Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’ • Hacker News Board

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#211

Post by davedx » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 11:57 AM UTC

heipei wrote: post #186

gspr wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the two first points are more specific to Germany than to the old world as a whole. Up here in Scandinavia, we often laugh at how much Germans interact with humans, send letters and faxes, and make phonecalls in their business lives. They are woefully far behind. From what I understand the same is true for the south. While I agree with the basic premise of the last point too I think you maybe underestimate th…

You're right, and I'm glad I started by saying that I'm German because lots of smaller European countries run circles around us in terms of tech adoption. I don't underestimate the value of quality of life, and I don't blame anyone who knowingly works for a stable, "boring", old-school German company which has been the world-leader in its niche for the past 100 years. But I think many people here are not aware that t…

Yeah in the Netherlands here, and I’ve spent some time recently integrating a German fintech vendor. The cross of new and modern and old beurocratic way of doing things has been almost dystopian and really slowed everything down. Contrast to similar vendors in the UK is quite something.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#212

Post by adev_ » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 11:57 AM UTC

hydraxis wrote: post #158

adev_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> France, Germany etc. are charging huge payroll, income and sales taxes to fund their huge welfare states and bureaucracies, but in the process ruining their competitiveness That's a common bashing legend that France/Germany are taxe hell and it is mainly bullshit. I am currently live in France with salary over 100k and my effective taxe rate is under 20%. Both France and Germany (and almost every European country)…

Are you including social contributions of employer and employee in your 20% tax rate? Because these are definitively taxes that should be included. If yes, I am really curious to know how this is possible

> Are you including social contributions of employer and employee in your 20% tax rate?

Only income taxes. The employer taxes are mainly pension / health insurance.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#213

Post by JeremyS » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 11:58 AM UTC

From the article "The companies will inject an annual €1.5 million combined in the underlying association, with plans to double the sum later." 1.5 million ... I hope this is a typo.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#214

Post by Bayart » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 11:59 AM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #106

flr03 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly there are very capable and smart engineers in France, and I don't blame the country ambition to develop its own solutions, but the SSII mafia (or how are they called now?) is killing innovation. It's a very top to bottom decision process (starting from the Government/MP), with big bucks involved, and very little understanding of how to drive these tech projects, all the way to the bottom. What I don't unders…

> there are very capable and smart engineers in France I would not be so sure. I looked at the IT salaries there (both as a permanent and as a contractor) and it just doesn’t make sense to stay there when you could earn way more money elsewhere in Europe.

Salaries have diminishing returns too. If you balance income and quality of life, if you can reach a certain point that's reasonable for you, it doesn't make sense at all to go through the trouble of moving.

Anyway the US is really at the bottom of the list. Most people would prefer anywhere in Europe or at worse Canada and Australia.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#215

Post by maga20yes » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 12:02 PM UTC

thamer wrote: post #14

It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company. Qwant[1], launched as "The French Google" with a focus on privacy, serves 10 million searches a day (a ridiculously small number). No one has heard of it, no one uses it, and it's another project with a dream of restoring France to…

This so many times. There's no accountability for government sponsored projects in France. They believe they are discovering the wheel and so they will pour a few million in a born-dead team. And so after a while, they call it done, and everyone is happy even if product has zero usage.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#216

Post by heipei » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 12:03 PM UTC

moring wrote: post #182

heipei wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I'd love for Hetzner to step up and start offering more managed services a la AWS, I just don't see it happening, and if it were I'm not sure I'd like the side-effects of that. Hetzner is laser-focused on delivering beefy and very affordable dedicated servers, apparently the way they are able to trim costs is by running most support functions on auto-pilot and having a very narrow set of products (servers,…

Isn't that an opportunity for another company to run managed services like S3, RDS, SQS, SES on top of Hetzner servers? I see some issues with multiple companies being involved in support requests, but nothing that can't be solved. Or, in case their virtual servers suck (which I don't know about), running VM hosts on Hetzner servers as a service.

