[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 : 430 points
Date : 2024-08-25 16:35 UTC (1 days 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.
| mantas wrote:
| Protectionism and self-sufficiency is the same thing. And
| so agree it's a good thing.
| waihtis wrote:
| > Protectionism and self-sufficiency is the same thing
|
| please revisit the dictionary
| mantas wrote:
| There's no local industry to protect if you ain't self-
| sufficiency. And it's damn hard to protect self-
| sufficiency long term without protectionism if possible
| at all.
| waihtis wrote:
| protectionism is an optional downstream branch of self-
| sufficiency - being self-sufficient does not
| automatically imply that it will devolve into
| protectionism
| mantas wrote:
| But without protectionism self-sufficiency is very likely
| to fall apart. Be it Chinese manufacturing or EU
| agriculture.
| 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
| mantas wrote:
| Many Chinese local companies took advantage of west
| technology they acquired in joint companies and Chinese
| government kicked off western companies.
|
| Preventing a good part of western big tech from entering
| the market was protectionism too.
| 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."
| mantas wrote:
| ,,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.
| 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.
| stefs wrote:
| i try to stay away from the ready-made high protein stuff
| because just mixing regular stuff with protein power is much
| more cost effective.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| You'll know because they'll inform you with a paper leaflet.
| jamesblonde wrote:
| The Ballad of Lidl (and Aldi) - a classic
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL7jyXCQ2Zc
| 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.
| jamesblonde wrote:
| OVH is quite good, actually. We are using their K8S
| offering and S3 to build a service. It works well.
| liotier wrote:
| The fire occurred in their old datacenter, built in an era
| when OVH was aggressively cheap and experimental. It is in
| no way representative of today's OVH.
| 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?
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| I expect nothing less from SAP
| Aeolun wrote:
| Their pricing page is funny. Can I have 2 RAMs please?
|
| My physics teacher would get spitting mad at them for not
| specifying the unit.
|
| Of course their billing is also 'hours'. Instead of 'hourly'.
| 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.
| manquer wrote:
| They license the software to run the cloud , they don't act
| run it . Basically a white labeled solution for DC software
| like OpenStack
|
| This is not a new idea and is how Azure(or AWS) always
| operated in China. The Azure Fabric software is licensed to
| DCs owned and operated by 21vianet a Chinese company.
| Microsoft has no control over what happens there.
|
| No amount of legal[1] US pressure can make Microsoft give
| access to those DCs as they don't have it in the first
| place
|
| This is why you cannot just provision hardware in China in
| AWS/Azure, you have to enter into separate contract with
| the Chinese operator first and comply with any government
| restrictions that the Chinese state may require
|
| [1] illegal/unauthorized tapping is a different matter and
| preventing that is not the intent of sovereign clouds .
| bjornsing wrote:
| Thanks for explaining. But it sounds like the European
| version will be less watertight. European customers will
| be able to "store sensitive data and run critical
| workloads on AWS infrastructure that is operated and
| supported by _AWS employees_ located in and residents of
| the European Union (EU)" [1].
|
| 1. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-
| european-s...
| 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.
| snowpid wrote:
| Please think about context. GP thinks, there was a weak
| European economy, esspecially about Germany in the last
| 20 years. This was not the case and even during the
| current struggle in Germany (not German swiss), more
| people from the US move here
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I meant that the European economy is not growing; Germany
| has had 0 or negative GDP growth for about a year now.
| People move from the US to Europe for a lot of reasons,
| not necessarily because of economic opportunities. I
| think the most common kind of expat I see is someone who
| works remotely for a US-based company and enjoys the
| relatively lower cost of living in Europe. This is not an
| indication of strong European growth, it's an indication
| of the buying power of the dollar compared to the Euro
| 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.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Quality of life is pretty high in the US for salaried
| workers (health insurance is good at these jobs usually).
| Work/life balance depends on the company. If you work in
| a low CoL city, life is very nice (compared to larger,
| more expensive cities like SF and NYC)
| 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.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Belarus is irrelevant since 2020.
| pas wrote:
| in what sense? it was irrelevant even before that too.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I don't think Silicon Valley has really been the standard
| bearer for software engineering jobs in at least 5 years,
| I'd reckon as far as 10 years. The pandemic also has
| hollowed them out as well. You can find high paying
| software engineering jobs in plenty of low cost of living
| states these days. That city has very sharp problems that
| it is failing to solve and when given a choice, many
| people choose not to live/move there
| 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.
| croisillon wrote:
| you forgot Ibiza ;) "countries with a german speaking
| majority" might be more correct
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| 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.
| 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
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| 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...
| petesergeant wrote:
| OK fine, it's the international plate code for
| Switzerland: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationa
| l_vehicle_regist...
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Is this why so many German companies expand to Japan :?
| 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.
| user90131313 wrote:
| Also by default DACH companies are very limiting to
| foreigners to go higher. Sure they hire a lot of
| engineers but you will never see overachiever Indian CEO
| or Asian CEO or even board members.
| __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.
| eurg wrote:
| Can confirm, and there are worse offers prevalent than
| this. However, that's industry average, I don't know about
| the specific companies in question.
| 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.
| Numerlor wrote:
| Eh I'm in s similar country and around 30k for a more
| senior position is the normal
| antonkochubey wrote:
| I'm in Latvia and senior developers are paid 60-90k here.
| majoe wrote:
| From my experience this is true for big German corporations,
| but is it really different for big corporations from other
| countries?
|
| While I agree, that DACH mentality in big German corporations
| "has been devastating on serious tech development" at these
| companies, I don't see how this would affect the whole of
| Europe. It's an opportunity for other countries/companies to
| do better.
| Aeolun wrote:
| From my experience, this is true for big corporations
| anywhere. It seems that when a company reaches a certain
| size it becomes incapable of digging itself out of that
| hole.
