain’t self-sufficiency. And it’s damn hard to protect self-sufficiency long term without protectionism if possible at all.
this is also how AWS started. amazon created a setup they needed and found out that they can sell it to others as well.
It's both. Privacy and sovereignty are big issues in Europe, specifically because of the jurisdiction issues. The fact that it provides some protection for European businesses means they'll lean into it all the more. That said, I think the Europeans would be joyous if the rest of the world would eliminate their protectionist boundaries by adopting Europe's privacy laws.
All countries do that where strategically sensible - or beneficial to "friends" of the government. 300% import tax on Bombardier CSeries anyone? CHIPS act? Silicon Valley getting started with military contracts?
or: the EU is serious about citizen privacy and addressing the flagrant disregard for it that the major adtech players have shown. If LIDL can compete on price/features/performance _and_ comply with the laws, then good luck to them. Equally, if the big US companies comply, then there's nothing excluding them from the market. They're already present as you note.
Yes. And it works when implemented correctly. See China.
I'm going to apologize for my ignorance upfront here, but I was under the impression that China isn't protecting local companies. It is making the companies it can directly control the only available option. Perhaps you're referring to something other than just controlling technology and information. I'd be interested in knowing more if there's something specific you had in mind
Many Chinese local companies took advantage of west technology they acquired in joint companies and Chinese government kicked off western companies.
Preventing a good part of western big tech from entering the market was protectionism too.
Preventing a good part of western big tech from entering the market was protectionism too.
It’s more of a prisoners dilemma than “it works when implemented correctly.”
In general, all parties do better in freer markets and all parties do poorly in restricted markets. However, when one party in a trading system implements restrictions and the others don’t that party can gain outsized benefits versus others.
The world spent almost 50 years liberalizing trade systems, mostly with benefits at the national scale. It took 10-15 years for most of leaders to realize that China was successfully subverting the liberal system.
“it works when implemented correctly” is the wrong lessons and will lead us to widespread protectionism and make us all poorer.
The right lesson is that “bad actors need to be dealt with and excluded from the system.”
In general, all parties do better in freer markets and all parties do poorly in restricted markets. However, when one party in a trading system implements restrictions and the others don’t that party can gain outsized benefits versus others.
The world spent almost 50 years liberalizing trade systems, mostly with benefits at the national scale. It took 10-15 years for most of leaders to realize that China was successfully subverting the liberal system.
“it works when implemented correctly” is the wrong lessons and will lead us to widespread protectionism and make us all poorer.
The right lesson is that “bad actors need to be dealt with and excluded from the system.”
„It works when implemented correctly“ might not be the lesson you want others to learn. But looking at China, boy did it work for them.
Once you start dealing with bad actors, you'd have to kick out pretty much anybody. Did western europe played fairly with post-cold-war eastern europe? No. I hear South america have issues with US too.
In reality this works great for established powers to keep status quo. For the rest... It depends on how many rules you're willing to bend. Or how others go above-and-beyond to help you out for some reason that is not part of the system.
Once you start dealing with bad actors, you'd have to kick out pretty much anybody. Did western europe played fairly with post-cold-war eastern europe? No. I hear South america have issues with US too.
In reality this works great for established powers to keep status quo. For the rest... It depends on how many rules you're willing to bend. Or how others go above-and-beyond to help you out for some reason that is not part of the system.
In beautiful EU bureaucratic style It's a framework for how to talk about how a European Cloud could look like.
It's not about technical standards. It's about how we can talk about how we can think of maybe eventually deciding on how we can come up with standards that might one day lead to talk about implementations.
It represents to me everything that is wrong with the EU today. A bureaucratic monster that can't decide how to talk about things or come to any form of alignment.