You can't just run a service of S3 scale on someone else's datacenter, both from a technical and a business perspective. You need fine-grained control over every aspect, from servers to cooling to network fabric to utilization by other applications etc etc. And you need to be in control of the business trajectory. If you forecast your S3 clone to grow 1000% every month, you need to start building actual datacenters and make bulk deals with hardware suppliers months ahead of time. If you tell Hetzner that they should build a new datacenter because your demand will outstrip their current ones, they're gonna shrug their shoulders. Even if you handed them the cash you got from your VCs for scaling, they might say "eh, not really the direction we want to take, thanks".

Regarding their virtual servers: They're great, don't get me wrong! But it's a tiny piece in the puzzle that is AWS, starting from things like VPC/Security Groups to managed services like load balancers, gateways, cross-DC availability, etc. And that's just the EC2 part.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#217

Post by woodpanel » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 12:03 PM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #203

woodpanel wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But we are super proud of coining Industrie 4.0, so, that's something." Regarding Industrie 4.0: Currently at a client of mine, a "hidden champion" i.e. world market leader in industry XYZ (1.6B in revenue), I'm struggling to have them migrate from Cobol to Java. They are using their versioning system as a backup for their data, not for versioning the code. Deployments are done via dragging a zip file somewhere. Eve…

I understand why everything else is suboptimal but why do you want them to migrate from Cobol to Java? What problem is that going to solve for them?

It's about human capital.

Not that I favor Java, or even that I dislike Cobol.

It is rather their existing human capital that makes anything more fancy than Java even harder to migrate to. At the same time, job postings looking for Cobol-Devs in 2020 are useless and even if they manage to find people capable and willing to work with Cobol per se, their existing code-base is an additional deterrant. This further fossilizes what ever ounce of agility their dev teams might have had.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#218

Post by cosmodisk » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 12:03 PM UTC

disiplus wrote: post #190

thecleaner wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech salaries in Europe really are a joke. Even American companies don't pay well here because why would they, the market itself sucks. Combine that with easy immigration to US for Europeans and good affordable education it seems unlikely that talented people would choose to stay here. Part of the reason is the old money in this ecosystem. The problem with digitization in Germany specifically is that our paperwork is…

germany is also one of the only west countryes that uses fax machines. some of our customers are sending orders with fax.

We had a funny situation with a fax couple of years ago.My bosses were opening a new company and because of some situation in the bank,they did request to fax the paperwork to them(email not safe, f2f wasn't an option).I asked my manager how is he going to do it,as he seemed quite puzzled. Eventually,he found one dumped behind all the cleaning equipment in the office. Dusted it off and managed to fax it somehow.This was for one of the largest banks operating in the UK. Fintech it's not.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#219

Post by Pedrit0 » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 12:05 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #198

thamer wrote: post #14

It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company. Qwant[1], launched as "The French Google" with a focus on privacy, serves 10 million searches a day (a ridiculously small number). No one has heard of it, no one uses it, and it's another project with a dream of restoring France to…

I agree that these efforts have been very hit or miss but on the other hand... What should they do instead? Just give up and accept that we're going to simply be technological vassals to America? Or should Macron and Merkel learn Javascript and take the matter into their own hands? We could've gone the Chinese way and just close the door to American companies, effectively forcing the local populace to use home-grown…

Merci de le dire... Parfois cette mentalité collective qui nous caractérise me rend dingue... Le Français passe son temps à cracher sur tout et tout le monde, et surtout sur son propre pays. Donc ça fait du bien de voir des concitoyens qui restent lucides et positifs. Big up.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#220

Post by C1sc0cat » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 12:06 PM UTC

baq wrote: post #154

AmericanChopper wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically the same line of reasoning used by people that say you could replace your corporate slack with IRC. Of course you could, but there's a good reason that people don't. If you just want to compare one VPS to another, the only thing you're comparing is cost and availability. But really there's many more factors that people are interested in considering beyond just that. Even if the only service you're i…

well, the thing is, if you literally only need one server, AWS is ridiculously expensive. the value proposition is just not there. you have to design for the cloud from the start to come out on top.

And have wild swings in load - if its steady sate load then owning the kit outright and renting space in a DC is much more cost efficient than AWS.

And bonus you can write of the depreciation cost of hardware in your accounts.