| 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.
| biztos wrote:
| In Hungarian the people I know use felho and not cloud. I
| don't know what they say in actual IT circles but to my
| ears "cloud" sounds very awkward if stuck in a Hungarian
| sentence.
|
| https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felh%C5%91alap%C3%BA_sz%C3%
| A1m...
| 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
| vasco wrote:
| Isn't this how all the hyperscalers already run in China?
| alephnerd wrote:
| Yes. Though they increasingly own management as well.
|
| At this point Azure in China and AWS in China is a reskin
| around Tencent Cloud.
| trevyn wrote:
| This is actually quite funny. A sovereign cloud that they
| have no f-ing clue how to maintain without the
| mothership.
| progbits wrote:
| They get documentation and playbooks (which are pretty
| good), source code access, and of course direct channel
| to the "mothership" engineers for support.
|
| I'm sure early days will be painful but there is no
| reason for this not to work.
| 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?
| cyberpunk wrote:
| I've used it, it's a rebranded openstack, not aws.
| a012 wrote:
| They built it on OpenStack as a clone of AWS offerings
| cyberpunk wrote:
| And it's not actually too far off; couple rough edges,
| managed k8s is shit but everything mostly works (rds,
| ec2, s3, iam, ebs etc)
| 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.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| "Gilead" ?
| defrost wrote:
| _Republic of Gilead_ - fictional future fundamentalist
| theocracy version of the USofA
|
| https://the-handmaids-
| tale.fandom.com/wiki/Republic_of_Gilea...
| ahoka wrote:
| Unfortunately, every democracy is one election away from
| Gilead.
| donavanm wrote:
| The americans are already on this path
| https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-
| european-s....
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Or just plain old buy out any EU company that threathens to
| become successful with free reserve currency monopoly
| money.
| District5524 wrote:
| Maybe you are misunderstanding the gravity of this problem.
| Thanks to US Cloud Act and the Patriot Act and similar
| acts, there is no way any US citizen or any US company may
| EVER be involved in such projects. It's completely legal
| for the US to rely on extraterritorial jurisdiction
| leveraging any US companies and US citizens they have
| access to. But on the other hand, everyone else on out
| there will want to avoid that, so the only way to achieve
| that is to avoid involving any US citizens or companies for
| such sovereign projects. Google will not be able to solve
| it via subsidiaries, and no nice promises from Amazon, MS
| etc. will ever change it. Data sovereignity means all this.
| This will probably escalate a lot more, it might involve
| the financial infrastructure used (SWIFT) or even currency
| used in the process.
| scotty79 wrote:
| But then they'd have to obey laws and pay taxes and who
| wants that.
| 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.
| rblatz wrote:
| It looks like an example of perfect being the enemy of
| good. So afraid to make any mistake that they end up
| saying and doing nothing.
| 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._
|
| The EU has a lot of talent, but it lacks good leadership
| and good priorities.
| manquer wrote:
| Doesn't feel like that looking at Airbus and Boeing .
| signatoremo wrote:
| Only if you ignore the A380 debacle, or the bloat that
| A400 is. And then there is this - [0]
|
| Boeing makes the comparison easy for Airbus.
|
| [0]- https://spacenews.com/airbus-takes-a-charge-of-
| nearly-1-bill...
| manquer wrote:
| OP is EU has become an open air museum and all the good
| companies are now either American or Chinese.
|
| > Boeing makes the comparison easy for Airbus.
|
| What else to compare against this claim ?
|
| Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still
| miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have
| to offer in a very complex large scale industry. It is
| not just aerospace, even auto is still uber competitive,
| European manufactures are on par or perhaps better than
| anything Ford and GM have to offer. I am sure Europeans
| can come with good examples for every bad one.
|
| The point it is easy to paint a narrative however reality
| is lot more complex and doesn't match with sweeping
| generalization .
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Tech companies are getting insanely large valuations (I
| work in tech, and I think they're absurd). Europe doesn't
| have many large public tech companies, therefore Europe
| looks bad in terms of the "industries of the future"
|
| Plus a bunch of angry USians really irritated by the
| anti-trust stuff the EU has been doing (DMA etc).
| yfontana wrote:
| It's not even all tech either. Europe has some big
| players in silicon or biotech for example. It does
| however lack giants that introduced major disruptions in
| the way things are done, like cloud services, social
| networks, gig economy etc.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Not sure why this comment was downvoted / dead? ASML and
| Bayer come to mind.
| nextos wrote:
| IMHO, Airbus is a good counterexample of how EU could do
| things better.
|
| It's not perfect, but it's competitive and successful.
| Lots of countries contributed to its success, leaving
| (most) political issues aside.
| signatoremo wrote:
| > Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is
| still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the
| Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale
| industry
|
| First of all this is an empty statement that reeks of
| rhetoric. You don't have the full grasp of the picture to
| quantify if a company is miles ahead of the competition.
| Nobody does. Ahead in terms of what? Even if we want to
| compare companies in more specific aspects (for the sake
| of comparison) -- be it revenue, vision, innovation,
| supply chain, or efficiency -- Airbus is not ahead of the
| pack (which includes the likes of Lockheed Martin, GE
| Aerospace, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Rolls Royce).
|
| Airbus is half of the commercial airline market duopoly
| with Boeing. Customers really have no other choices.
| Airbus benefits when Boeing drops the ball. Simple as
| that.
| wuming2 wrote:
| 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 their spending of tax and debt
| money. Favorable outcome is the spending itself as a mean
| to subsidize this and that group.
| gizmo wrote:
| > 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?
| paulmd wrote:
| > 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.
|
| well, newer hardware is more efficient than older
| hardware, but the cost and e-waste resulting from
| replacing working but older hardware with new stuff is
| also non-zero.
