[HN Gopher] Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Com...
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Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
Author : taubek
Score : 228 points
Date : 2024-08-25 16:35 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (horovits.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (horovits.medium.com)
| outside1234 wrote:
| This is not about privacy or sovereign clouds because at least
| AWS and Azure have those already in Europe.
|
| It's about protectionism and tweaking the law to favor local
| companies.
| waihtis wrote:
| How so - Lidl created something for their own demand, and
| started selling it to externals and found demand. Nothing
| protectionist in that
| mantas wrote:
| There are some protectionist-like tendencies in europe and
| that's fine. Both laws trying to push for as much local parts
| as possible and buying agencies preference for local
| providers by tweaking purchasing terms here and there.
| znpy wrote:
| They're not protectionist, they're about self-sufficiency
| and about lowering dependency on third parties, and it's a
| good thing in my opinion.
| mvanbaak wrote:
| this is also how AWS started. amazon created a setup they
| needed and found out that they can sell it to others as well.
| mantas wrote:
| Yes. And it works when implemented correctly. See China.
| NeuroCoder wrote:
| I'm going to apologize for my ignorance upfront here, but I
| was under the impression that China isn't protecting local
| companies. It is making the companies it can directly control
| the only available option. Perhaps you're referring to
| something other than just controlling technology and
| information. I'd be interested in knowing more if there's
| something specific you had in mind
| topkai22 wrote:
| 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 scale. It took 10-15
| years for most of leaders to realize that China was
| successfully subverting the liberal system.
|
| "it works when implemented correctly" is the wrong lessons
| and will lead us to widespread protectionism and make us all
| poorer.
|
| The right lesson is that "bad actors need to be dealt with
| and excluded from the system."
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Not with direct control from the US - with AWS there is no
| privacy or sovereignity difference between EU-CENTRAL-1 or US-
| EAST-1 - you might tick a compliancy checkbox though. But
| sooner or later there will be more pressure and AWS and Azure
| will create legally independent companies in the EU to manage
| clouds in the EU.
| whizzter wrote:
| Sadly iirc the US laws that makes GDPR compliance problematic
| cover subsidiaries so making them independant enough is
| probably more or less impossible in practice.
| skrebbel wrote:
| If AWS gets a letter from an American 3-letter agency to plz
| turn over this and that data and don't tell anyone, they're
| going to comply, no matter what kind of paper "privacy shield"
| agreement the politicians negotiated this time around.
| znpy wrote:
| You can name the NSA, it's not illegal to do it (not in
| Europe at least --- pun intended)
| skrebbel wrote:
| I didn't mean to be vague, I meant to be general. I don't
| know which other agencies have this kind of unchecked
| power.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Probably a few we've never heard of.
| vanviegen wrote:
| Some might even have a different number of letters in
| their acronyms, to fly below our radars. :-)
| zo1 wrote:
| To be a bit facetious/snarky: And we compare this to the EU's
| version where they're outright open about it and censor-away?
| "We're not being bad, this is legal censorship!"
| spinningslate wrote:
| or: the EU is serious about citizen privacy and addressing the
| flagrant disregard for it that the major adtech players have
| shown. If LIDL can compete on price/features/performance _and_
| comply with the laws, then good luck to them. Equally, if the
| big US companies comply, then there's nothing excluding them
| from the market. They're already present as you note.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| After arresting Pavel Durov on specious charges yesterday?
| Seems more like protectionism with that context.
| jdietrich wrote:
| The EU didn't arrest Durov, France did.
| Muromec wrote:
| Dude should have blocked that nazi channel when we asked
| nicely.
| yorwba wrote:
| AWS does not yet have a sovereign cloud in Europe, they're
| planning to launch in 2025:
| https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-plans-to-invest-e7...
| (linked in the article)
| cbsmith wrote:
| It's both. Privacy and sovereignty are big issues in Europe,
| specifically because of the jurisdiction issues. The fact that
| it provides some protection for European businesses means
| they'll lean into it all the more. That said, I think the
| Europeans would be joyous if the rest of the world would
| eliminate their protectionist boundaries by adopting Europe's
| privacy laws.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| All countries do that where strategically sensible - or
| beneficial to "friends" of the government. 300% import tax on
| Bombardier CSeries anyone? CHIPS act? Silicon Valley getting
| started with military contracts?
| maeil wrote:
| AWS and Azure's "sovereign clouds" still effectively fall under
| the CLOUD Act and FISA, rendering them as sovereign as the
| Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic.
| ck45 wrote:
| Unrelated except it's the same company, reminded me of the failed
| SAP migration, https://www.retaildetail.eu/news/food/lidls-
| failed-it-projec...
| croes wrote:
| At least they had the balls to back out
| maeil wrote:
| Seriously, this is impressive for a company of their size.
| Almost anywhere else it would be pushed through to preserve
| the status of whichever leaders championed the whole thing,
| to hell with the long-term consequences.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Anyone with experience?
| rgblambda wrote:
| It looks like this isn't open to the public but is just for
| internal use by Schwartz Group.
| maeil wrote:
| Bayern Munich and SAP are not parts of Schwartz Group. For
| now it seems aimed at large European enterprise customers.
| christkv wrote:
| Looking forward to cloud week at my local Lidl store.
| spinningslate wrote:
| what's in the "middle of lidl" this week? Drill bits, car
| shampoo and a kubernetes cluster. Nice.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Seems like "beauty" health products and bedroom stuff this
| week. Monday well drill bits and tools...
