The issue is not lack of european providers. The issue is almost natural lobby from the likes of Microsoft and Amazon.
All the unis are infected with former corpo programmers who push their preferred employer stacks. Students get free credits to use on Azure. Some of them become gov employees or consultants. You end up with all sides agreeing Microsoft Azure is the most trustworthy solution.
Everything gov in my country seems to be built with asp.net to point where its often requirement in the contract.
Lets start with erasing all the proprietary tech taught at universities. Microsoft can do their education. Universities dont have to do it for them for free.
Also Microsoft consultants are everywhere, and management consultants like McKinsey usually work closely with Microsoft, and many corporations are already locked in.
In many ways its kind of really scary how so much of the digital infrastructure even of key enterprises and entire states is owned and operated by a private company.
I didn’t see any mention of EU’s last attempt to build a sovereign cloud: Gaia-X. I think that didn’t really go anywhere due to disagreements over technical direction. Much like Quaero.
Don’t get me wrong, I hope it goes better this time and the author acknowledges the many pitfalls of such a complex undertaking.
" Innovation Mindset: Willingness to explore new technologies – especially related to trust frameworks and associated standards –, staying ahead (no kidding!) of main-stream industry trends (This is a real requirement, not ChatGPT – just look into our GitLab repos!)."
I checked their public GitLab and it's puny. Moreover, I suspect based on the use of bold and bullet points that the job description itself went through ChatGPT.
It's more or less covert subsidies for the usual suspects. In Germany that means the like of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Atos, Bosch, Deutsche Telekom, SAP, BMW and Siemens get some millions (and by "some" I mean around 200 million euro). If there's no outcome, like in the GAIA-X case, it's just bad luck for the taxpayer.
Disagreements over direction should be solved by making separate orgs/initiatives to go test each approach.
Better than funding “one true initiative” and force people to work together to keep the funding.
The VC funding model succeeds in experimental domains by letting many experiments run at once. Kind of a form of Darwinism. How to do that with funded initiatives is a really interesting challenge.
I don't think bureaucrats can build a successful cloud by enforcing laws, adding even more regulations, making policies and using subsidies.
This is not how the market likes to work. There has to be a demand and the free market forces will build a supply. Governments can help by reducing regulation and bureaucracy, reducing taxes.
I agree with this. It doesn't make sense to have these low salaries. You want the best people that make a difference, business is like sport. Your team competes with other teams.
You can't expect to get Lionel Messi on your team with just €70k, but for €200k you get hell of a bargain.
This misunderstanding about EU/US salaries is so baffling to me, how this opinion can come up still in every EU conversation. Do people really just look at $$$ without a second of thought of how governments/taxation works and what they get for that salary/taxes?
The cultures across Europe are anti growth and anti speculation
That facilitate it for other people, but not enough interest culture wide
It’s kind of interesting “why don’t we just make the same amount quarter after quarter” like, wow who knew you could do that? But speculation drives innovation. Permission to fail results in faster selective pressures.
I don't know why they don't just hire the people who built Azure / AWS / GCP etc...
If you offer these people a good salary, tax cut and a EU passport after 4 years I suspect many will be open to move to London / Paris / Amsterdam for a few years.
Subsidise the high speed train between all these cities for 5 years, offer crosscountry startup cash and investment and you might just end up with a functioning IT sector in Europe.
The triangle London / Paris / Randstad really isn't much further apart than many Sillicon Valley HQs.
Hetzner is not small, I would say it's several times bigger than OVH in turnover, but this is just a guess based on their perceived markets and market share in those markets.
The cloud offered by Hetzner is the perfect sweet spot for me, but the vast majority of IT crowd and non-IT decision makers in EU want AWS-like.
But all EU alternatives that mimick AWS will be worse than the alternative.
Pretty much like wvery MS Word copycat was worse... until Google Docs shifted the paradygm.
China was able to build its own IT technologies thanks to decades of protectionism and smart maneuvers from the party. Europe, being under the US "umbrella", was in an almost impossible position to do so, along with the very poor attitude of European elites, which is one of rent-seeking rather than investment.
Regardless of the attitude, I don't see this happening without some form of protectionism, trump sperging out might be the chance of a century to reboot the European military and IT industries.