|
| desktop usage sure, it makes sense to keep it a good long
| time. in datacenter, for many situations the cost is not
| worthwhile because DDR5 is substantially more expensive
| for a given tier of memory, pcie5 is way more expensive
| to implement, etc. the newer platforms are really also
| higher-cost ones, due to the complete collapse of moore's
| law and hitting the limits of physics in link rates etc.
| On the other hand power does matter and datacenters are
| highly power-constrained etc.
|
| it's completely application-specific, maybe if you do
| something that benefits from AVX-512 it's super worth it
| to upgrade, but for a lot of people it isn't, so it isn't
| something you can make a blanket regulation on when is
| the Right Time to upgrade.
|
| MLID has good guests on sometimes and this is an
| interesting one. Just before this he's talking about the
| power issues ("they just can't get power into the
| datacenters quickly enough to keep up with needs"), and
| he balances this concern against the massive price factor
| confounding the newer DDR5 stuff.
|
| https://youtu.be/evhkvGBljWI?t=588
|
| This engineer is a good reality check on a number of
| sacred cows with the AMD fanbase too - for example he is
| excruciatingly negative on AMD's Platform Vendor Lock. He
| was asked if the AI market dumped if they could scoop up
| any cheap gear and the answer is no - they don't use GPUs
| currently, and they wouldn't even be able to benefit from
| (eg) epyc cpus being dumped because of the platform lock.
| They are basically e-waste (by design) once they hit the
| market unless the provenance is known, and even then it
| destroys the market efficiency (by design) since now you
| have separate market for Dell Epyc, Lenovo Epyc, HPE
| Epyc, etc. Once the value drops, surplus places won't
| even bother parting them out and basically the channel
| for that stuff dries up and they become actual e-waste.
|
| And remember, this affects Ryzen processors now too, and
| platform lock is becoming much more common now as AMD
| makes the deals with OEM providers to get them into work
| desktops etc. In 5-10 years there probably won't be too
| much of a secondhand market left, largely because of
| AMD... and there's really not much that can be done since
| this is all hardware-locked/physically fused, short of
| just pushing a firmware which disables the whole thing.
|
| https://youtu.be/evhkvGBljWI?t=5667
|
| He also is not mincing any words about the
| Sinkclose/Ryzenfall exploits where an attacker can
| escalate from a VM guest to jailbreak/control of the PSP
| and BIOS persistence. Obviously that's a _huge, huge_
| issue for datacenter operators and it 's bullshit that
| AMD just basically decided not to patch it for older
| chips. The amount of handwaving and corporate defense the
| AMD fan club runs is silly, of course those are major
| issues and need to be patched ASAP.
|
| I remember the "root password lets you do root things,
| where's the exploit" and other insane cope/handwaving
| from HUB and GN and other tech media and social media.
| Shockingly, the people who actually own the servers
| aren't as keen on a VM guest being allowed to `sudo
| jailbreak psp`. And AMD just wanted to leave that
| unpatched on a huge number of chips, even though they had
| a working fix for that uarch they were already deploying!
|
| It's unfortunately the same level of security focus that
| AMD has given to other exploits like the cache ways
| vulnerability or the PREFETCH+cache eviction
| vulnerability ("worse than meltdown", discovered by one
| of the researchers who discovered meltdown), which AMD
| simply left unpatched and insecure, and ( _very_ )
| quietly told people to enable KPTI if they cared.
| "Insecure by default" corporate mindset.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evhkvGBljWI&t=3053s
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HxkLlmh4EY
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/849paz/assassi
| nat...
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/8goyuq/amd_ships_ct
| s_l...
| arkh wrote:
| Here is what happened: fear. Fear of patriotism getting
| us a second Hitler. Fear of war.
|
| This is IMO the root cause of why most public services
| are going down the drain in most Western Europe: people
| are there to work for themselves, not for their country.
| And the higher people are, the worst it is. Keep the
| status quo, embezzle if you can and shut your eyes to not
| see we're in economic and cultural wars against the rest
| of the world.
| 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.
| effie wrote:
| > it's also undeniable that as a coordination mechanism the
| EU has been spectacularly successful.
|
| I get you like the EU, but "spectacularly sucessful" isn't
| something many people would use. See covid response, and
| Ukraine war response. I would describe EU's mechanisms as
| moderately successful, i.e. somewhat better if states did
| everything on their own and bilaterally.
|
| > The fact that people treat it as a national government is
| proof of that.
|
| People with triste knowledge of how EU works do that. I do
| not think having most people in dark about how EU works is
| "spectacularly successful".
| admdly wrote:
| It all depends on what (or when) you're comparing
| coordination between European nations to. Having a less
| than ideal response to COVID or the war in Ukraine is
| vastly different than the openly hostile relations
| between European nations experienced prior to the
| foundation of the CoE/EEC/EU.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| 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 finally got sick of it in 1789
| and threw out this form of government in favor of a
| constitutional republic with a much stronger federalized
| government. Over 235 years later, that form of government
| still persists, though it's really showing its warts and
| the Constitution really needs a rewrite IMO, but despite
| its enormous flaws in the modern age it's still a lot
| better than the decentralized mess that is the EU. If you
| want real economic power in the face of competing
| superpowers, you need centralized policy and authority, not
| a bunch of semi-sovereign states all squabbling with each
| other and no one able to make a decision.
| nosianu wrote:
| 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 are focused on their own
| country. Sure we have plenty of firms active in many EU
| countries, but the level of support especially for new
| firms is orders of magnitude lower than in the US. From
| languages to social issues to attitude and expectations
| of common people, the EU is much more compartmentalized
| and it is significantly harder to have EU scale.
|
| So there are _two_ issues, and the side of the government
| is only one. The private sector and the investors have to
| do their job too and provide their own side of the EU
| wide infrastructure.