|
| Which reminds me that I need to pick up some cheap pliers...
| christkv wrote:
| Kitchen and Garden stuff over here.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Someday it might be interesting to see article or video
| on just how Lidl's logistics and supply chain works on
| these special products. There is the staples, but how
| these shorter run campaigns are rotated around.
| mimischi wrote:
| Would be curious to know if there's an overlap with other
| retailers. Many "discount" supermarkets in Germany (Aldi,
| Penny, Lidl, Netto) have such aisles. As far as I can see
| in the UK, both Aldi and Lidl have similar things here,
| but not that vast of a variety?
| bengale wrote:
| I'll trust them with my cloud infra when they can keep the high
| protein yoghurt in stock consistently.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| You'll know because they'll inform you with a paper leaflet.
| AlexanderDhoore wrote:
| Being a European, I'd love to try this. Many businesses operate
| completely local. I think there is a market for a Europe-only
| cloud provider.
|
| How do I try this? Do they have a free tier?
| liotier wrote:
| Hetzner and OVH are top of mind, Gandi is nice too. Not Amazon-
| scale, by far, but European companies hosting in Europe with
| decent service.
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| OVH is a joke (their data center burned because they had
| wooden roofs), Gandi is no more, and Scaleway gave up. There
| is no French host anymore. Only Hetzner is left in this
| business.
| quentindemetz wrote:
| Dassault has a cloud offering with 3DS Outscale
| pestaa wrote:
| How exactly did Scaleway give up? They keep releasing new
| cloud and serverless products.
|
| There's also IONOS.
| jononor wrote:
| OVH is still in business, even if they had a fire 3 years
| ago. Both AWS and Google have had rather large fires.
| monospaced wrote:
| You can sign up on their website: https://www.stackit.de/en/
|
| While there are no free credits the services are priced pay per
| use to the minute with a much simpler pricing model than the
| large hyperscalers like AWS. See prices for EC2 here:
| https://www.stackit.de/en/pricing/cloud-services/iaas/stacki...
|
| You can find the docs here:
| https://docs.stackit.cloud/stackit/en/knowledge-base-8530170...
| arianvanp wrote:
| Note that you need to be Incorporated in Germany, Austria or
| Switzerland to use it. And they dont allow individuals to
| open accounts. Only companies.
|
| "The European cloud" that doesn't allow sign ups from Europe
| is extremely ironic.
|
| I don't know how they keep getting all this press without
| actually delivering _anything_
| mvanbaak wrote:
| I came here to state exactly this. As a dutch individual
| that has 'cloud' high on his CV, I would like to create an
| account and test this to see if it is something I should
| invest my time in to make it part of my cv. But ... they
| won't allow that.
|
| Ah well, next!
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Lidl got SAP's award for best customer a few years before
| admitting they have wasted half a billion on SAP
| implementation.
|
| It's the same thing again.
| sva_ wrote:
| > award for best customer
|
| I've never heard of this. Does it mean best cash cow?
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Exoscale has a simple sign up, with a credit of EUR 20 to get
| you started.
|
| (I work there, and my job tomorrow is to get my 2 apprentices
| new accounts so they can start following the self-paced
| training in the Exoscale Academy.)
| ncruces wrote:
| See also: https://www.scaleway.com/
|
| They have three zones, Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw.
|
| Not sure if they have a free tier, but I still pay about
| 1EUR/month for two (really) small instances that I used for
| testing their service (and kept around for personal stuff).
| duxup wrote:
| This makes sense from a governance perspective.
|
| I would worry that it becomes a mandated / feature poor service
| whose customers are guaranteed not by competitiveness, but by
| government requiring it.
| maeil wrote:
| > This is something AWS is scrambling to address with its recent
| announcement of a EUR7.8 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. As long as those exist, all proposed
| "sovereignty" guarantees by vendors that have their (or their
| parent company's) HQ in the US are entirely worthless and should
| be ignored.
| foota wrote:
| These sovereign clouds generally put the root in trust with a
| local operator so they physically can't be compelled to release
| information.
| bjornsing wrote:
| What difference does that make, if the parent company is in
| the US and its executives can be physically compelled to send
| orders to the local operator?
| foota wrote:
| 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 impermissible side to me.
| bjornsing wrote:
| But somehow the money still flows to Amazon Inc in the
| US? I don't get it...
| foota wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| Amazon licenses the technology to the other company and
| finances their related infrastructure, in exchange for
| most of the profit they make from it, or something along
| those lines, I would guess. It's a contractual agreement.
| maeil wrote:
| Do you mean a local subsidiary, e.g. "AWS Europe" or
| "Microsoft Europe"? Those are included in those acts all the
| same. If not, what kind of local operator are you thinking
| that e.g. AWS will use?
| omnibrain wrote:
| 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.
| wmf wrote:
| A separate company doesn't interact with Azure either. If you
| want to be "sovereign" there's a price to be paid.
| mathverse wrote:
| 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
| maeil wrote:
| > Schwarz Digits generated EUR1.9 billion in sales last year
|
| It's already working.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| How much of that is in sales to Schwarz group + SAP only?
| adamnemecek wrote:
| I too have noticed this difference in mentality but I'd be
| curious to hear what do you think are the most salient
| differences.
| novagameco wrote:
| What do you mean by DACH mentality?
| _nalply wrote:
| 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?
| raverbashing wrote:
| > Or overengineering or being stubborn and old-fashioned?