If Europe wants cloud protectionism then they need apply the usual methods: tariffs on foreign cloud services and requirements on public funds to be spent on the European cloud providers.
They could apply Chinese policy and require foreign cloud corporations to have locally owned partners that will own the technology produced locally.
Cloud is highly overrated for a lot of projects. While in theory you could scale up or down based on demand, my experience the need for it was rare. More common was provisioned resources sitting there for months.
And S3 encourages you to basically save everything
And there was another aspect, since compute / storage was a consumable. Devops were less shy about spinning up services as if they were candy, rather than being more economical with resources that were fixed in the short term.
It also takes care of backups, disaster recovery, maintenance, HW replacement and offers many services right out of the box that would require at least a single extra DevOps guy to do on-prem.
Managed databases and managed storage like S3 is where it's at.
I think the big problem is this: That NLNet thing he mentions gives subsidies of the insanely large amount of €5-50k that’s not even worth getting out of bed over, much less quitting your job on the off chance you are successful in the 3 months that gives you.
I am really questioning that initial premise that "we need an European cloud". Here I roughly understand "we need a few big European hyperscaler with a dozen huge datacenters we can migrate to" because this is the model we understand. But you are fundamentally "fighting the last battle", the wrong battle.
The idea of an European cloud has happened several time before and I was once strongly encouraged to select one so I investigated, here are my findings:
About 10 years ago all those countries needed a cloud to put their government and sensitive industries on, so public money and contracts was given to friendly corporations.
Once the initial chunk of free money ran out a lot of those companies got rid of the business. In France a lot got sold to Orange, the big telco partially owned by the state.
I considered it because according to some metrics they had the biggest cloud in Europe.
I found out quickly they actually immediately given everything to Huawei. So it was all managed by Huawei but if I remember correctly still hosted on Orange premises.
Strangely information about it is more difficult to find now but you can still read about it on third party websites [0].
By the way all of this is GDPR whatever compliant.
I just did a quick search and it seems they had to shut it down in 2024 because Huawei became such a radioactive topic. Information is hard to find about it in English.
In the end the companies who were forced to select a "sovereign cloud" probably went through hell and moved around several time in the last 10 years.
You are told you should/must go on a sovereign cloud, you then end up on a Chinese cloud and you are then kicked out of it.
I am not pushing for the big american hyperscalers but be very careful before listening to politicians.
You are so right about computers, except from Raspberry Pi (UK) not much as been done in Europe.
Regarding the eu cloud, it is definitely about sovereignty, specially since the CLOUD Act (H.R. 4943). In the context of the global trade war initiated by the US of A, it also makes sense from a European Union perspective.
Sorry to be a killjoy, I see these sentiments everywhere across the EU sovereign cloud space. The dream of distributed "cloud providers" made up of individual companies products, all cooperating and communicating together in some utopian way. That's the stuff that Gaia-X was huffing.
Make no mistake, this will absolutely be curb stomped by vertical integration.
But I get the sentiment, we need to figure out a way of collaborating on this. Perhaps airbus is a good example.
I've done quite a bit of government contracting for governments in Europe, including various government levels in Belgium and the EU itself. Every single time, I encountered a lot of friction regarding hosting. The applications were always hosted by a partner [1] that won a large public tender, usually by virtue of supposedly being the cheapest. Those hosting partners were invariably awful and incompetent. Simple tasks would take weeks. Complex tasks wouldn't happen at all. There was enough red tape to go to the moon and back.
Every project I worked on, developers (consultants like me) advocated for finding a way of bypassing the hosting partner, and either doing their thing on top of platforms like Hetzner, or switching to AWS/Azure. Not because they particularly love AWS, but because the default hosting solution sucks so much arse.
I can totally see EU cloud infrastructure working for the public sector, but ONLY if they come with the same level of self-service management as the big cloud providers. Without that, it's a non-starter.
[1] One of those is a large French company on the verge of banruptcy.
In my experience this is mix of lack of knowledge sometimes mixed with self-dealing/corruption.
But it can be prevented by writing hosting specs well. If in your proposed solution you specify really detailed hosting envinronment then most of these old incopetent companies wont even apply.
Hmm one other thing - USA is completely English but EU is quite multi-lingual so to be competitive within EU market services need a lot of more efforts.