|
| We also don't have EU-wide media that needs to support
| the development of a shared EU identity, and many other
| things that unite the US population as one people. Much
| of that has to come from the private sector, from the
| rich, from investors. But apparently they don't think big
| enough here in the EU?
| shiroiushi wrote:
| 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.
| t43562 wrote:
| 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.
| Certhas wrote:
| I agree that a stronger central EU government, more like
| a federal state would be highly desirable and more
| efficient in many ways today.
|
| 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...
| 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.
| danpalmer wrote:
| It's not great, but this is far from abnormal. I worked for a
| company (not my current employer) that got R&D grants or tax
| breaks (I'm not sure which) from a government. The engineers
| were asked to come up with defined projects that could be
| justified as R&D in the way the government wanted. We did,
| and we actually did the projects, but might have done them
| anyway.
|
| Governments want to grow areas of their economies that they
| think could be beneficial. It's not acceptable to just hand
| out cash, and that can be trivially abused, so they put a
| little work around it to make sure the right companies are
| applying, and they tie it to token artifacts to make it seem
| more specific. Some companies commit outright fraud, but
| they're likely the minority and it's just a cost of the
| program, some put in a ton of effort and do it properly, and
| that's fine, and the majority just carry on doing the work
| they were already doing that the government was trying to
| encourage, and they'll hopefully be just a bit more
| successful as a result of the extra cash.
|
| It's all a bit silly, but I don't think it's malicious or
| actually that bad if you assume that the government isn't
| trying to achieve a specific outcome beyond growing a sector,
| despite what they say.
| girvo wrote:
| The Australian government R&DTI operates this way. Nearly
| every job I've had I've had to fill out specific timesheets
| and project descriptions to fit the gov's reqs to get the
| tax incentive.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| > some put in a ton of effort and do it properly, and
| that's fine...
|
| I mostly agree with you, except with this statement. It's
| not fine, the companies that fall into this trap are
| wasting their time and resources on something that is not a
| real opportunity. This is the main source of waste imho and
| unfortunately happens a lot in EU projects.
|
| Other than that, spot on.
| danielscrubs wrote:
| I've acquaintances who have done similar things.
|
| The wastefulness of EU is the real reason people want their
| countries out of it.
|
| There seem to be zero journalists covering EU shenanigans so
| everyone just get the news from people in the trenches. While
| our local politicians gets fired for buying chocolate on the
| wrong account (true story).
| pif wrote:
| > The wastefulness of EU is the real reason people want
| their countries out of it.
|
| Unless such wastefulness is directed towards your own
| country!
|
| By the way, the only ones who actually voted to quit were
| those idiot Brexiteers who were not even aware of the EU
| funds invested in the UK.
| radiator wrote:
| You have a pretty big mouth, calling the majority of the
| United Kingdom voters idiots. But I am sure you know
| better than them what is good for them.
| pif wrote:
| I have met several Brexiteers on Quora, and not one of
| them could give a sensible reason for their vote. I don't
| mean a reason that I would like, I mean just a reason
| that could make any sense. I still hope some smart
| Brexiteers exist, but I've not been lucky enough to meet
| any of them.
| 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".
| manquer wrote:
| The flip side is a lot of governance in US which is
| typically centralized is distributed to states and yet
| there are 2M federal employees.
|
| Also only country with comparable language complexity to EU
| is India, so many languages adds enormous amount of
| paperwork and bureaucracy, US does not simply have to deal
| with it.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| 1.4M of those are defense, VA, or homeland security. It's
| not much of a secret that the US has a large military,
| and it dominates employment numbers. The highest federal
| employment total was 4.4M at the end of WW2. It decreased
| to 2M after the war ended, with clear bumps for the
| Korean, Vietnam, Cold, and Middle Eastern wars.
| roenxi wrote:
| That sounds like an EU success story - the bureaucrats aren't
| getting the way so Lidl is free to set up an AWS competitor.
| The EU isn't supposed to be a tech company, the point of
| companies is that they should be doing the part where services
| get provided. The US government was not a direct player in
| setting up AWS.
|
| The danger would be if Gaia-X were kicking goals and laying
| down the law ... and had banned Lidl from setting up their own
| cloud until all the paperwork was signed off by 13 major
| committees, 666 undersecretaries of The Cloud and the High
| Bureaucrat was satisfied that there was a genuine market need
| for a new AWS competitor.
|
| The EU has a lot of clever and motivated people. If the legal
| situation wasn't blocking success I expect they would succeed.
| vuxie wrote:
| I am not sure the job of the EU should even be to make
| technical standards in this case. The point is to develop
| strategy and to convince an endless amount of non-technical
| stakeholders on value, and that is something the EU usually
| does well.
| vjk800 wrote:
| 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.
| username_my1 wrote:
| 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.
| Temporary_31337 wrote:
| 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.
| username_my1 wrote:
| that's why you give credit to investors not just
| compnaies.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Just give it to the companies. That still incentivises
| equity investment (it lowers risk and raises the
| potential upside of profitability). It also make
| underwriting standard loans easier too.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| The core feature of Gaia-X is that it makes it easy for small
| EU software companies to get up to EUR200k 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.
| arianvanp wrote:
| 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?