|
| Exactly this
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Low salaries to me indicates they believe it is a Germanic
| ideal to pay subpar wages for highly skilled engineers? I
| don't think it's a mentality thing, personally, I think it
| just speaks to the weakness of the European economy for the
| last 20ish years
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Highly skilled engineers leave to places where they get
| their money's worth (i.e. not germany/eu).
| snowpid wrote:
| That shouldn't the USA as there are more people moving
| from there to Germany than vice versa.
| tormeh wrote:
| 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.
| dathinab wrote:
| honestly if you include other costs e.g. for acceptable
| health insurance, having children, eating reasonable
| healthy, general quality of live things etc. the sallies
| often aren't bad at all
|
| Sure if you are one of the best of the best and are
| willing to take high risk for high reward and in general
| give up QoL/Work live Balance then especially in SV you
| have better chances to make a lot of money.
|
| But for most skilled engineers they can get their money
| worth in the EU, through depending on their priorities
| and goals in live.
|
| Like to put it in context to have a similar quality of
| live in US I think I would need to earn around 50% more
| before tax and that is even through US has much less tax.
| Through that 50% more also would allow me more
| flexibility for reducing my QoL at the current time,
| invest it and long time have more money (or much less if
| you mess up). So again a question of priorities.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| Lots of people in this thread talking about low salaries
| in tech in the EU, but maybe it's the case the US is the
| outlier? And not even the US as a whole, more like SV?
|
| Are there any other countries where tech engineers are
| among the best paid workers?
| pas wrote:
| yes, someone mentioned Belarus, but also likely in
| Hungary and India too.
| attendant3446 wrote:
| Definitely the latter.
| monomers wrote:
| 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.
| pas wrote:
| For anyone who is unfamiliar with the German unions: job
| security is really extremely high.
|
| For example even when a larger company gets acquired (or
| a merger happens) it could take a decade to consolidate
| overlapping services.
| croisillon wrote:
| german speaking countries
| _nalply wrote:
| 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.
| polotics wrote:
| 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 Osterreich) 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
| petesergeant wrote:
| Those are the EU plate letters for each fwiw
| peterpost2 wrote:
| What is Dach mentality? I've googled the definition but can't
| seem anything that fits in this context.
| intunderflow wrote:
| Germany, Austria, Swiss (swiss-german) mentality
|
| In a nutshell: German speakers mentality
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| But I mean what is that mentality
| jeffrallen wrote:
| 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-mentality company. There are
| hundreds of niche categories where they dominate the
| market, including machine tools, forging, factory
| automation, etc.
|
| But don't write off DACH: there are plenty of companies
| in DACH that run circles around their competitors by
| blending typically DACH traits with agility.
| mathverse wrote:
| 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.
| fransje26 wrote:
| > they are so much stuck up with their need to "speak
| french"
|
| But.. ..why would you want to speak anything else? Who
| settles for the mediocre?
| fransje26 wrote:
| > But don't write off DACH: there are plenty of companies
| in DACH that run circles around their competitors by
| blending typically DACH traits with agility.
|
| For future career possibilities worth investigating,
| would you care to name a few good examples/companies you
| are aware of?
| digiou wrote:
| Extreme frugality and risk aversion, cash (and revenue)
| is the only KPI to success, digitalization = just make it
| a PDF and don't change the process thus any process is
| still equally slow.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Cheap. Loving embrace of arbitrary rules.
|
| In a stable manufacturing business, it's a superpower. In
| tech, not so much.
| nairboon wrote:
| Probably the old-school mentality of pay hierarchies:
| Managers must earn more than subordinates. Thus if the salary
| expectation of a high skilled engineer is higher than some of
| the management class, it's often viewed as obscene. Usually
| as an engineer you achieve certain salary levels only with
| additional management duties.
| mathverse wrote:
| Not only that but them being stubborn and with a
| superiority complex. DACH companies rule EE with their
| capital and often manage to prototype and execute very much
| innovative features focused on convenience in the EE region
| (with local engineers etc). But this will never transform
| into something bigger because management wont allow non
| DACH people to assume executive roles + conservative market
| in their countries.
| nextos wrote:
| This is a very accurate, and very depressing, summary of
| why EU is stuck since the 2000s.
|
| Most EU tech and non-tech companies, with some notable
| exceptions like Spotify, have this mentality.
| mathverse wrote:
| It's an interesting phenomena but to be honest you need a
| leader with a vision to change the course of history.
| Circa 2006-2012 everyone orbiting the DACH sphere of
| influence believed they need to speak german even in tech
| jobs and then due to USA's influence and huge market we
| realized we actually dont give a crap about DACH that
| much. Thus it spawned companies in EE,Baltics and
| everywhere else with a focus on mostly american market.
|
| And then all of a sudden due to lack of workers and other
| factors even DACH began to change and basically accepted
| English as the defacto working language in tech.
|
| Unfortunately it's a small change, too little too late as
| they say. Without proper transeuropean companies and
| unified market we will never be able to challenge
| competitors from Asia let alone the USA.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| What a silly thing. A good manager is worth quite a lot,
| but most of them aren't and a mediocre engineer is worth
| way more than a mediocre manager.
| qwertox wrote:
| DACH means Germany (D), Austria (A) and Switzerland (CH).
| Data is _not_ the new oil, and this gets reflected in how
| much engineers earn.
|
| Though companies like the Schwarz Gruppe or OEDIV tend to
| understand their value so I don't think parent's comment is
| valid.
| morsch wrote:
| > 50-60k/pa for engineers
|
| Is that, like, actual information, or just an educated guess
| based on some industry average.
