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EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

politico.eu

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Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#41

Post by the_duke »

juskrey wrote: post #18

BTW Hetzner is a top notch EU cloud with an excellent proposal to finally learn Linux and deploy whatever you want on their industrial grade networking and storage. Instead of feeding an exploding complexities and costs of AWS, Google and Alibaba. I hope they will come to other continents soon.

I recently tried out Hetzner Cloud, after using their dedicated servers for years, and have come away positively surprised.

It works well, and the pricing is very appealing. But it's not even remotely in the same league as AWS/GC/Azure.

All you get is DNS, private networks, load balancers VMs and storage volumes. That's it.

Sure, you can self-host Kubernetes, and they even have a CSI driver for mounting volumes and an official Terraform provider. Which is great.

But you miss out on the incredibly rich service offerings you get from the others.

It's a great start though, and I hope they keep expanding their offerings.

Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#42

Post by worldmerge »

Whenever I think of the EU I can't think of a single tech giant from there, countries that come to mind for me are the US, China, Japan and Taiwan. The only things I know about the EU when it comes to tech is it trying to push massive global regulations around tech.

For reference I'm a 23 year old from the US. Nothing I have is made in Europe and I don't deal with any EU companies. Even my bike computer was made by a US company and built in China.

What EU tech companies should I check out? What ones are on your radar?

Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#43

Post by rapsey »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #26
bsaul wrote: post #6

As a european, i still think those kind of measures are trying to cure the symptoms by throwing huge pile of cash, rather that fix the core issue : that the private sector in europe is currently unable to produce GAFA-sized companies in the IT sector. My intuition is that once again the money will be grabbed by existing big companies that proved unable to innovate, but are the best at capturing public fundings. EDIT…

I agree and IMO a project like this would probably work better if the rules stipulated that it can only be used to fund startups. Eg: only companies younger than 3-5 years old, with fewer than 200 employees, and less than 100M in market cap. Such rules could help prevent established players from grabbing all the money.

So existing companies well versed in getting EU funds will make new companies and move some people over.

They always have a way around and have enough influence to make sure there is anway around it.

EU investments like these always go to the same pockets. It is a broken system but it makes the insiders lots of money.

Lots of companies exist for the sole reason to get EU money and have absolutely zero interest in making any real products.

Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#44

Post by ivan_gammel »

throwaway7281 wrote: post #13
bsaul wrote: post #6

As a european, i still think those kind of measures are trying to cure the symptoms by throwing huge pile of cash, rather that fix the core issue : that the private sector in europe is currently unable to produce GAFA-sized companies in the IT sector. My intuition is that once again the money will be grabbed by existing big companies that proved unable to innovate, but are the best at capturing public fundings. EDIT…

The recent COVID-App is a prime example of that. SAP plus German Telekom, neither of which is known for innovation, grab a 60M plus deal to develop a single app. In Italy a startup took over the job for 1/50 of the price and with at least as good or better job. Is the above play a problem for Germany? No. Do you they even understand an problem? I don't think so.

You are comparing costs of bakery which made an apple pie with the price of apple. 60M budget included much more than just an app, which is basically a frontend to a sophisticated government operation. If you want to make a point about inefficiency of German corporations, find the right figures first.

Upd: I previously wrote, that Italian app shares the source code with German one, which was probably not correct. In fact, Italy collaborated with Germany on developing a contact tracing solution before, but the apps were developed independently with different requirements. I’m sorry.

Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#45

Post by justoreply »

88840-8855 wrote: post #35
justoreply wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the app doesn't store location information by design for privacy reasons

if you ask normal people, they will hate this - only some data fanatics want this feature. people die. the economy is suffering. millions lose jobs. still, some guys making 140k in their it engineering jobs working from home and relaxing are telling me sth about "data privacy as priority". i disagree. people disagree. Taiwan did a FANTASTIC job leveraging data. we are either not capable of that or just fanatic.... ma…

several people still remember the Stasi and they don't want a state controlled app to monitor their movement. If you want your app to have the biggest installation base (without asking for a mandatory installation) you can't ask for user location, with it enabled fewer people will install it

Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#46

Post by worldofmatthew »

NeoFeznet wrote: post #39
bsaul wrote: post #6

As a european, i still think those kind of measures are trying to cure the symptoms by throwing huge pile of cash, rather that fix the core issue : that the private sector in europe is currently unable to produce GAFA-sized companies in the IT sector. My intuition is that once again the money will be grabbed by existing big companies that proved unable to innovate, but are the best at capturing public fundings. EDIT…

Apologies for the stupid question, as I feel like I’m missing something obvious: why is that? Is it the regulatory environment?

Would investors want to risk investing in a anti-tech part of the world who will blame them for everything?

The EU is populist in trying to blame tech companies for all of society's ills.

Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#47

Post by nemo44x »

NeoFeznet wrote: post #39
bsaul wrote: post #6

As a european, i still think those kind of measures are trying to cure the symptoms by throwing huge pile of cash, rather that fix the core issue : that the private sector in europe is currently unable to produce GAFA-sized companies in the IT sector. My intuition is that once again the money will be grabbed by existing big companies that proved unable to innovate, but are the best at capturing public fundings. EDIT…

Apologies for the stupid question, as I feel like I’m missing something obvious: why is that? Is it the regulatory environment?

It’s cultural. It’s really hard to get investors to invest in things that aren’t a guarantee. Most potential billion dollar companies. Investors in the USA are fine taking risk investing in them. In the EU you don’t find that culture. Could part of it be regulatory in terms of tax write offs? I’m not sure.

Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#48

Post by adventured »

juskrey wrote: post #18

BTW Hetzner is a top notch EU cloud with an excellent proposal to finally learn Linux and deploy whatever you want on their industrial grade networking and storage. Instead of feeding an exploding complexities and costs of AWS, Google and Alibaba. I hope they will come to other continents soon.

Hetzner doesn't compete with AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.

They compete primarily with companies like DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, OVH, Scaleway and traditional co-location and dedicated hosts.

Look at the software offerings from Hetzner, they're barely existent. AWS and Hetzner are very clearly not in the same business. AWS makes its money primarily off of software services, Hetzner makes money primarily off of primitive (basic) hosting. The AWS software side of the business has enormous margins compared to the primitive hosting side. You'll find that Hetzner barely has any margin, as with all the others in their segment. Meanwhile AWS is a half a trillion dollar global juggernaut, funded by its software margins.

Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#49

Post by colinjoy »

juskrey wrote: post #18

BTW Hetzner is a top notch EU cloud with an excellent proposal to finally learn Linux and deploy whatever you want on their industrial grade networking and storage. Instead of feeding an exploding complexities and costs of AWS, Google and Alibaba. I hope they will come to other continents soon.

„Cloud“ is increasingly more about services than just bare compute. I feel like Hetzner targets the cloud market from yesteryear. Maybe that niche is big enough to sustain the company - certainly while many are still making the intermediate transition from on-prem hardware to managed offerings. In the long run, I‘m sceptical.

Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#50

Post by tachyonbeam »

88840-8855 wrote: post #38
tachyonbeam wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems difficult to be protectionist when it comes to online services... And do you really want to live in that world? Do you want your government to build a great firewall and limit your access to content from outside of your country?

yes. i do want that. i do not like American products at all. i would love to see alternatives that actually work and are competitive.

You want your access to Google, Duckduckgo, YouTube, Uber, Facebook, Dropbox, Amazon, Netflix, etc to be blocked?
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