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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

#241

Post by roenxi »

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…

That sounds like an EU success story - the bureaucrats aren't getting the way so Lidl is free to set up an AWS competitor. The EU isn't supposed to be a tech company, the point of companies is that they should be doing the part where services get provided. The US government was not a direct player in setting up AWS.

The danger would be if Gaia-X were kicking goals and laying down the law ... and had banned Lidl from setting up their own cloud until all the paperwork was signed off by 13 major committees, 666 undersecretaries of The Cloud and the High Bureaucrat was satisfied that there was a genuine market need for a new AWS competitor.

The EU has a lot of clever and motivated people. If the legal situation wasn't blocking success I expect they would succeed.

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

#242

Post by phantompeace »

bubblesnort wrote: post #207
ofrzeta wrote: post #96

Lidl has their own IT company that is not mentioned in the article as far as I can see: https://it.schwarz/ (linked from the "Digits" page, though)

Their self-checkouts run MS-Windows 7. That's just one step up from Vista. Their payment terminals run ancient OpenSSL versions. Their website until recently blocked searches for products whenever a substring matched a generic catch-all SQL injection blacklist. And their in-store discounts require you to have an Android or Apple device and install their proprietary app on it from Google Play or iTunes, and sign up fo…

A POS device at a Target store was used to exploit systems in a completely different part of the Target infrastructure to allow CC details to be dumped. I think most supermarkets have lacklustre security.

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

#243

Post by AlotOfReading »

manquer wrote: post #238
redleader55 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1.4M of those are defense, VA, or homeland security. It's not much of a secret that the US has a large military, and it dominates employment numbers. The highest federal employment total was 4.4M at the end of WW2. It decreased to 2M after the war ended, with clear bumps for the Korean, Vietnam, Cold, and Middle Eastern wars.

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

#244

Post by signatoremo »

manquer wrote: post #236
nextos wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Only if you ignore the A380 debacle, or the bloat that A400 is. And then there is this - [0]

Boeing makes the comparison easy for Airbus.

[0]- https://spacenews.com/airbus-takes-a-charge-of-nearly-1-bill...

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

#245

Post by atbpaca »

Europe has OVH, Scaleway, etc, but why don't they grow as fast as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud? Besides being a cloud provider, there are some essential cloud-native applications missing. Take for example the area of Data Science: is Databricks or Snowflake available in any European cloud provider? It's not only a question of IaaS, it's having the same PaaS and SaaS offering as the others.

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

#246

Post by biztos »

snowpid wrote: post #106
szszrk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what is going on nowadays, anyway. In Poland we have Chmura Krajowa (national cloud), aimed at public, non profit and finance companies. It's basically more controlled local Azure and GPC region.

In Polish people don't use Cloud but Chmura?

In Hungarian the people I know use felhő and not cloud. I don’t know what they say in actual IT circles but to my ears “cloud” sounds very awkward if stuck in a Hungarian sentence.

https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felh%C5%91alap%C3%BA_sz%C3%A1m...

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

#247

Post by rblatz »

n_ary wrote: post #93
arianvanp wrote: post #83

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.

It takes time to shape and convince people and form frameworks to move forward.

It looks like an example of perfect being the enemy of good. So afraid to make any mistake that they end up saying and doing nothing.

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

#248

Post by trevyn »

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

This is actually quite funny. A sovereign cloud that they have no f-ing clue how to maintain without the mothership.

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

#249

Post by siruncledrew »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #182
input_sh wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ope…

At a personal level, it feels better to have something of your own to hold on to instead of someone else’s, so I think beaucrats will also respond accordingly.

In a way, we’ll probably see more cloud fragmentation in the future, especially as other countries develop their IT sectors more and feel like they want more control over their own infrastructure, and whatever tertiary benefits can be extracted from that.

Relationships don’t even have to turn sour, there just has to be enough protectionism and popular appeal to support it. Just like saying “build it here”.

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

#250

Post by user90131313 »

mathverse wrote: post #121
nextos wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very accurate, and very depressing, summary of why EU is stuck since the 2000s. Most EU tech and non-tech companies, with some notable exceptions like Spotify, have this mentality.

It's an interesting phenomena but to be honest you need a leader with a vision to change the course of history. Circa 2006-2012 everyone orbiting the DACH sphere of influence believed they need to speak german even in tech jobs and then due to USA's influence and huge market we realized we actually dont give a crap about DACH that much. Thus it spawned companies in EE,Baltics and everywhere else with a focus on mostl…

Also by default DACH companies are very limiting to foreigners to go higher. Sure they hire a lot of engineers but you will never see overachiever Indian CEO or Asian CEO or even board members.
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