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Cloud&Heat receives GaiaX funding:
| https://www.cloudandheat.com/news-press/gaia-x-summit-2020/
|
| Teams up with Schwarz group to create StackIT cloud:
| https://www.handelsblatt.com/technik/it-internet/schwarz-
| gru...
|
| As for the revenue, I would trust a multi-billion
| international company that if they say billions in revenue,
| that'll be halfway accurate. Or else, that would be massive
| securities fraud. Here's their (independently audited) tax
| filling showing 1.2 billion EUR in revenue 2 years ago: htt
| ps://www.unternehmensregister.de/ureg/result.html;jsessio..
| .
| codethief wrote:
| > Here's their (independently audited) tax filling
| showing 1.2 billion EUR in revenue 2 years ago: [...]
|
| Unfortunately, those links expire after a while. To
| everyone else: Go to unternehmensregister.de and search
| for "Schwarz IT KG" (located in Neckarsulm, registered at
| Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRA 730995) and open the document
| "Jahresabschluss zum Geschaftsjahr vom 01.03.2022 bis zum
| 28.02.2023".
| jagermo wrote:
| I have worked with Deutsche Telekom in the past and I'm
| convinced that every project that involves them will never get
| enough traction to beat US companies.
|
| The entitlement and refusal to listen to other people outside
| their direct org is mindboggling, its like if everyone at that
| company still thinks they are the hottest shit and they know
| everything better. Sadly, they are a gatekeeper. Super
| frustrating partner to work with
| alephnerd wrote:
| > The entitlement and refusal to listen to other people
| outside their direct org is mindboggling
|
| +1 on that. Same with the owner of the CSP mentioned in the
| article above.
|
| It's weird because it was always only German companies that
| gave truly unreasonable feature requests AND were extremely
| pushy, despite not spending much compared to other customers.
|
| T-Mobile is much easier to deal with, but they are also
| walking with their tail between their legs...
| crabbone wrote:
| Living in the EU, and having by and large a meaningless job in
| a meaningless division of a quasi-government org... while
| reading the news coming from the East, I keep imagining how a
| war with EU will upend this little paradise of parasites and
| laziness, and it gives me nightmares :) Also, EU will probably
| kick me out before things will start getting more serious, I
| struggle to imagine any other sort of motivation less drastic
| than that to get things going in the "right direction" :(
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| To come to a decision is dangerous for a career in a
| bureaucratic monster. Its all about creating the most
| impractical swiss-knife of all trades with as little personal
| responsibility as possible. If the whole apparatus fails, that
| does not result in the whole apparatus being fired. Thats the
| crux.
|
| Another nice example, resulting in horrible deformed APIs:
| https://www.ibm.com/topics/what-is-a-digital-twin
| radiator wrote:
| But Gaia-X is not the article's main focus, is it? I think it
| is about Schwarz Digits, which is a daughter company of Lidl.
| 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.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| No, you're right
| 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.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Africa will soon emerge as an important market as well,
| particularly Nigeria. Japan and Korea are, as you said,
| not only stagnating but deflating (in the case of Japan).
| I believe GDP actually declined in Europe recently so I
| think Europe will shrink as a market in the coming
| decades unless they can fix demographic pressures and
| improve entrepreneurship. The US faces similar
| demographic problems but we have unique solutions to
| those problems that means that GDP growth is stronger in
| the US than virtually anywhere else in the world. India
| is a more mature "growing economy", and at this point I
| think the whole world is aware of the opportunities
| there. As you pointed out, Malaysia and the Philippines
| are growing, and so are other SE asian countries like
| Viet Nam and Thailand (though Thailand has struggled to
| grow since the pandemic, it's shown good growth since
| 2000).
|
| Africa is the untapped market right now; Nigeria is
| expected to exceed 400mil (if not 500-700mil) people by
| 2050. I don't know as much about their economy, so I'm
| not sure if this growth has translated into the kind of
| infrastructure which would create more demand for
| computing services (i.e: I don't know what smartphone or
| 5G penetration is like there), but I would bet that if
| it's not ripe yet, it will be soon
|
| Europe needs to solve its demographic pressures by either
| accepting more non-EU immigrants or doing something to
| encourage women to have more children, which would
| require solving for the opportunity cost (i.e: career
| stagnating or ending) that women bear 90+% of the time
| they have children, as well as the FOMO issues (which I
| don't think government can solve)
| nradov wrote:
| It's always humorous to see HN users praising the
| lifestyle of dense, walkable European cities. They don't
| realize how miserable it is to raise multiple children in
| the typical 2 bedroom / 1 bath flat that most locals can
| afford. It's not surprising that many couples have only
| one child.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| temac wrote:
| I'm using OVH and the notion of it "just working" is all
| relative. It's tolerable, but certainly a bit buggy, and
| with far less services than aws and co. It is also cheap,
| but given the limitations I doubt they can increase the
| prices much...
| 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.
| rtpg wrote:
| If you thought "I had to publish any code changes I make
| to my object storage server" was bad, wait until you find
| out that you're not even allowed to make code changes to
| S3 servers!
|
| Obviously the fully-managed nature of S3 is very valuable
| compared to MinIO but the licensing issues seem neither
| here or there. Or is there some extra part of the AGPLv3
| that I'm not aware of?
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > 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?
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| I'm confusing things myself. One's okay as long as one
| doesn't modify the code.
| sakjur wrote:
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| S3 is so expensive at scale that it _only_ makes sense if
| you 're tiny _or_ if you have extreme durability
| requirements and your working set is tiny.
|
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| I just use R2. Who says that if I use one company, they
| have to provide every single service under the sun to be
| useful?
| cryptonym wrote:
| Linode is quite cheap and comes with Object storage so
| you don't have to maintain a MinIO
| 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.
| ggm wrote:
| 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?
