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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

#221

Post by bastawhiz »

vander_elst wrote: post #167
haukem wrote: post #153

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…

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

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.

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

#222

Post by nextos »

arianvanp wrote: post #83
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/

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.

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.

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

#223

Post by nradov »

Barrin92 wrote: post #202
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compa…

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.

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

#224

Post by vasco »

progbits wrote: post #128
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.

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

Isn't this how all the hyperscalers already run in China?

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

#225

Post by danpalmer »

nosianu wrote: post #176
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…

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 di…

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.

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

#226

Post by rtpg »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #212
singhrac wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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?

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

#227

Post by doctorpangloss »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #212
singhrac wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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

#228

Post by mvanbaak »

kkfx wrote: post #214
mvanbaak wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 32…

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 :)

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

#229

Post by vasco »

TheTxT wrote: post #201
bengale wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#230

Post by ggm »

9dev wrote: post #216
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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