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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

#91

Post by mathverse »

jeffrallen wrote: post #70
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I mean what is that mentality

As a french speaking Swiss I'm pretty biased, but I'd say it comes down to salary thriftiness to the detriment of innovation, practicality to the detriment of flexibility, and perfection to the detriment of velocity. If you happen to want your supplier to be slow, extremely reliable, and you don't mind paying for the high profit margin they expect to be able to extract, you'll be a perfect customer of a DACH-mentalit…

French speakers are a serious mystery to me. They are much better stewards when it comes to tech and cooperation but they are so much stuck up with their need to "speak french" that it hinders any progress.

At least DACH made the progress of opening up. It would be ideal to combine DACH liberalism for language and french attitude towards tech and innovation.

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

#92

Post by foota »

bjornsing wrote: post #82
foota wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The operator isn't under the other company, so if they say "we need this data" they can just say no. Now potentially they could try to trick the operator, but I'm not sure a company could be compelled to do so under US law. While there doesn't appear to be any relevant cases, this would fall under compelled speech ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compelled_speech ) and it seems like it would fall on the impermissibl…

But somehow the money still flows to Amazon Inc in the US? I don’t get it…

It seems like they're doing it differently than they did for e.g., China.

Note that the money is simply a matter of a contract (e.g., we will hire your company, which is located in China to operate our cloud region. We'll give you X dollars, and you'll give us Y revenue).

For the Germany region, they're using a mixture of technical controls (e.g., the AWS user has to sign off on accesses in a way that's technically not circumventable (think like a phones unlock screen or something protecting the data on the device) and only allowing AWS employees located in the EU to operate it (presumably the goal being that employees physically located in the EU can't be compelled in the same way as those located in the US).

You can read more here https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-european-s...

For comparison, the structure in China is more like what I was describing above: https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/about-aws/china/

I'm not as familiar with it, but it looks like GCP is going with an operating company approach, see eg., https://cloud.google.com/t-systems-sovereign-cloud?hl=en for Germany.

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

#93

Post by n_ary »

arianvanp wrote: post #83
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/

They produced a few fluffy documents in 2022 and then nothing happened. They repurposed the word milestone to mean agenda. It's just a list of events they're organizing. Because they have no actual milestones or goals.

It takes time to shape and convince people and form frameworks to move forward.

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

#94

Post by isoprophlex »

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

You're absolutely right: a huge, underserved market exists. Are you hiring? I'd love to work on a European big cloud alternative..!

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

#95

Post by polotics »

novagameco wrote: post #33
mathverse wrote: post #21

Yea this is so gonna work with them paying 50-60k/pa for engineers. Seriously DACH mentality and influence has been devastating on serious tech development in Europe

What do you mean by DACH mentality?

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, Dach stands for "roof" in German, I guess that's why they like it. maybe

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

#97

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#98

Post by monomers »

_nalply wrote: post #36
novagameco wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by DACH mentality?

DACH = Deutschland (D) - Austria (A) - Switzerland (CH) but DACH mentality? Perhaps hard-working like people in Germany, Austria and Switzerland? Or overengineering or being stubborn and old-fashioned?

The German social contract for a long time was that the working class gets low wages, which keeps German exports competitive and combined with the large internal market, prices low. In return for making the owning class wealthy, workers also get a relatively good social support system and job security.

I'm not sure this model ever applied to A & CH, and might be starting to collapse in D as well.

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

#99

Post by WA »

jeffrallen wrote: post #72
kkfx wrote: post #51

As an European: cloud is someone else computer, sovereign computing means users own their iron, sw and data, as government, so a sovereign computing means a State own hw, sw and data belonging to it. That's ALMOST the case for most EU states so far, but less and less the case, and more and more with private partnership engendering public IT, which is public information, nervous system, witch is the OPPOSITE of sovere…

As a fellow European, I'm perfectly content to use someone else's computer, as long as they have a legal responsibility to respect my privacy, i.e. not submitting to the USA Cloud Act.

Speaking of: Is there an EU alternative to Netlify where I can basically upload/host a small static website for free, including custom domains and free SSL?

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

#100

Post by omnibrain »

maeil wrote: post #20

> This is something AWS is scrambling to address with its recent announcement of a €7.8 billion investment in an AWS European Sovereign Cloud, expected to launch its first region in Germany by the end of 2025. But will that be enough to regain the trust of European corporations Given the CLOUD Act and FISA, no it should not be enough to regain the trust of those European corporations that look for data sovereignty. A…

Microsoft tried the same (working with Deutsche Telekom) a few years ago. It offered only half the services (mainly "raw" compute, not the cloud services) and was about 30% more expensive and (by design) did not interact with the "regular" Azure. You can imagine how that went.
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