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Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

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Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#181

Post by cyberax »

echelon wrote: post #63
p1esk wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

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?

Nothing. Amazon already does that in China, their subsidiary licenses the tech and support services from the US company.

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#182

Post by ivan_gammel »

input_sh wrote: post #135
mardifoufs wrote: post #48

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.

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 necess…

> 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.

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#183

Post by matthewmorgan »

arianvanp wrote: post #22

Gaia-X is a disaster. The article misrepresents it. Gaia-X is not a framework for what a European cloud should look like. This would be useful. 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 o…

A lot of busy-work for a lot of highly overpaid bureaucrats.

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#184

Post by layer8 »

WA wrote: post #99
jeffrallen wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not for free, but for negligible cost.

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#185

Post by jedisct1 »

stavros wrote: post #105
albertgoeswoof wrote: post #47

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

I use Hetzner cloud not because it's European, but because it's great.

Same for me with OVH and Scaleway.

Way cheaper than AWS and friends, and they just work.

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#186

Post by mns »

haukem wrote: post #162
echelon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 stop…

Open Telekom Cloud is a whitelabeled AWS, so they are still doing this, but with other technologies.

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#187

Post by rizzir »

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

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#188

Post by Phelinofist »

qwertox wrote: post #101

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…

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.

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#189

Post by kkfx »

jeffrallen wrote: post #72
kkfx wrote: post #51

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 sovere…

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.

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.

Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing

#190

Post by isbvhodnvemrwvn »

maeil wrote: post #25
mathverse wrote: post #21

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

> Schwarz Digits generated €1.9 billion in sales last year It's already working.

How much of that is in sales to Schwarz group + SAP only?
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