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| weinzierl wrote:
| 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 rarely need it.
|
| With Hetzner on the other hand, if you use them seriously you
| _will_ run into a situation where you need support sooner
| than later and my experience with that always has been
| abysmal.
| nik736 wrote:
| Do you have some examples?
| weinzierl wrote:
| I do. My favourite is the one where a scraper hosted
| their version of Stackoverflow on Hetzner servers. For
| some reason they only copied the textual content but
| replaced all user profile pictures with random profiles
| pictures from elsewhere - mostly harmless ones. I had the
| misfortune that mine was replaced by a pornographic one,
| which appeared as the first result in Google when someone
| searched my name.
|
| Hetzner did nothing to help rectify the situation. Thanks
| for nothing Hetzner.
| arendtio wrote:
| What I find great about the Hetzner Cloud is that you don't
| need a dictionary to understand which product does a specific
| job. With AWS, I found it much harder to take the first steps
| because of the names being used.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| I find AWS quite OK (Stockholm syndrome?), but Cloudflare
| dashboard confuses me every time. Their navigation is just
| not logical to me.
| 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.
| Woeps wrote:
| 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.
| spwa4 wrote:
| Meaning this is about EVERY manager being able to say
| "this is not my fault", not about any actual result?
| Literally every last one?
|
| Sounds about right ...
| vasco wrote:
| There's published proof the US government actively will
| go to the extent of having submarines go to undersea
| fiber cables to tap into them. They have private lockers
| in almost all the datacenters in the world, etc. Doesn't
| matter if it's an American company or not.
| cuu508 wrote:
| There are potholes and drunk drivers on road. It does not
| matter if you use seatbelt or not.
| illiac786 wrote:
| Yes it does matter is the company is subject to US law or
| not. There is not 100% security but saying "it does not
| matter" is manichean and does not reflect reality. Yes
| the US have a very long arm but it's all a cost/benefit
| even for three letter agencies.
|
| Every time they make use of a zero day or a backdoor they
| run the risk of it being discovered. The harder it is to
| get a new one, the more they will think twice about using
| it for mass and low stakes surveillance. A non-US company
| will be less inclined/forced to cooperate with them,
| making it harder for them to siphon data out, hence
| lowering probability.
|
| No one is 100% safe, agreed though. Probabilities and
| threat models is all we got.
| Fradow wrote:
| The main benefit of using a 100% European cloud is to be 100%
| GDPR compliant. No matter how you slice it and how
| lawyers/companies try to wiggle around it, it's not possible
| to host data with a US company and be GDPR compliant, because
| of US laws.
|
| Customers do ask about it, and it's always iffy to have to
| justify your GDPR compliance when using US cloud companies.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Which is why the big cloud providers have European data
| centers that comply with all relevant European laws where
| many big European companies, including some banks, medical
| companies, etc. choose to host their stuff. You know, the
| type of companies that would actually care a lot about such
| things and let their lawyers make sure they are doing all
| the right things.
|
| AWS actually joined Gaia-x years ago. I think MS and Google
| did as well. They want to be compliant. Keeping their
| European customers happy is important to them. They use
| European legal entities as well to do business here.
| Because that is indeed required. No need to switch cloud
| provider. Just make sure you use them correctly and do all
| the right things. Which in any case is 100% your
| responsibility as you will be on the spot if you get that
| wrong. This job doesn't change if you switch cloud
| provider.
| 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. ;-)
| eb0la wrote:
| 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.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| I doubt anyone who was ever customer of their detail telecom
| services would free-willingly use any services from Telekom
| ever again.
| mercora wrote:
| agreed.
| m3adow wrote:
| That's only on paper though. I know a couple of people who
| founded a startup in the medicine sector on Telekom Cloud and
| most of their backend engineering work in the first years(!)
| went into circumventing Telekom Cloud issues like slow API,
| servers not starting or plainly disappearing.
|
| Haven't talked to the guys for two years, so it might have
| improved in the meantime, but it's Telekom, so I heavily
| doubt it.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| 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.
| arkh wrote:
| > there not too much innovation required to compete
|
| Yeah, sure.
|
| This is the kind of mentality which lead us to "Cloud" being
| developed by an online book seller and not hosting companies.
| Then those hosting companies needed 10 years for open source
| solutions to be available to close some of the gap. Next time a
| random company disrupts the hosting market, it won't come from
| hosting companies because "there not too much innovation
| required to compete" and those companies will wonder what is
| going on.
| fbn79 wrote:
| From Italy there is Aruba (www.cloud.it). Not bad. But
| quality/price ratio worst than Hetzener I think
| 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...
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| 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.
| siruncledrew wrote:
| At a personal level, it feels better to have something of
| your own to hold on to instead of someone else's, so I
| think beaucrats will also respond accordingly.
|
| In a way, we'll probably see more cloud fragmentation in
| the future, especially as other countries develop their IT
| sectors more and feel like they want more control over
| their own infrastructure, and whatever tertiary benefits
| can be extracted from that.
|
| Relationships don't even have to turn sour, there just has
| to be enough protectionism and popular appeal to support
| it. Just like saying "build it here".
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Let's not call it ,,cloud fragmentation" please. It's
| cloud competition. Cloud is an utility and probably
| should resemble energy market regarding the choice of
| suppliers and simplicity of the switch.
| enriquto wrote:
| > 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.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| There's one plausible escalation scenario: Trump wins and
| America becomes authoritarian state the same way as
| Russia did, gradually destroying democratic institutions
| and opposition. In such scenario EU will be forced to
| reconsider the relationship with America and pursue
| strategic autonomy. It is still not a matter of days,
| months or years.
