Live data from Hacker News

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

horovits.medium.com

261–270 of 420 posts

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

#261
post #30
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some protectionist-like tendencies in europe and that’s fine. Both laws trying to push for as much local parts as possible and buying agencies preference for local providers by tweaking purchasing terms here and there.

They’re not protectionist, they’re about self-sufficiency and about lowering dependency on third parties, and it’s a good thing in my opinion.

Protectionism and self-sufficiency is the same thing. And so agree it’s a good thing.

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

#262
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner and OVH are top of mind, Gandi is nice too. Not Amazon-scale, by far, but European companies hosting in Europe with decent service.

OVH is a joke (their data center burned because they had wooden roofs), Gandi is no more, and Scaleway gave up. There is no French host anymore. Only Hetzner is left in this business.

OVH is quite good, actually. We are using their K8S offering and S3 to build a service. It works well.

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

#263
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lidl got SAP's award for best customer a few years before admitting they have wasted half a billion on SAP implementation. It's the same thing again.

> award for best customer I've never heard of this. Does it mean best cash cow?

I expect nothing less from SAP

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

#264
post #261
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re not protectionist, they’re about self-sufficiency and about lowering dependency on third parties, and it’s a good thing in my opinion.

Protectionism and self-sufficiency is the same thing. And so agree it’s a good thing.

> Protectionism and self-sufficiency is the same thing

please revisit the dictionary

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

#265
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.

Or just plain old buy out any EU company that threathens to become successful with free reserve currency monopoly money.

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

#266

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

Open Telekom Cloud has at least a great part of the functionality you expect when talking about a cloud provider: VMs (even GPU ones), VPCs, managed databases, block storage, Logging, IAM, API Gateway, Container Engine etc. https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/

That's only on paper though. I know a couple of people who founded a startup in the medicine sector on Telekom Cloud and most of their backend engineering work in the first years(!) went into circumventing Telekom Cloud issues like slow API, servers not starting or plainly disappearing.

Haven't talked to the guys for two years, so it might have improved in the meantime, but it's Telekom, so I heavily doubt it.

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

#267

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 am not sure the job of the EU should even be to make technical standards in this case. The point is to develop strategy and to convince an endless amount of non-technical stakeholders on value, and that is something the EU usually does well.

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

#268

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.

[deleted]

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

#270
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And it works when implemented correctly. See China.

I'm going to apologize for my ignorance upfront here, but I was under the impression that China isn't protecting local companies. It is making the companies it can directly control the only available option. Perhaps you're referring to something other than just controlling technology and information. I'd be interested in knowing more if there's something specific you had in mind

Many Chinese local companies took advantage of west technology they acquired in joint companies and Chinese government kicked off western companies.

Preventing a good part of western big tech from entering the market was protectionism too.

Post reply on HN