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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

#231
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people in this thread talking about low salaries in tech in the EU, but maybe it’s the case the US is the outlier? And not even the US as a whole, more like SV? Are there any other countries where tech engineers are among the best paid workers?

yes, someone mentioned Belarus, but also likely in Hungary and India too.

Belarus is irrelevant since 2020.

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

#232
post #60

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…

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/

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While most Western governments have gotten increasingly good at communicating with their citizens (i.e. making their web sites and forms accessible in human language, rather than bureaucrat language), and often even go so far as to offer versions in "Simple English" or local-language equivalents, the EU seems to be going the opposite way. I'd consider myself reasonably accustomed to and able to deal with bureaucracy…

Because the EU is not a national government. It issues no passports. It has no citizens. It levies no taxes. It has no army. It's an organisation that coordinates sovereign states. Often it doesn't even set the law directly but establishes a framework that allows it to specify some requirements that national legislative bodies then have to turn into actual legislation. Frameworks for how to talk about things is very…

> it's also undeniable that as a coordination mechanism the EU has been spectacularly successful.

I get you like the EU, but "spectacularly sucessful" isn't something many people would use. See covid response, and Ukraine war response. I would describe EU's mechanisms as moderately successful, i.e. somewhat better if states did everything on their own and bilaterally.

> The fact that people treat it as a national government is proof of that.

People with triste knowledge of how EU works do that. I do not think having most people in dark about how EU works is "spectacularly successful".

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

#235
post #63
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.

The americans are already on this path https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-european-s....

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

#236
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Doesn’t feel like that looking at Airbus and Boeing .

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

#237

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

> Seriously DACH mentality and influence has been devastating on serious tech development in Europe German corporations (and politics) are full of bean counters, bureaucrats and underachievers. It's filled with people who love to talk, excessively plan, draw flowcharts and build frameworks - essentially everything except getting shit done.

From my experience this is true for big German corporations, but is it really different for big corporations from other countries?

While I agree, that DACH mentality in big German corporations "has been devastating on serious tech development" at these companies, I don't see how this would affect the whole of Europe. It's an opportunity for other countries/companies to do better.

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

#238
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU: 440 million people, 60,000 EU bureaucrats. US: 330 million people, 2 MILLION+ US federal employees. Maybe what they need is more bureaucrats, so we don't get half-assed programs like this.

If you were not being sarcastic, it's not a fair comparison. Those 66k EU bureaucrats only deal with some of the stuff. You'll have to add some of the public administration employees from each of the countries that deal with things that in US would be considered "federal".

The flip side is a lot of governance in US which is typically centralized is distributed to states and yet there are 2M federal employees.

Also only country with comparable language complexity to EU is India, so many languages adds enormous amount of paperwork and bureaucracy, US does not simply have to deal with it.

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

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

The Australian government R&DTI operates this way. Nearly every job I've had I've had to fill out specific timesheets and project descriptions to fit the gov's reqs to get the tax incentive.

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

#240
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These sovereign clouds generally put the root in trust with a local operator so they physically can't be compelled to release information.

What difference does that make, if the parent company is in the US and its executives can be physically compelled to send orders to the local operator?

They license the software to run the cloud , they don’t act run it . Basically a white labeled solution for DC software like OpenStack

This is not a new idea and is how Azure(or AWS) always operated in China. The Azure Fabric software is licensed to DCs owned and operated by 21vianet a Chinese company. Microsoft has no control over what happens there.

No amount of legal[1] US pressure can make Microsoft give access to those DCs as they don’t have it in the first place

This is why you cannot just provision hardware in China in AWS/Azure, you have to enter into separate contract with the Chinese operator first and comply with any government restrictions that the Chinese state may require

[1] illegal/unauthorized tapping is a different matter and preventing that is not the intent of sovereign clouds .

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