| dathinab wrote:
| it's definitely not industry average
|
| at least for jobs which often are referred to as engineers
| (through legally speaking are not as enginer is a protected
| title having little to do with software development)
|
| maybe for jobs of people which mainly idk. replace hardware
| in servers all day but don't really administrate the servers
| at all
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| That's definitely the kind of salary you'd be looking at
| after an undergraduate tech degree in Austria or secondary
| cities in Germany.
| throwaway215234 wrote:
| > Seriously DACH mentality and influence has been devastating
| on serious tech development in Europe
|
| German corporations (and politics) are full of bean counters,
| bureaucrats and underachievers. It's filled with people who
| love to talk, excessively plan, draw flowcharts and build
| frameworks - essentially everything except getting shit done.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| German shit is done in Poland, Romania, and Belarus, and for
| less than 50-60k EUR pa.
| mathverse wrote:
| No longer true. 40-60k would be reasonable in those
| countries as well.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| Yeah but don't count on more. Belarusians are quite
| desperate with current geopolitics, can easily push them
| below 40k.
| arianvanp wrote:
| 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 one day lead to talk about
| implementations.
|
| It represents to me everything that is wrong with the EU today. A
| bureaucratic monster that can't decide how to talk about things
| or come to any form of alignment.
| intunderflow wrote:
| Can be shown by how everyone who actually produces cloud
| services of value quit Gaia-X very quickly
|
| Scaleway published an entire blog post on why they quit:
| https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/full-steam-ahead-towards-a-...
| jimkoen wrote:
| > It represents to me everything that is wrong with the EU
| today. A bureaucratic monster that can't decide how to talk
| about things or come to any form of alignment.
|
| I think that the EU can very well find a consensus when it
| wants to, going so far to push for legislature that will be
| clearly thrown out by the ECJ or HUDOC (see Chat Control for
| great example).
|
| It's just that we also have a lot of "token projects" which
| serve for virtual signaling for topics where there is a lack of
| domestic competence. Gaia-X is one of these things, the idea of
| a "european cloud" as laughable to begin with, due to
| dependence on foreign technologies to facilitate it.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yup https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-
| dis...
| opentokix wrote:
| Gaia-X is a place where the hasbeens of the yesteryear can
| poison any reasonable developent made by saying "We have always
| done it this way".
| p1esk wrote:
| 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/
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| szszrk wrote:
| That's exactly what is going on nowadays, anyway. In Poland
| we have Chmura Krajowa (national cloud), aimed at public,
| non profit and finance companies. It's basically more
| controlled local Azure and GPC region.
| snowpid wrote:
| In Polish people don't use Cloud but Chmura?
| bartekpacia wrote:
| It depends. If we're talking about e.g. GCP we use
| "cloud", but Chmura Krajowa is a Polish product and it
| has a Polish name, so we use "chmura". We basically use
| the original name in this context.
| snowpid wrote:
| Interesting. In Germany government uses the word cloud .
| Not Wolke. TIL something new.
| szszrk wrote:
| Both, but chmura is a non-controvertial and easy
| translation.
| progbits wrote:
| 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
| haukem wrote:
| Deutsche Telekom hosted Microsoft Office 365 for some years
| in Germany as a German cloud offering.
|
| I think this was the press release: https://www.telekom.com
| /de/medien/medieninformationen/detail...
|
| This was a Microsoft 365 cloud hosted and operated by
| Deutsche Telekom in Germany. It was more expensive than the
| global version and had less features. It often took some
| years till new features were introduced.
|
| They stopped this offering some years ago, I think they did
| not get as many customers as they expected, most of the
| German customers used the global version.
| mns wrote:
| Open Telekom Cloud is a whitelabeled AWS, so they are
| still doing this, but with other technologies.
| haukem wrote:
| This press release from 2020 says Open Telekom Cloud is
| from Software and Hardware from Huawei.
|
| https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-
| sich...
|
| Do you have any source that they switched to AWS?
| cyberax wrote:
| > What's to stop an American cloud hyperscaler from
| creating a "properly patriated" subsidiary that it simply
| licenses the tech to?
|
| Nothing. Amazon already does that in China, their
| subsidiary licenses the tech and support services from the
| US company.
| mr_toad wrote:
| They might if there was a market for it. But who wants to
| pay a premium to be free of US influence? America hasn't
| gone full-on Gilead yet.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| As I get older and a little lazier, sometimes I think I might
| want to find a way to get a completely pointless job that
| gives me a paycheck where all I have to do is write documents
| that nobody ever reads.
|
| Then I look at something like this Gaia-X "milestones" list
| and think "Meh, this is probably not the job for me..."
| elric wrote:
| I was involved in an EU funded software research project
| related to air quality [1] around ~2008. The bureaucracy
| was very real, we had to produce a boatload of paperwork
| (including a literal, on paper, printout of the source
| code, for some reason?). But aside from the weird paperwork
| overhead, we were fairly free in how we approached the
| project, and we got a lot of shit done. This was software
| R&D in the true sense. I don't know what happened to the
| project after I left, but I suspect the universities
| involved benefited from the research and some of it was
| probably spun off.
|
| That is to say: it's not all just paperwork and paychecks,
| it can be greatly rewarding work.
|
| [1] Strangely enough I was just talking about another
| aspect of air quality in another HN thread. Never noticed
| this was a theme in my life before.
| karaterobot wrote:
| [raises hand]
|
| It's not so bad. Looooong lunches.