If you take the triangle between London - Paris - Randstad (Amsterdam+) then we're talking about 60+ million people all connected via <4 hours of high speed rail where essentially everyone can speak English.
(Okay maybe in Paris only people under 40 can but in IT it's usually okay imo).
You don't need the entire EU, just a chunck of it that can carry the industry like Silicon Valley does for the US.
[+] [-] omnimus|1 year ago|reply
All the unis are infected with former corpo programmers who push their preferred employer stacks. Students get free credits to use on Azure. Some of them become gov employees or consultants. You end up with all sides agreeing Microsoft Azure is the most trustworthy solution.
Everything gov in my country seems to be built with asp.net to point where its often requirement in the contract.
Lets start with erasing all the proprietary tech taught at universities. Microsoft can do their education. Universities dont have to do it for them for free.
[+] [-] p_v_doom|1 year ago|reply
In many ways its kind of really scary how so much of the digital infrastructure even of key enterprises and entire states is owned and operated by a private company.
[+] [-] jpeter|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dataking|1 year ago|reply
Don’t get me wrong, I hope it goes better this time and the author acknowledges the many pitfalls of such a complex undertaking.
Edit: The author previously discussed Gaia-X at length here: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-dis...
[+] [-] sam_lowry_|1 year ago|reply
Look at this recent job ad for a Senior Software Developer / Tech Lead: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4181090679
AFAIU it's written by the CTO and see this gem:
" Innovation Mindset: Willingness to explore new technologies – especially related to trust frameworks and associated standards –, staying ahead (no kidding!) of main-stream industry trends (This is a real requirement, not ChatGPT – just look into our GitLab repos!)."
I checked their public GitLab and it's puny. Moreover, I suspect based on the use of bold and bullet points that the job description itself went through ChatGPT.
[+] [-] realusername|1 year ago|reply
Remove them of the picture and the market will solve itself very quickly, most of the companies to replace them are already there in a weaker form.
The cloud platforms are nowhere near as hard to replace as the chips.
[+] [-] ofrzeta|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Aeolun|1 year ago|reply
Even the utterly straightforward eucloud is better. Or make it cloud.eu :)
[+] [-] cadamsdotcom|1 year ago|reply
Better than funding “one true initiative” and force people to work together to keep the funding.
The VC funding model succeeds in experimental domains by letting many experiments run at once. Kind of a form of Darwinism. How to do that with funded initiatives is a really interesting challenge.
[+] [-] kichimi|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] DeathArrow|1 year ago|reply
This is not how the market likes to work. There has to be a demand and the free market forces will build a supply. Governments can help by reducing regulation and bureaucracy, reducing taxes.
[+] [-] redrove|1 year ago|reply
Start paying 2-300k in Europe and watch shit being built.
[+] [-] olavgg|1 year ago|reply
You can't expect to get Lionel Messi on your team with just €70k, but for €200k you get hell of a bargain.
[+] [-] CorrectHorseBat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] poisonborz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rcarmo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] yieldcrv|1 year ago|reply
That facilitate it for other people, but not enough interest culture wide
It’s kind of interesting “why don’t we just make the same amount quarter after quarter” like, wow who knew you could do that? But speculation drives innovation. Permission to fail results in faster selective pressures.
[+] [-] odiroot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] apexalpha|1 year ago|reply
If you offer these people a good salary, tax cut and a EU passport after 4 years I suspect many will be open to move to London / Paris / Amsterdam for a few years.
Subsidise the high speed train between all these cities for 5 years, offer crosscountry startup cash and investment and you might just end up with a functioning IT sector in Europe.
The triangle London / Paris / Randstad really isn't much further apart than many Sillicon Valley HQs.
[+] [-] robert_dipaolo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sam_lowry_|1 year ago|reply
The cloud offered by Hetzner is the perfect sweet spot for me, but the vast majority of IT crowd and non-IT decision makers in EU want AWS-like.
But all EU alternatives that mimick AWS will be worse than the alternative.
Pretty much like wvery MS Word copycat was worse... until Google Docs shifted the paradygm.
[+] [-] realusername|1 year ago|reply
The cloud side isn't polished enough to pretend to be a cloud provider.
