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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

#181

Post by vetinari »

barrenko wrote: post #169
pydry wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe doesn't need to create these companies. If Europe used this money to create the infrastructure for smaller companies to work together horizontally and vertically to form similar offerings they could end up with something better, at lower cost. This is a model that worked extremely well in Japan in the latter half of the 20ths century, and was mostly responsible for its economic miracle: https://en.wikipedia.or…

Nope. Big IT (which is highly creative stuff) cannot be built top-down, only bottom up. Europe is and will be an IT wasteland.

Depends. It could be argued that DARPA and it's development programs during Cold War were top-down. They were providing a market for the innovators, so they could pop up and do whatever their vision was.

But that is something different that taking all the funds by incumbents.

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

#182

Post by diggan »

cblconfederate wrote: post #124
diggan wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happy user of Hetzner's dedicated servers. Very nice platform and lots of bang for the buck, paying ~$40/month for Intel Core i7-980, 2x HDD SATA 2,0 TB, 1x SSD SATA 250 GB, 3x RAM 8192 MB DDR3 and unlimited traffic. Hard to beat really. Only gripe is that they only have servers in Europe, wish they had at least North/South American + Asian centers too.

You d pay even less for their 'serverbidding' servers

This particular one was indeed from server-bidding, but needed it within 24h so my selection was less than if you have lets say a week available for bidding/winning.

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

#183

Post by vetinari »

CydeWeys wrote: post #171
ivan_gammel wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you know about them?

Well, the median household income there is less than one-fourth of the US, with the concomitant lower standard of living you'd expect.

One dollar spent in Russia gets you more than in US. You cannot compare household income directly, you must go through PPP (purchase power parity). Even then, you might have expenses that they don't (medical, for example).

So in the end, objective comparison would have to go much deeper, than median household income.

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

#184

Post by diggan »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #145
the_duke wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Well, essentually Herzer is missing PAAS offerings that most modern devs can't live without, especially managed databases.

Is "modern devs" the modern "No true Scotsman"? Plenty of developers and organizations get by without managed databases. Although in "7-day sprints on loop forever" world of startups, any effort to require less knowledge to run the stack is probably welcome, hence it seems "most devs can't live without" for a lot of things, like managed databases, containerization and yadda yadda.

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

#185

Post by snicker7 »

vetinari wrote: post #181
barrenko wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Big IT (which is highly creative stuff) cannot be built top-down, only bottom up. Europe is and will be an IT wasteland.

Depends. It could be argued that DARPA and it's development programs during Cold War were top-down. They were providing a market for the innovators, so they could pop up and do whatever their vision was. But that is something different that taking all the funds by incumbents.

DARPA is a R&D organization, not an industrial powerhouse.

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

#186

Post by DangitBobby »

brazzy wrote: post #165
amadeuspagel wrote: post #153

Whenever I read about the EU's struggles to compete with american tech companies (also SAP vs Salesforce), I think of Steve Yegge's rant on AWS, quote: > So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that w…

You're seriously claiming that the EU cannot compete with US companies because you can't credibly threaten to fire people to show that you're serious about a policy decision?

I think they're claiming that it's important to have a real, credible, well communicated threat of consequences for not following the mandate.

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

#187

Post by brnt »

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…

Why on Earth would we want to create GAFA sized, privacy violating, information power concentrating and privatizing molochs? The current pluralist landscape suits me and demicracy just fine!

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

#188

Post by Kankuro »

klaudius wrote: post #120

Remember Quaero* ? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero

In France in 2012, there was also Numergy and Cloudwatt, funded by state money and associated to existing large groups (Orange, the largest telco, Thales, military, SFR, other large telco, Bull, a prehistoric computer company). Now there are dead. Such projects were weird because back then OVH was already the largest European hosting company. Maybe the owner was not a good friend of the politicians or he wanted to keep full control…

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

#189

Post by ivanovb »

petre wrote: post #75
christophilus wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty similar here in the US. What do you think the solution is? I don’t like the consolidation and regulatory capture I see everywhere.

The solution is de-regulation. In France if you want to run an open WiFi you need a license from the national comms authority for instance. But it won't happen. Too much bureaucracy. It's in the European mindset.

On the other part of E.U., in Romania, no matter what kind of business you want to start you need to battle with the bureaucracy.

Out of high-tech domain, I was thinking that my grandma could sell the jam she makes - but she can't sell it legally if it's produced in her own house - no matter how low is the production. Maybe just at some kind of farmers market, but that is iffy.

If I want to invoice some custom development for software, I can not do it as an individual. I either need a BS in Compute Science or setup a SRL.

The romantic view of starting out in the garage is quite illegal in these parts.

You need to spend a lot just to test a business idea. And what yous spend is not actually investing in the business, but just wasting time and resources with the bureaucracy.

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

#190

Post by brazzy »

tupputuppu wrote: post #177
brazzy wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking out of your ass. Literally everyone who knows anything calls the German app a huge success, especially compared with similar efforts.

In Finland, the authorities reserved 6M to create a contact tracing app and all support systems. They ended up building it for 150k, with 250k more to operate it until the end of next year. Half the population downloaded it in the first days and it works great. It's completely privacy-focused and the UX is great for both individuals as well as the government. Is the German tracking solution really 400 times as comple…

> They ended up building it for 150k, with 250k more to operate it until the end of next year.

Do you have any source for that?

If true that is indeed impressive, but I am sceptical, given that your claim that "Half the population downloaded it" seems to be extremely exaggerated (https://qz.com/1898960/whats-behind-finlands-contact-tracing...)

One way in which the German app was clearly superior is that it was released a full month and a half earlier.

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