| macintux wrote:
| Any suggestions on how to land such a role? I've had the
| last 48 hours off work, which I think is the longest
| stretch in the last month, but I'll be working this
| evening, and tomorrow, and tomorrow evening, and Tuesday,
| and Tuesday evening, and...
| p1esk wrote:
| Work for government.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Look for companies that are funded as part of long,
| multi-year projects. I have been funded by institutions
| like the NSF, NIH, and a bunch of smaller philanthropic
| foundations. After leaving SaaS-world, I just went to
| LinkedIn and looked for a non-profit doing work I can
| stand behind.
|
| The thing that makes it so chill is that we work on very
| long time scales, based on the length of whatever NIH (or
| similar) grant we're on. If you're used to building
| things in the private sector, the comparison I make is
| that what took us 3 months at my previous YC startup
| would take us 3 years at the non-profit where I work now.
| A lot of that is because there are many moving pieces to
| coordinate, and because you have to be careful when
| dealing with sensitive data and research ethics. Blah
| blah blah, at least part of it is also because the
| breakneck pace of VC-funded software hasn't got its
| fingers into this pie, at least not yet.
|
| Downside: pay cut. I make $18k less than I did 4 years
| ago, despite having gotten promoted in this new spot.
| Also, it can be frustrating trying to actually produce
| software at a company with no culture for it. You find
| out that software delivery practices are something people
| have to learn, and at places that aren't software-
| oriented, they don't know about them.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| "Right now it's only a goal, but I think I can get the money
| to make it into an intention, and later turn it into an
| outcome." -- European Woody Allen
| arianvanp wrote:
| 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.
| n_ary wrote:
| It takes time to shape and convince people and form
| frameworks to move forward.
| nradov wrote:
| When there is actual value in forming frameworks then the
| key stakeholders don't need to be convinced. They just
| get to work on writing and building.
| nextos wrote:
| 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 on its way to become an open-air
| museum. What happened?"_
|
| https://x.com/MichaelAArouet/status/1827588190342979934
|
| Some of the top replies:
|
| _" Bureaucracy, Regulation, Aversion to Innovation, Green
| myth of degrowth etc happened"_
|
| _[...] Europe's challenges are significant, but not
| insurmountable. To regain its edge, Europe will need to
| foster a more dynamic business environment, streamline
| regulations, and encourage risk-taking in its startup
| culture. Without these changes, Europe may continue to fall
| behind, watching as the U.S. and China shape the future of
| technology._
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| While most Western governments have gotten increasingly good at
| communicating with their citizens (i.e. making their web sites
| and forms accessible in human language, rather than bureaucrat
| language), and often even go so far as to offer versions in
| "Simple English" or local-language equivalents, the EU seems to
| be going the opposite way.
|
| I'd consider myself reasonably accustomed to and able to deal
| with bureaucracy and formal language, and still find every
| interaction with official EU sites massively off-putting. Now
| imagine someone who isn't a native speaker in any of the EU's
| languages, mentally impaired, or generally quickly feels
| overwhelmed by bureaucracy.
| Certhas wrote:
| 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
| apropos for what the EU is and for how it came about.
|
| I am not defending this state of affairs. Simply pointing out
| that it's a category error to compare it to national
| governments. I think it would be good if we had more of an EU
| state. It seemed to be heading there 25ish years ago. But the
| nation states do have little appetite to cede authority to
| the central institutions, so that's probably not on the
| table. And it's also undeniable that as a coordination
| mechanism the EU has been spectacularly successful. The fact
| that people treat it as a national government is proof of
| that.
| seydor wrote:
| The EU is a bureaucratic body so the production of bureaucracy
| counts as success
| nosianu wrote:
| I used to work for a company that gets Gaia-X money. I will not
| mention concrete names, so you'll have to believe this
| anonymous source, me, choosing to remain vague to not be
| identified.
|
| All we did for Gaia-X was the paperwork to get the money. It
| had zero impact on anything we actually did. Somebody I know
| who knew what other firms receiving Gaia-X funds did told me
| the others did even less than us. We certainly did not take it
| very seriously, apart from it being a great source of free
| money, and I say that as someone who reported quite a few
| developer hours for Gaia-X.
|
| I think at most this project is about sending some money to
| some European firms, with little regard for actual outcomes,
| kind of as a concealed subsidy. I'm not sure if those who
| started the project actually wanted that outcome in the first
| place? A lot of these things are just ways to use the current
| system to achieve goals that the system does not directly
| allow. It could just be incompetence, but it could also be the
| case that _somebody_ knows exactly what they created with
| Gaia-X and is perfectly okay with the outcome.
| matthewmorgan wrote:
| A lot of busy-work for a lot of highly overpaid bureaucrats.
| gman83 wrote:
| EU: 440 million people, 60,000 EU bureaucrats. US: 330 million
| people, 2 MILLION+ US federal employees. Maybe what they need
| is more bureaucrats, so we don't get half-assed programs like
| this.
| redleader55 wrote:
| If you were not being sarcastic, it's not a fair comparison.
| Those 66k EU bureaucrats only deal with some of the stuff.
| You'll have to add some of the public administration
| employees from each of the countries that deal with things
| that in US would be considered "federal".
| znpy wrote:
| Iirc a while ago i saw an article about lidl offering it services
| (mainly server collocation) and the price was indeed interesting.
|
| Also, if lidl plays this right, there are a bunch of engineers in
| Europe, currently working for faangs in places like Dublin and
| London, highly skilled and and quite desperate to go and live
| somewhere with a lower cost of living.