[+] [-] apexalpha|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jimbohn|1 year ago|reply
Regardless of the attitude, I don't see this happening without some form of protectionism, trump sperging out might be the chance of a century to reboot the European military and IT industries.
[+] [-] BlackFly|1 year ago|reply
They could apply Chinese policy and require foreign cloud corporations to have locally owned partners that will own the technology produced locally.
[+] [-] DrNosferatu|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] woodson|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tony-allan|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] DrFalkyn|1 year ago|reply
And there was another aspect, since compute / storage was a consumable. Devops were less shy about spinning up services as if they were candy, rather than being more economical with resources that were fixed in the short term.
[+] [-] apexalpha|1 year ago|reply
It also takes care of backups, disaster recovery, maintenance, HW replacement and offers many services right out of the box that would require at least a single extra DevOps guy to do on-prem.
Managed databases and managed storage like S3 is where it's at.
[+] [-] Aeolun|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayFanta|1 year ago|reply
Word is that it'll be run similar to the top secret (lol) cloud [1] that they run for the USA 3 letter agencies.
[0] https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/europe-digital-sovereignty... [1] https://aws.amazon.com/federal/top-secret-cloud/
[+] [-] sunshine-o|1 year ago|reply
The idea of an European cloud has happened several time before and I was once strongly encouraged to select one so I investigated, here are my findings:
About 10 years ago all those countries needed a cloud to put their government and sensitive industries on, so public money and contracts was given to friendly corporations. Once the initial chunk of free money ran out a lot of those companies got rid of the business. In France a lot got sold to Orange, the big telco partially owned by the state.
I considered it because according to some metrics they had the biggest cloud in Europe.
I found out quickly they actually immediately given everything to Huawei. So it was all managed by Huawei but if I remember correctly still hosted on Orange premises.
Strangely information about it is more difficult to find now but you can still read about it on third party websites [0].
By the way all of this is GDPR whatever compliant.
I just did a quick search and it seems they had to shut it down in 2024 because Huawei became such a radioactive topic. Information is hard to find about it in English.
In the end the companies who were forced to select a "sovereign cloud" probably went through hell and moved around several time in the last 10 years. You are told you should/must go on a sovereign cloud, you then end up on a Chinese cloud and you are then kicked out of it.
I am not pushing for the big american hyperscalers but be very careful before listening to politicians.
- [0] https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/cloud/orange-introduces-...
[+] [-] pabs3|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] invaliduser|1 year ago|reply
Regarding the eu cloud, it is definitely about sovereignty, specially since the CLOUD Act (H.R. 4943). In the context of the global trade war initiated by the US of A, it also makes sense from a European Union perspective.
[+] [-] albertgoeswoof|1 year ago|reply
I own https://mailpace.com and would love to expand from there- reach out if you want to help.
[+] [-] grumpy-de-sre|1 year ago|reply
Make no mistake, this will absolutely be curb stomped by vertical integration.
But I get the sentiment, we need to figure out a way of collaborating on this. Perhaps airbus is a good example.
[+] [-] invaliduser|1 year ago|reply
Anyway yes, we need to better list and advertise the european alternatives for services like yours.
[+] [-] elric|1 year ago|reply
Every project I worked on, developers (consultants like me) advocated for finding a way of bypassing the hosting partner, and either doing their thing on top of platforms like Hetzner, or switching to AWS/Azure. Not because they particularly love AWS, but because the default hosting solution sucks so much arse.
I can totally see EU cloud infrastructure working for the public sector, but ONLY if they come with the same level of self-service management as the big cloud providers. Without that, it's a non-starter.
[1] One of those is a large French company on the verge of banruptcy.
[+] [-] omnimus|1 year ago|reply
But it can be prevented by writing hosting specs well. If in your proposed solution you specify really detailed hosting envinronment then most of these old incopetent companies wont even apply.
[+] [-] F-W-M|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] invaliduser|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] BrandoElFollito|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hackandthink|1 year ago|reply
There is everything:
Servers/Storage/Network/Linux/Kubernetes
Experts are still rare but people can learn.
[+] [-] mithron|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] apexalpha|1 year ago|reply
(Okay maybe in Paris only people under 40 can but in IT it's usually okay imo).
You don't need the entire EU, just a chunck of it that can carry the industry like Silicon Valley does for the US.