[joker99]

While I understand where you’re coming from, it’s important to mention that the German military buys googles software and hardware to self host an air gapped google cloud. I know that to some it’s a distinction without a difference, but if you want to have a modern(-ish) private cloud _now_, there’s not a lot of non-American competition out there, plus there’s the entire topic of support and consulting services. It would be great if Europe could get its head(s) out its behind and build a competitor (which is not easy, just look at how not great gcp is compared to aws) but they need a solution _now_.

And having worked together with the German government on IT projects, I’ll say that the _only_ way an OSS project would be even considered is if there’s a company backing the project that has extreme amounts of passion, patience and passibility. In the end, they need some _entity_ that is _legally responsible_ - and it’s always better if that entity is not them ;)

[FirmwareBurner]

> While I understand where you’re coming from, it’s important to mention that the German military buys googles software and hardware to self host an air gapped google cloud.

The fact the Google cloud is private for the military doesn't matter. The core issue is that Germany, the richest EU country, is incapable of building its own cloud infra for its defense. It's a laughing stock to posture how the EU is getting rid of US tech when EU's biggest economy is entangling itself even deeper with the US big-tech. Andit's not just Germany.

> but they need a solution _now_

AFAIR Europe has been saying "we need X now" for over 10 years, that I'm more than fatigued by it.

Things don't magic themselves into existence out of thin air just because you need them _NOW_. You need to make smart investments and incentives into the private sector both for investors and the workforce, to get the results the US has.

The problem is EU wants the nice things the US has built, but without putting the long term effort, similar how a guy wants to have the body of Thor but doesn't go to the gym and eats french-fries all day.

> I’ll say that the _only_ way an OSS project would be even considered is if there’s a company backing the project that has extreme amounts of passion, patience and passibility.

And why wasn't a German company like SAP or T-Systems able to do it?

[Balinares]

> And why wasn't a German company like SAP or T-Systems able to do it?

Getting to the level of capability and provable mandate compliance of a hyperscaler like GCP takes decades of engineering investment. Renting a chunk of air-gapped GCP infra is much cheaper and faster.

I wish there were European companies committed to this level of engineering investment. I don't know that there are.

[thyristan]

They could have bought local for the simple part of the tender, and got the rest from Google for the complicated things no local vendor could offer. Or even split by criticality of the data.

But they didn't even do that.

[yobbo]

What about possible future employment as a "consultant" in a much more generous (and sexy) private corporation?

[xvilka]

NextCloud exists and already works though.

[Macacity]

But it is not doing at all what they need that cloud for.

They want to host SAP and it seems there are just a small set of providers where it is running on.