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| 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
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| 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.
| kergonath wrote:
| Europeans are mostly comfortable giving money to American
| companies, and there is not as much of a culture difference
| as with Asia, so there is no need for separate offerings
| specially for Europe. All big tech companies have several
| subsidiaries that seem to be doing quite well. It's true that
| there are not as many European startups than American ones,
| but the market is there.
| namaria wrote:
| Which creates some juicy margin niches for smart developers
| to make a killing as independent contractors.
| dathinab wrote:
| even if it has struggled it still is a lot of purchasing
| power
|
| and cloud is an essential service for many companies
|
| and how things played out in recent years has created
| increasing insensitive to not use Amazone/Google/MS Cloud
|
| but it's marked which isn't really that visible on HN and
| similar US focused sites
| layer8 wrote:
| Is "Asia" a well-defined market? Honestly curious.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >European market has always seemed like a tertiary market
| compared to the US and Asia
|
| Well, this isn't even remotely accurate on the numbers. For
| virtually every big tech company the US is about half of the
| market, Europe about 30%, then ~15% Asian Pacific, and give
| or take a bit in the rest of the world.
|
| Given that most large tech companies are locked out of China
| or quickly leaving the only large country with comparable
| purchasing power to Europe in Asia is Japan.
| nradov wrote:
| It's about revenue growth opportunities, not current market
| share. Europe in general is largely stagnant, and seems
| likely to trend down due to the demographic time bomb.
|
| In Asia, South Korea is already comparable to Japan as a
| technology market (but also stagnating). The big Asia-
| Pacific growth opportunities are going to be in India,
| Malaysia, and Philippines.
| lossolo wrote:
| Do you compete in some kind of a niche? There is OVH in EU.
| RainaRelanah wrote:
| And Scaleway (Online.net/Iliad). And Hetzner.
| dathinab wrote:
| and OTC (Open Telecom Cloud)
|
| But I wouldn't say it's a niche if you look at the size of
| the EU even if it "hasn't being doing that well" it's still
| a lot of purchasing power
|
| And especially in recent years there has been an increasing
| push away from US cloud providers and this somewhat evening
| out the playing field of "newcomers" compared to Amazone,
| MS, Google.
|
| Also because HN is quite US/SV focused and differences in
| business culture especially compared to SV about e.g.
| businesses doing blog post and similar you don't really see
| much at all from this marked on HN. But that doesn't mean
| it's not a big marked.
| haukem wrote:
| The Open Telekom Cloud was at least in the beginning
| running on Huawei hardware and software.
|
| Here is a press release from 2020: https://www.open-
| telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sich...
|
| Title: Open Telekom Cloud - die sichere Cloud made in
| Europe
|
| > Im Rahmen der Innovationspartnerschaft liefert Huawei
| mit dem Cloud-Betriebssystem Huawei OpenStack
| Distribution eine zentrale Softwarekomponente der Open
| Telekom Cloud.
|
| English translation: Title: Open Telekom Cloud - the
| secure cloud made in Europe.
|
| > As part of the innovation partnership, Huawei provides
| a central software component of the Open Telekom Cloud
| with its cloud operating system, Huawei OpenStack
| Distribution.
| dathinab wrote:
| I know but AFIK they have moved await from it.
|
| Software wise they where anyway OpenStack based, which is
| a trusteable open source project Huawei is a major
| contributor to but other major contributors include AT&T,
| Canonical, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Intel, Red Hat,
| IBM. This made moving away from Huawei quite viable.
|
| Hardware wise they also moved away from Huawei, but I'm
| not sure if this apply to all data-centers of them. But
| AFIK at least some data centers are Huawei free.
|
| Or at least that is what they told some of their business
| partners which wouldn't have used them if they still used
| Huawei hardware in the data center that specific
| bussiness partner uses AFIK.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| You're absolutely right: a huge, underserved market exists. Are
| you hiring? I'd love to work on a European big cloud
| alternative..!
| stavros wrote:
| I use Hetzner cloud not because it's European, but because it's
| great.
| elric wrote:
| Also because it's cheap.
| stavros wrote:
| That's a bonus!
| jedisct1 wrote:
| Same for me with OVH and Scaleway.
|
| Way cheaper than AWS and friends, and they just work.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| 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.
| singhrac wrote:
| 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.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| 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.
| 9dev wrote:
| 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.
| bengale wrote:
| What are the other 20% with you for?
|
| What is the benefit that your customers see in using an
| European cloud?
| vesinisa wrote:
| As far as I know, the companies / service providers would
| love to be able tell their customers that 100% of their data
| is only stored and processed in the EU. It makes everything
| GDPR-related simpler for companies, and could be turned into
| a good advertisement for consumers.
| GordonS wrote:
| I'm guessing so they can keep data of EU customers stored
| within the EU.
| bengale wrote:
| You can do that with AWS regions though.
| TheTxT wrote:
| 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.
| sealeck wrote:
| 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.
| mkesper wrote:
| 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/
| haukem wrote:
| 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. ;-)
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| I doubt anyone who was ever customer of their detail telecom
| services would free-willingly use any services from Telekom
| ever again.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I 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.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| > (which is a rather cringy term imo, as it implies that
| something as big as the EU isn't sovereign) angles to this.
|
| How will the sovereign EU stop the US from exercising the CLOUD
| act over the data stored in AWS in Europe?
| input_sh wrote:
| 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 necessarily a
| bad thing.
