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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

#311

Post by shiroiushi »

nosianu wrote: post #304
shiroiushi wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Perhaps, but I wonder how much having so many different languages contributes to that. In the US, most people all speak English (though there's a growing Spanish-speaking population, but even here most younger ones probably end up being bilingual), so there's not that much to do for your company to do business in all 50 states, depending on just how much interaction with state governments you require. And state laws are all pretty similar usually. Not so in the EU.

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

#312

Post by t43562 »

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…

Glass half full. No civil war was needed to keep the EU together. It lost a member without any bloodshed. It's exactly the kind of imperfection we admire when we compare democracies to China - less effective than central control but more free.

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

#313

Post by rad_gruchalski »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #227
rad_gruchalski wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm confusing things myself. One's okay as long as one doesn't modify the code.

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

#314

Post by prmoustache »

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…

> You have to be a company to make business with them. You can not just sign up, you have to contact them first.

This is not necessarily a bad strategy if they want to do something different than OVH/Scaleway/Hetzner.

For instance, I understand you cannot possibly run a decent mail infra on the above hosting vendors IP ranges because they are so popular cheap self service hosting service they have been used a lot by spammers.

So definitely not targetted at the lone developper starting a side gig but more as a vendor for the many larger EU institutions/companys that mostly kept their stuff on prem until now because of patriot act.

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

#315

Post by gizmo »

wuming2 wrote: post #258
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…

In a finite resources world, with unsustainable levels of pollution and soon of climate change, I don’t understand why much more of EU regulation and enforcement resources are not spent towards mandatory hardware re-use. All computer vendors know 90% of IT users never even scratch the surface of computational power and functionalities. As for Gaia-X itself, governments are always on the hunt for programs to justify t…

> I don’t understand why much more of EU regulation and enforcement resources are not spent towards mandatory hardware re-use

Beliefs like these are common in Europe and I absolutely despise them. Inefficiencies in IT exist for boring reasons like requirements that are way too complex or that keep changing, internal politics, and inexperience. If you add more regulations that don't move the needle you just get more politics, more middle men that seek to profit from the regulatory capture (advisors, consultants, resellers), and you distract industry from focusing on those things that matter most.

Complexity is the enemy of progress. IT systems fail when they attempt to codify contradictory bureaucratic processes that make no sense. The solution is to simplify. Businesses that refuse to simplify get eaten by hungry startups, and deservedly so. What do you think will happen to a continent that refuses to simplify?

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

#316

Post by sakjur »

singhrac wrote: post #200
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.

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.

I’d argue that the smaller you are, the more sense S3 makes, since its costs scales down to zero and offer a high degree of reliability from the first file stored.

Rolling your own storage comes with at least some operational expenses, if you’re counting your data/egress in gigabytes that’s likely not worth it compared to just using S3 or similar services.

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

#317

Post by [deleted] »

sealeck wrote: post #218
TheTxT wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The US government can (and for many years did) tap the phone calls of the German chancellor; I don't think getting to data held by European cloud providers is really a big challenge for them.

[deleted]

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

#318

Post by Woeps »

sealeck wrote: post #218
TheTxT wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The US government can (and for many years did) tap the phone calls of the German chancellor; I don't think getting to data held by European cloud providers is really a big challenge for them.

Regarding the tech aspect? no. But legally it's always has been challenging. And that's where the difference lies

Unrelated, I think this also happens the other way around.

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

#319

Post by rad_gruchalski »

petesergeant wrote: post #160
polotics wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DACH would be: (D)eutschland (A)ustria (C)onfederatio (H)elvetica... This acronym manages to use three different languages, german for Deutschland, english for Austria (which is Österreich) and the latin name for Switzerland... Don't ask me, it is very dubious to use this DACH hodgepodge term here, as definitely mentalities are different: the state of IT is in no way identical between these three countries. Also, Dac…

Those are the EU plate letters for each fwiw

Not exactly. Only D and A. Switzerland is not in the EU (it's in the EEA but not EU) and doesn't have number plates following the EU design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of...

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

#320

Post by rad_gruchalski »

_nalply wrote: post #157
croisillon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

german speaking countries

Nitpick: Luxemburg, Belgium (around Eupen), Italy (Tirol) and France (Alsace) are also German speaking countries. Historically, too: Poland, Czechia, Hungary and Romania, but German speaking communities have disappeared or are in massive decline. Disclaimer: this list of German speaking countries might be incomplete.

As a Polish person I have no idea how you can come out in public and state that Poland was ever a German speaking country.
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