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| Cloud act and it's various variations
| input_sh wrote:
| Oh it's much simpler and immediate than that: Trump wins
| and stops funding Ukraine, like he has already promised
| to dozens of times. That would instantly lead to the EU
| having to double their spending, which would certainly
| mean increased unrest within the EU and a whole lot of
| grudges towards the US.
|
| And it wouldn't be the first time Trump specifically
| caused grudges. The US just giving up on the Iran deal
| has certainly already done the same. Not only was the EU
| also a signatory, but so were the UK, Germany and France
| individually. And then he moved the embassy to Jerusalem,
| which was also openly opposed by the three I've already
| mentioned. So now the EU has to second-guess every treaty
| the US signed, because apparently that signature means
| less than it used to mean.
|
| But those two past actions would be nothing but a
| sentence in history books compared to at least a
| paragraph about the US cutting funding to Ukraine.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| >That would instantly lead to the EU having to double
| their spending
|
| Not going to happen. This will result in partitioning of
| Ukraine and non-aligned status of it. It is a
| satisfactory outcome for everyone in the West in such
| circumstances. That war is already lost by everyone
| except EU, so whatever is American strategy there, it
| won't do much harm.
| aguaviva wrote:
| _It is a satisfactory outcome for everyone in the West in
| such circumstances._
|
| It is absolutely not a "satisfactory outcome" for anyone
| in the West if Russia's neocolonial aggression is allowed
| to succeed.
|
| Except for certain segments of the populist right and far
| left, who are bizarrely unified on this issue.
| csomar wrote:
| > The economies are too integrated for this scenario.
|
| So are the US and Chinese economies. Yet, here we are.
|
| > I'm sure EU regions of AWS or GCP won't cease to exist,
| for example.
|
| The servers, maybe. I highly doubt AWS will continue to
| provide access to its platform. Actually there is zero
| chance they do. The servers are not useful much without the
| AWS platform.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > imagine the EU-US relationship suddenly turning very
| hostile
|
| 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.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| One historical example:
|
| After the second world war, Europe was developing space
| launch capability (multiple governments and companies in
| Europe joined together to do this). USA said, don't waste
| your money on that, you can use American launchers. So it
| didn't continue. Some time later, European commercial sats
| that competed with American ones couldn't get launch
| opportunities on American rockets. So then Europe developed
| its own launcher.
|
| EDITed to remove caveats, after checking that it really is
| accurate: https://www.inventingeurope.eu/knowledge/the-
| unfinished-symp...
| 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.
| mvanbaak wrote:
| I won't bore you with the details of my home setup, and I
| do host from home with both static IPv4 and IPv6 and
| everything (ok ok, two details: it's all freebsd on
| enterprise hardware) I will repeat: it is an option for
| some. and if you fall in the small group that has
| everything on green for a home hosted setup, it is the
| best option.
|
| But thinking this is for more then a very very small
| group of people is not confirm reality.
|
| And I really applaud you for having a setup that
| generates enough power so for you it turns out to be
| free. If only I could get a setup like this. For the
| biggest part of the population this is, unfortunately,
| not an option.
|
| Also, there is a very big difference between running k*s,
| docker, whatever at home in a homelab, and hosting your
| stuff at home. A homelab is to learn, learning means
| breaking stuff all the time. hosting things dont really
| combine with that. Most people that actually host things
| at home have 2 setups, one that hosts the online tools
| and one homelab where they can break stuff at their will.
|
| At the end of the day, for the majority of people
| throwing a couple of dollars per month to a company to
| handle all this crap is the better option :)
| kkfx wrote:
| Well, while both option exists and obviously anyone is
| (almost) free to choose, I still fail to see convenience
| in living on someone else computer. Anyway, allow me a
| different scenario: you are Foo Bar, you have a bunch of
| documents and many photos/videos/music etc no computer
| skills beyond clicking around. You ask someone more
| knowledgeable, local or remote, but still a single human,
| if he/she can create your infra to own your data. he/she
| gives you a list of stuff to buy, instructions to
| assemble or came to you/send it assembled and ready to
| you, a usb stick with a live system to deploym the config
| (NixOS/Guix system) on it. You are now operational, your
| infra it's still a black box for you but you own the
| config, so you can give it to someone and in case of
| trouble or the need of changes you know who to contact.
| You pay a certain capex and small opex. Your infra evolve
| following you. Your contact disappear, another came and
| propose to rebuild anything, no data loss, he/she can use
| your iron, your data and knowing anything from the
| config. You are on again and the event loop keep running.
|
| How different is from choosing let's say FileHoster inc
| who works well enough, albeit much less than your infra,
| and have no capex, than it experience a big issue (cfr.
| Gandi/FR two times few years ago) all your data are lost,
| you still have some here and there you get up again on
| another one, than it became too expensive, you switch
| from another, ...
|
| In the two scenario:
|
| - on one side you spent in capex more than in opex, so
| you spent at a specific point in time, in an inflationary
| economy, instead of being vampirized every month;
|
| - you are tied to your infra reliability and consumer
| grade assembled iron it's pretty reliable for such usage,
| as most well know giants are for the same usage/point of
| view BUT on one side the reliability is in your infra,
| something you can tune, learn and check, on the other
| it's about third party decisions who can happen at every
| point in time without anything you can do.
|
| You've certainly read countless of time about $BigName
| impromptu ban for instance. You've certainly experienced
| terms of use unilateral changes, sometimes ok for you
| sometimes not. Where is the balance?
|
| If you live in a Korean goshiwon -alike you can't host
| while you might still have docs/photos etc you have no
| choice, but when you have it and honestly MOST people who
| need IT at a certain level do have the choice, at least
| formally, if he/she knows it exists, then where is the
| convenience? Trusting the market on one side, with little
| to no capex but much bigger opex and uncertainty or more
| capex, less opex and uncertainty? Think about schooling:
| what we do in most part of the world? A big initial capex
| (long school time) than profiting for life on the
| acquired knowledge or a jump in the wild than we will
| learn on the go?
|
| In the mean people are honest, so trusting someone else
| IF you can verify or the exposure it's low it will
| generally end up well anyway, otherwise... I trust myself
| more than someone else shielded under a corp name,
| eventually in another country (so legal protection
| issues, geopolitical risks and so on)...
| 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.
| MaKey wrote:
| They have a Terraform provider:
| https://registry.terraform.io/providers/stackitcloud/stackit...