|
| China's tech is already self-contained, to a lesser extent so
| is Russia's, the US is investing a lot in semiconductors just
| in case something happens to Taiwan, and India has already
| banned pretty much every Chinese app. The EU, on the other
| hand, is completely reliant on the US for core tech
| infrastructure and trying to address that.
|
| None of it makes sense economically, but essentially every
| superpower is doing something towards at least making it a
| possibility to "self-contain" their own tech sector. I don't
| even think this has anything to do with the current political
| climate (Russia-Ukraine war included), I think it's more in
| preparation for when climate change consequences start ramping
| up.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| > 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 operated from USA, e.g. CloudFront, but that won't
| be too hard to replace.
| 9dev wrote:
| 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...
| kkfx wrote:
| 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 sovereign computing and Gaia-X
| (a failed project anyway) it's the apex of such disgraced model.
| Oh BTW to be sovereign ALSO DESKTOP must be FLOSS, witch is
| almost not the case in any public administration. The hw since
| it's full of fw to the point of being de facto connected black
| box, network hw included, mush be open or state-made. Witch is
| not the case in the 99.9% periodic of the cases.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| 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.
| WA wrote:
| 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?
| mvanbaak wrote:
| While 'for free' is something we all want (who wants to
| spend their money right) it is not a sustainable business
| case. And with prices of it/server/hosting in the EU being
| a lot higher then in other parts of the world, what you
| want is not going to be easy to find.
| kkfx wrote:
| it's cloying how people (individuals and SMEs) forget
| that in the present time in vast part of the world we
| have FTTH with enough bandwidth and low enough ping
| that's MUCH better than a cheap VPS or someone else
| server. The only needed thing is a fixed IP, witch is
| pretty available anyway.
|
| A homeserver is much cheaper, not less monitored, much
| powerful and much more flexible than living on someone
| else computer. Since IPv6 it's not an option but a need,
| it's about time to IMPOSE a public global per host to any
| ISP, without clauses to avoid legally hosting a server
| because hey, that's how internet work, it's not a damn
| mainframe.
| mvanbaak wrote:
| Yes, self/home hosting is an option for some. but
| maintaining a server is not as easy as you make it sound.
| Power, cooling, noise, spare hardware, network etc are
| all factors that are taken care of by a provider, that
| are not easy to replicate.
|
| And even if you can self-host, fighting against (D)DOS
| attacks is not something I have seen done at any consumer
| ISP.
| kkfx wrote:
| At a personal|SME level? Who might want do DDOS John
| Smith or Pop's store? How much iron you need for such
| usage? That's without counting the various "datacenters
| horror stories" about how badly many providers are really
| without appearing.
|
| My homeserver is a simple NixOS, so I have to maintain
| just a config, easy to replicate anytime without manual
| setups or complex orchestration, it's a small celeron
| machine with 32Gb ram and two sata classic disks + 2 nvme
| on a PCIe adapter card, total cost around 300EUR few
| years ago, cooling is juts the home cooling, power it's
| free on sunny days (domestic p.v.) and otherwise it's
| still cheaper than the cheapest VPS, plus it can do much
| more. It's run my HA, Asterisk (for having some VoIP
| numbers on my deskphone and diverting call to my mobile
| when I'm not at home, nothing more), a small video-
| surveillance setup, fetchmail+maildrop+notmuch to serve
| mails via muchsync, etc etc etc a minimal equivalent VPS
| setup would costing me around 100+EUR/month, performing
| much less. If my server die I have a spare
| motherboard+cpu a little bit outdated but powerful enough
| drives are both mirrors from different brands, I have
| some cold spare anyway shared if needed with my main
| desktop etc in case of a complete crash I have my config,
| few kb of text, and I can replicate it anywhere. For
| personal usage is MUCH more than any classic hosted
| setup.
|
| The only real issues is for most:
|
| - knowing the software stack they need, witch is rare,
| because yes maintain a classic Arch or FreeBSD server
| it's much less comfy than NixOS/Guix System especially if
| you never heard of them but heard a gazillion of
| recommendations to use k*s or docker, proxmox and co AT
| HOME some even trying on raspi sbc...
|
| - some minor legal and hw things, depending on your home
| and how much the temp mount in summer inside.
|
| Essentially for most it's just about knowing the sw stack
| witch is a big issue since no university seems to be
| interesting in really teaching FLOSS nowadays and most
| professors themselves have very little practical
| knowledge.
| layer8 wrote:
| Not for free, but for negligible cost.
| kkfx wrote:
| Like Schrems sentences you can't get that from USA companies,
| legally, but you can't get technically for ANY third party,
| because you are not on their servers, and no one else is
| there to control them.
|
| How can you verify what any company state in a GDPR nightmare
| letter response? I've sent one time ago where a bank asking
| me to drop an RSA physical OTP for an Android app, that alone
| violate PSD2 (since the app it's not only a soft-token but
| also allow to operate on the same device, the reason why
| banking piracy was a thing again and more then ever), they
| respond accordingly to the law, but I can only choose to
| trust or not their response, I can't prove anything and I
| have nothing tangible to push some public inquiry on them.
|
| Oh, you might feel protected if you upload ONLY encrypted
| contents, at least feel protected for an unknown amount of
| time, potentially very long but potentially not enough long.
|
| So no, you can choose to trust someone else, but it's a
| choice that demand trust, you can't verify, so it's a
| vulnerability.
