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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

#301

Post by District5524 »

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.

Maybe you are misunderstanding the gravity of this problem. Thanks to US Cloud Act and the Patriot Act and similar acts, there is no way any US citizen or any US company may EVER be involved in such projects. It's completely legal for the US to rely on extraterritorial jurisdiction leveraging any US companies and US citizens they have access to. But on the other hand, everyone else on out there will want to avoid that, so the only way to achieve that is to avoid involving any US citizens or companies for such sovereign projects. Google will not be able to solve it via subsidiaries, and no nice promises from Amazon, MS etc. will ever change it. Data sovereignity means all this. This will probably escalate a lot more, it might involve the financial infrastructure used (SWIFT) or even currency used in the process.

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

#302

Post by Traubenfuchs »

Ylpertnodi wrote: post #294
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…

>der8auer Presumably pronounced derachter?

You lost the "au" on the way? 8 could be l33t for B, making it derBauer (the farmer).

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

#303

Post by fbn79 »

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

From Italy there is Aruba (www.cloud.it). Not bad. But quality/price ratio worst than Hetzener I think

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

#304

Post by nosianu »

shiroiushi wrote: post #287
Certhas wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 amazing the EU has lasted this long really. The USA tried something somewhat similar back in 1781, and it was a complete failure: they organized a bunch of sovereign states (formerly colonies, but they became sovereign states after the Revolutionary War just before) into a confederation, where the central government had no real power at all. The resulting country couldn't even defend itself against pirates. They…

Having lived and worked in the US for a decade, as a German, and having had time to think about many things:

I think a key difference between how the US works and how Europe works lies in the private sector and the people. When you build a new company in the US, you have a lot of private infrastructure and people to be active in all of the states. In Europe, this does not exist in that form. Here, all the investors are focused on their own country. Sure we have plenty of firms active in many EU countries, but the level of support especially for new firms is orders of magnitude lower than in the US. From languages to social issues to attitude and expectations of common people, the EU is much more compartmentalized and it is significantly harder to have EU scale.

So there are two issues, and the side of the government is only one. The private sector and the investors have to do their job too and provide their own side of the EU wide infrastructure.

We also don't have EU-wide media that needs to support the development of a shared EU identity, and many other things that unite the US population as one people. Much of that has to come from the private sector, from the rich, from investors. But apparently they don't think big enough here in the EU?

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

#305

Post by snowpid »

tormeh wrote: post #193
snowpid wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That shouldn't the USA as there are more people moving from there to Germany than vice versa.

Depends. If you want to live a good life you stay in the EU. If you have the will and ability to do great things professionally (not many do) then in most industries you need to move to the US to do it. There’s just not enough high-risk capital here for exciting projects to be done. I suspect comes from market size. Financiers won’t take high risk without high reward, and the reward is not here.

Please think about context. GP thinks, there was a weak European economy, esspecially about Germany in the last 20 years. This was not the case and even during the current struggle in Germany (not German swiss), more people from the US move here

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

#306

Post by alephnerd »

jagermo wrote: post #297
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 have worked with Deutsche Telekom in the past and I'm convinced that every project that involves them will never get enough traction to beat US companies. The entitlement and refusal to listen to other people outside their direct org is mindboggling, its like if everyone at that company still thinks they are the hottest shit and they know everything better. Sadly, they are a gatekeeper. Super frustrating partner to…

> The entitlement and refusal to listen to other people outside their direct org is mindboggling

+1 on that. Same with the owner of the CSP mentioned in the article above.

It's weird because it was always only German companies that gave truly unreasonable feature requests AND were extremely pushy, despite not spending much compared to other customers.

T-Mobile is much easier to deal with, but they are also walking with their tail between their legs...

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

#307

Post by alephnerd »

vasco wrote: post #224
progbits wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. Though they increasingly own management as well.

At this point Azure in China and AWS in China is a reskin around Tencent Cloud.

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

#308

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

manquer wrote: post #260
signatoremo wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

OP is EU has become an open air museum and all the good companies are now either American or Chinese. > Boeing makes the comparison easy for Airbus. What else to compare against this claim ? Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry. It is not just aerospace, even auto is still über competitive, Eu…

Tech companies are getting insanely large valuations (I work in tech, and I think they're absurd). Europe doesn't have many large public tech companies, therefore Europe looks bad in terms of the "industries of the future"

Plus a bunch of angry USians really irritated by the anti-trust stuff the EU has been doing (DMA etc).

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

#309

Post by precommunicator »

My company's clients dislike US companies so much that we had to switch from very cheap AWS SES, European region, only used to send emails to very expensive (10x at least) European competitor. The AWS entry in the GDPR DPA was generating so many meetings that it was just worth it.

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

#310

Post by username_my1 »

vjk800 wrote: post #271
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…

As others here have pointed out, Gaia-X successfully funnels money to EU cloud companies and maybe this is what it's supposed to do. The deal is: company agrees to write some bs on how it contributes to this project and they get the money. The point is to get local cloud tech sector to grow here in the EU and maybe it's too difficult politically or otherwise to just give money to the companies directly.

This also blows my mind, instead of adding more berucracy to apply for funding to review funding to give funding.

just give tax credits based on innovation / investment criteria, to both companies and employees, Europe needs digitalization so badly, yet they find more complex ways to enable it.

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