| 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.
| phantompeace wrote:
| A POS device at a Target store was used to exploit systems in
| a completely different part of the Target infrastructure to
| allow CC details to be dumped. I think most supermarkets have
| lacklustre security.
| 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.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >der8auer
|
| Presumably pronounced derachter?
| mkreis wrote:
| Looks more like he replaced B with 8 (derBauer) Otherwise it
| would be der8er
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| You lost the "au" on the way? 8 could be l33t for B, making
| it derBauer (the farmer).
| slightwinder wrote:
| More like builder or maker, then farmer.
| VonGallifrey wrote:
| I have never heard any native German say "Bauer" for
| builder. "Bauer" is definitively Farmer unless it is used
| as a suffix.
| slightwinder wrote:
| Yes, it's not the common usage, but it's still a legit
| meaning according to the dictionary.
|
| But the relevant point here is, that Youtuber has a
| channel about building and testing Hardware. I don't know
| whether he has any relation to farming, but considering
| the content I would think his intention was a wordplay on
| building, not farming.
| 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.
| Palmik wrote:
| Pricing calculator was easy to find
| https://www.stackit.de/en/pricing/cloud-
| services/iaas/stacki...
|
| Menu -> Compute Engine -> Pricing
| prmoustache wrote:
| > 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.
| fulafel wrote:
| Even the article doesn't claim any connection between Lidl and
| Gaia-X.
| 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
| Havoc wrote:
| Hetzner seems to be holding their ground so it seems at least
| theoretically possible.
|
| Going to be hard to beat the scale effects of US big tech though
| atbpaca wrote:
| Europe has OVH, Scaleway, etc, but why don't they grow as fast as
| AWS, Azure or Google Cloud? Besides being a cloud provider, there
| are some essential cloud-native applications missing. Take for
| example the area of Data Science: is Databricks or Snowflake
| available in any European cloud provider? It's not only a
| question of IaaS, it's having the same PaaS and SaaS offering as
| the others.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| The original from Financial Times is much better:
| https://www.ft.com/content/08eb1b45-91c2-4312-9d3c-ac5e4e557...
| Bengalilol wrote:
| More and more customers are looking for solutions that could keep
| their data as near and safe as possible. I view this move as a
| very logical economic opportunity.
| tintin_1A wrote:
| Where are the pub/sub magic overlays over kafka ?
|
| How does spark work on this ...
|
| does not seem very fit for large scale.
| wg0 wrote:
| Shouldn't underestimate what determined group of people can
| achieve.
|
| As for feature parity is concerned, AWS was pretty small at the
| beginning. Just like some 12 years ago. Even VPCs didn't exist at
| one point and you could scan whole cloud from your VM.
|
| I have yet to see a company fail because the engineering team
| failed to build, whatever monolith, MEAN, micro services.
|
| It is almost always the product tier that fails to articulate and
| envision the product and place it on a pedestal where people can
| immediately and clearly see the value proposition.
|
| I hope that doesn't happen here.
|
| Some good products in this realm would be Hetzner and Scalway for
| example which is certainly good engineering no doubt but great
| product management apparently.
|
| .
| precommunicator wrote:
| My company's clients dislike US companies so much that we had to
| switch from very cheap AWS SES, European region, only used to
| send emails to very expensive (10x at least) European competitor.
| The AWS entry in the GDPR DPA was generating so many meetings
| that it was just worth it.
| set5think wrote:
| Obviously no one knows anything and only time will tell, but if I
| had to gander, my conclusion would not be that of the author's:
|
| > As I pointed out in my previous blog post about the shifts in
| AWS, the one-stop-cloud-shop approach has shown cracks. Amazon,
| Google, Microsoft, Alibaba et al. won't be able to cover all
| grounds, neither in tech domains, nor in geo's.
|
| This doesn't make much sense to me. What cracks? Aren't aws
| regions the solution to geographic control to where your data and
| infra reside? Also, what tech domain does aws not have a solution
| for?
|
| I'm not saying the underdog can't catch up. I'm saying that when
| aws made this major switch to offer their cloud, it was certainly
| a first-of-its-kind offering. Lidl offering competitive services
| to aws doesn't sound that scary, especially considering that I
| don't believe for a second that lidl's cloud offering comes even
| close to what aws provides. At that point, if this competitor's
| only real value proposition is that they're "in Europe," then I'm
| not sure how compelling of a selling point that is for me to give
| up everything else I get with my aws offering.
|
| Note: I am using aws as my example solely because it's what I
| know best, not affiliated in any way with them as of this
| writing.
| sebstefan wrote:
| There is hardly a company I trust less than Lidl in the realm of
| tech
|
| "Case Study 12: Lidl's EUR500 Million SAP Debacle" (2020):
| https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d...
|
| They're already generating revenue so congratulations to them,
| but would I put my infrastructure in their hands for the long
| run?...
| remram wrote:
| This is always hard to compare because cloud offerings never
| exactly match (some include storage with their VMs, some include
| IOPS with their capacity, some bill bandwidth) but at first
| glance, their compute is cheaper than OVH and their storage is
| more expensive than OVH.
| teleforce wrote:
| Recently there's HN discussions about Hetzner's strategic pricing
| based on their spartan business approaches [1]. On the back of my
| mind thinking that it's very similar to how Lidl operates its
| supermarket outlets and if Lidl ever operates hosting it would be
| very similar to Hetzner [2].
|
| But now lol and behold unbeknownst to me that there's actually a
| Lidl cloud and it's not an April fool news.
|
| [1] Hetzner Pricing:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41179371
|
| [2] How does Aldi keep their prices so low | Aldi Vs Lidl:
| Supermarket Wars | Channel 5 [video]:
|
| https://youtu.be/AhwycD3GMlM
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