| opentokix wrote:
| Seeing how they don't even seem to have a terraform module, I
| would say this will not grow to anything.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| Lidl has their own IT company that is not mentioned in the
| article as far as I can see: https://it.schwarz/ (linked from the
| "Digits" page, though)
| bubblesnort wrote:
| Their self-checkouts run MS-Windows 7. That's just one step up
| from Vista. Their payment terminals run ancient OpenSSL
| versions. Their website until recently blocked searches for
| products whenever a substring matched a generic catch-all SQL
| injection blacklist.
|
| And their in-store discounts require you to have an Android or
| Apple device and install their proprietary app on it from
| Google Play or iTunes, and sign up for an account using your
| e-mail address and personal cellphone number (landlines and
| non-geographical numbers are disallowed). It also collects your
| data and sends it to Google and Facebook.
|
| This is the worst IT of any store I've seen.
| qwertox wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.oediv.de/en/
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMFo74rArBw
|
| * Yes, Oetker, the pizza-maker.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| > der8auer posted a video
|
| Does anyone remember 'derBauer', the Flash god?
| d_k_f wrote:
| Every single time I see the YouTube handle with the "8" in it
| linked/posted...
|
| There are a few videos of their previous homepage designs
| available on YouTube, it's an amusing window into the past.
| Right below the first one was another video about 2Advanced,
| which I also hadn't heard of since 20? years.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/derbauer-2003
| Phelinofist wrote:
| I remember a night some moons ago the update of our prod system
| hosted by OEDIV was scheduled. I spent most of the time in
| calls with them walking them through the disgusting number of
| installers for our components and supporting them with issues
| during upgrade. It took from 10pm to 10am the next day.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| And there I was hoping to find that Lidl had seen the light and
| started to sell some type of home server under one of their many
| 'brand names' - Medion (not only Lidl but still), Silvercrest,
| Parkside, etc. A solidly built box of hardware with a reliable
| power supply, some slots for storage. A pre-installed Linux
| distribution with Proxmox on top, a container with Nextcloud (all
| German companies so they'd probably be willing to participate in
| this project). Some optional extras which make the thing function
| as wireless AP and router, media player, IoT hub etc. A number of
| downloadable container images for running your own
| mail/XMPP/Torrent/Blog/Search/Media/etc. services. A distributed
| encrypted backup option were you get to use other's storage for
| your backup purposes just as long as you offer your own storage
| for that purpose. _That_ would be true 'sovereign computing'.
|
| Hm, maybe I should pitch this to them instead.
| elric wrote:
| > A distributed encrypted backup option were you get to use
| other's storage for your backup purposes just as long as you
| offer your own storage for that purpose.
|
| Add an option to enable encrypted backups with Shamir's Secret
| Sharing [1] to some of your closest friends/relatives, so that
| a few of them together can decide to decrypt your stuff in the
| event of your untimely demise.
|
| Gimme a shout if you're hiring ;-)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing
| imhoguy wrote:
| Should call it Lidl Cloud :)
| oneplane wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure how this is something you can 'shift' to.
| It doesn't compete with the three big ones at all (not in
| features, not in price and not in scalability, and it has no
| integration or ecosystem to speak of), but if we were to see it
| for what it is, it might be more of a competitor to DigitalOcean.
|
| If what you need is a DigitalOcean, then yes, you could shift to
| this. But when you need a DigitalOcean, you're probably in the
| wrong place if you were using an AWS/GCP/AZ instead, which is
| also where this article seems to create a failed comparison.
|
| The play itself does make enough sense, there is a significant
| duplication in effort across companies, even if you're not doing
| hyperscaler things and using 'enterprise hardware', the people,
| processes and technology involved are pretty much the same in all
| places (which means you wonder what value is added by doing it
| internally at all -- spoiler it's usually legacy reasons, legacy
| governance and aversion to change).
|
| When there are enough regions and scalability (capacity, higher
| resolution consumption pricing, shorter cycle times) you could
| probably use this as a datacenter-in-the-cloud type of deal,
| which while 15 years too late is definitely still an improvement
| in so many businesses. We have some larger companies like
| Hetzner, OVH and Leaseweb which also try to pivot to more of an
| XaaS but that in itself is just adding to duplication and a
| fractured ecosystem. Will this actually work out? Only time will
| tell...
| haukem wrote:
| 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 it there are some older press releases.
| vander_elst wrote:
| Interesting fact, it seems that their price catalog is a PDF
| https://www.stackit.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/240814_STA...
| and not the usual price calculator other providers offer
| bastawhiz wrote:
| That feels on-brand for an organization that's still selling
| to each customer rather than providing a self service
| offering. If you need to talk to a person to get their
| services they'll surely be helping you understand your
| pricing.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Wait, are we that close to eradication by biomass eating killer
| robots?
| vander_elst wrote:
| Aren't there already European could providers? Scaleway, OVH,
| hetzner, what are they missing that only digital schwarz can
| provide?
| vander_elst wrote:
| Has anyone first hand experience with gaia-x? Has anyone
| interacted with the association? On a very first look it seems
| like a public fund black hole, more and more money gets in
| nothing comes out, can anyone confirm/deny?
| rizzir wrote:
| Actually Lidl (or the mother company Schwarz Group to be more
| precise) tried to implement SAP and could not get it to work. So
| after burning more than 500 Mio. Euro they oficially quit with
| SAP in 2018 and decided to invest a lot in their own systems,
| both infrastructure and software. So in 2021 they bought XM
| Cyber, a cloud security specialist company from Israel and guess
| who is a big client of this company that is now owned by the
| Schwarz Group: SAP
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