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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

#271

Post by vjk800 »

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.

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

#272

Post by mantas »

topkai22 wrote: post #39
mantas wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s more of a prisoners dilemma than “it works when implemented correctly.” In general, all parties do better in freer markets and all parties do poorly in restricted markets. However, when one party in a trading system implements restrictions and the others don’t that party can gain outsized benefits versus others. The world spent almost 50 years liberalizing trade systems, mostly with benefits at the national scal…

„It works when implemented correctly“ might not be the lesson you want others to learn. But looking at China, boy did it work for them.

Once you start dealing with bad actors, you'd have to kick out pretty much anybody. Did western europe played fairly with post-cold-war eastern europe? No. I hear South america have issues with US too.

In reality this works great for established powers to keep status quo. For the rest... It depends on how many rules you're willing to bend. Or how others go above-and-beyond to help you out for some reason that is not part of the system.

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

#273

Post by jillesvangurp »

mkesper wrote: post #159
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

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/

We are using that for one of our customers that insisted on using it. It works but it's expensive and a lot of their managed solutions are a bit outdated. Last time I checked they still offered Elasticsearch on a version pre licensing change that is definitely no longer supported. Their support and documentation are a bit of a mess as well. I got stuck a few times on things that just weren't working where you had to do some non intuitive thing to get things going again. My strategy with them is to keep things simple and not let them manage anything I care about. So, I run my own Elasticsearch cluster there.

Basically it's just Openstack with some customizations. The rest of our customers run on gcloud. I'm currently eyeing Hetzner as I want to lower our hosting cost.

But the point of Openstack is that it's generally fine and that the feature set it offers is a commodity. AWS definitely overcharges for this stuff. If you do the math, most of their vms will cost you the hardware it runs on within months typically. Amazon runs this hardware for many years. In some cases they host multiple vms on them. Their margin on this stuff is huge. That's why they are so rich. You pay for the convenience and the uptime of course. But undercutting their pricing profitably isn't that hard.

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

#274

Post by fxtentacle »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #49
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

The European market has always seemed like a tertiary market compared to the US and Asia. I think that's because, despite having some raw number of euros to spend on a product, the European economy has struggled since 2008 compared to the US and Asia, and huge corps which are obsessed with growth don't see an accelerating future for Europe as a customer base.

I believe this impression is mainly because people think of France and Germany as separate countries, not as a combined EU market.

Imagine if you'd compare only California against all of China, it would look like the US was in seriously bad shape.

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

#275

Post by fxtentacle »

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…

The core feature of Gaia-X is that it makes it easy for small EU software companies to get up to €200k in "de minimis" tax gifts.

It also funnels money into open source office software and "European data spaces", which is (very loosely) tools to replace US clouds with open source. I would say it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, making it easier for EU companies to ditch US cloud services.

And didn't exactly that happen here?

4 years ago, the "Schwarz IT KG" company was a day-1 member of Gaia-X. And now they have billions in revenue from AWS-like cloud services.

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

#276

Post by fragmede »

ggm wrote: post #230
9dev wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that - and also managed Kubernetes. Hetzner could seize a lot of potentially lucrative opportunities, but for some reason they choose not to and pretty much stagnate in their offerings. I have been asking the support about both K8s and object storage since close to five years now, but no.

I also used to use Hetzner and I got the feeling they were capitalised to the extent their backers understood the DC/asset model and under-capitalised to software which was too intangible to invest in. K8s probably means more s/w than hardware, more bodies (for them) more helpdesk and more documentation, more process. More up-front cost. And, they seem to be making money without it. Maybe thats their position?

Their position is that k8s is the wrong layer of abstraction. They might be right, for their business model. Or it might be a case of intentional blindness.

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

#277

Post by croisillon »

_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.

you forgot Ibiza ;) "countries with a german speaking majority" might be more correct

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

#278

Post by ivan_gammel »

9dev wrote: post #219
ivan_gammel wrote: post #182

Earlier 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…

People used to say this about the energy infrastructure of Russia and Germany too, now see how that went. Or Chinese supply chains during Covid. Change comes rapidly sometimes. It just takes one lunatic president…

I don’t think comparing energy and IT sectors is correct. „Russian“ scenario is about being forced to have full autonomy in software, and that is happening now. For example, see how fast they started rolling out alternatives to Miro - I know about at least two products in this field. ERP, CAD, office tools, certified Linux distros… Yes, Russia has a focus and policy consistency advantage in IT, but I don’t see why Europe in crisis could not build a comparably efficient task force.

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

#279

Post by eb0la »

haukem wrote: post #171
mkesper wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Open Telekom Cloud was at least in 2020 running fully on Huawei Software and hardware: https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sich... Deutsche Telekom used Huaweis OpenStack implementation. I haven't found any information that this changed, so I assume it is still running completely on Huawei. At least they made sure that they still get chips from the US despite sanctions. ;-)

Telcos fell in love with OpenStack some years ago and went all in. Biggest problem with OpenStack was you needed a lot of hardware to learn how to use it and the talent pool was quite small.

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

#280

Post by arianvanp »

fxtentacle wrote: post #275
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…

The core feature of Gaia-X is that it makes it easy for small EU software companies to get up to €200k in "de minimis" tax gifts. It also funnels money into open source office software and "European data spaces", which is (very loosely) tools to replace US clouds with open source. I would say it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, making it easier for EU companies to ditch US cloud services. And didn't exactly…

Need a third party citation on that. I'm highly skeptical by the press releases they bring out and seem to be taken over verbatim with very little due diligence.

Given the fact they don't even allow public signups outside of DACH im highly skeptical of their claim they're doing billions of revenue in public cloud. It wouldn't surprise me if there is some interesting bookkeeping going on to boost the numbers.

The current status quo is that people in this thread want to try this but fail to figure out how to even sign up.

Also could you explain what part of being part of Gaia-X contributed to their success?

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