Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
321–330 of 420 posts
Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 50-60k/pa for engineers Is that, like, actual information, or just an educated guess based on some industry average.
That's definitely the kind of salary you'd be looking at after an undergraduate tech degree in Austria or secondary cities in Germany.
Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Tax credits make sense for companies already with a steady profit margin. Cloud in particular is a capex heavy business so for a new company that is not very useful for at least the first few years.
Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use Hetzner cloud not because it's European, but because it's great.
It is cheap, good it is not. You can complain about AWS and GCP support as much as you want, but given their sheer volume it is an accomplishment how rarely you actually need it. The situation when you need it is of course a different thing and I understand that satisfaction there greatly varies. Their support might be hit or miss, but at least their processes are streamlined and tried and tested enough to have you r…
Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> The economies are too integrated for this scenario. This exact reason was put forward by political thinkers in the 1910s to "prove" that a major war in Europe was completely impossible. It was then put forward again in the 1930s to "prove" the same thing; for real that time.
Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
#326Earlier 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…
But you are ignoring a ton of stuff here, too. The EU comprises territories that are far more different than the territories of the US. The EU has 24 languages spoken, and its poorest member state has a GDP that is a factor of 9 lower than its richest (excluding Luxembourg). While it would be nice to have strong decision-making, how do you make sure that the decisions are also perceived as fair and democratically justified? Imagine a president who doesn't even speak the native language of the vast majority of people in the country. Would that person be seen as legitimately representing the people? How do you even begin to organize public political discussions in a situation where most people can't read the same newspaper/watch the same content? It's far from obvious that any of this is achievable. It's easy to fantasize about a competent, legitimate central government. But how do you construct it from the pieces given?
The political analogue of the EU might be India rather than the US.
Historically, the EU also comprises the territories that for more than half the time period since the inception of the USA provided all the globally dominant economic and military superpowers, expanding the areas they ruled to the peak of colonialism in 1914 [1]. So the squabbling mess of European powers, barely coordinating under a balance of power system at home, was dramatically successful militarily and economically (at an even more dramatic human cost). Contrast the Quing dynasty, that had a central government. At least some historians I've read argue that maintaining the central government consumed so many resources that it was a major reason for the widening gulf in economic and military might between European power and China during the 19th century.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/graphics/1914-co...
Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
#327Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
#328Earlier 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.
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.
The durability can have value at scale, because ensuring it at scale with MinIO can be a lot work. But I often recommend to clients that they deploy a Hetzner setup as a cache, often with storage all the way up covering 100% of their data depending on access partner, because the AWS egress fees are so insanely extortionate that you never really want to read data from AWS at scale other than as an emergency option.
Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
#329I don't get what's new about this apart from the typical EU related buzzwords. France alone already has OVH and Scaleway, which are actual cloud providers in the "AWS" sense, not just hosting providers. Like I get that this is part of the platform's marketing but I don't see the sovereignty (which is a rather cringy term imo, as it implies that something as big as the EU isn't sovereign) angles to this.
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…
It doesn't need to be suddenly hostile, it already is for decades. This is about economical competition and not trusting foreign agencies (like NSA, CIA, etc.) which are known to spy on European data and abusing it for the benefit of US-companies. Since Snowden there are several long-running discussions about independence of data, and USA being unreliable in their laws and actions.
Re: Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
#330Looking forward to cloud week at my local Lidl store.