28 ms·

Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

215 points by tpush 6y ago

rock_hard 6y ago
Thats really the only thing the Europeans can put together these days...more policies :( How about just getting your hands dirty and start building great stuff? (Former european here)
mmmBacon 6y ago
I don’t see how a government bureaucracy can compete with Azure, AWS, and GCP.
- monadic2 6y ago
  Really? Typically the concern is that they can compete too well.
  - redisman 6y ago
    Can you point us to some examples of governments beating the private sector in software? I can’t imagine that EU governments can pull together funding greater than Google or Amazon tbh. Besides you then have to convince the private sector to move to your new unproven cloud platform
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - monadic2 6y ago
      I wouldn’t read the lack of public investment into software as accidental. Just look how terrible investments like healthcare.gov are to see why: massive mountains of cash if you’re not a worker and no need to deliver anything usable. There’s money in not understanding how software works if you’re a politician or a contractor. That said, I don’t think I have ever heard of governments releasing copyrighted, closed-source software, let alone trying to make money off it. That just doesn’t make any sense. I don’t see any reason why the lack of a profit motive would be a detriment to competition in the event governments do invest in free software Honestly this seems like something a trade treaty would be useful for if it weren’t written by multinational corporations. Until then we’re gonna be stuck with really, really shitty decisions as individuals, like ios vs android. Hell, have you seen any competition in software in private markets? There’s isolated pockets of competition in certain circumstances, but from my perspective the major markets all colluded to fuck us roughly the same ways. That said, this effort will fail for lack of decent hardware investment to keep costs down.
    - hobofan 6y ago
      Just recently, the DWD (German Meteorological Service) was banned from providing a free (and ad-free) general purpose weather app, after they were sued by other app developers that felt that competing with a government financed agency would be unfair. Of course an app is a much smaller project than launching a cloud provider.
- shockinglytrue 6y ago
  The EU could build support for this 1000 different ways. They need only shake another GDPR-shaped stick that gently encourages business to buy local and the rest would be history. But they can't really do that yet, because there is no viable local market. Look at Huawei to see how effective government bureaucracies can be when they decide to compete with efficient business.
- jackcosgrove 6y ago
  There were similar pronouncements made fifteen years ago or so about making a European search engine.
  - djohnston 6y ago
    Is there a European search engine?
    - Jdam 6y ago
      https://www.qwant.com/ https://www.qwant.com/
      - alibert 6y ago
        Does it still use Bing behind the scene?
    - mc32 6y ago
      Yandex is European, but maybe not the right kind of European.
      - djohnston 6y ago
        yeah definitely not what the eu means when they discuss technical sovereignty lol
- ryuukk_ 6y ago
  it worked well for alibaba ;) Azure and AWS are both state funded ;)
Zenst 6y ago
Interesting that Lidl only recently made news about moves into the cloud computing area. Reading the article "German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier, speaking in Berlin, described Gaia-X as a “moonshot” that would help reassert Europe’s technological sovereignty, and invited other countries and companies to join." It's not clear if this is limited to European based countries and companies only and if not, kinda moots the statement a bit. Be interesting how this progresses and competition is good and some standards would also work well. Though I do fear that the usual company suspects will pile into this pie just because they have a European satellite office, like Amazon, Google, Microsoft..... I hope this is an EU wide initiative and not just another FraGer based one for many reasons. So many questions and could just be a tool to bash the Tech giants into opening up more. Further reading upon this: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/legal-entity-gaia-x-established-european-cloud https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/legal-entity-gaia... https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Publikationen/Digitale-Welt/das-projekt-gaia-x-executive-summary.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=6-platform-now-official/ https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Publikationen/Digitale-Welt...
FridgeSeal 6y ago
> That is already far too late, according to analysts at Gartner, who forecast that the global market for public cloud services will grow by 17% to $228 billion this year. “The leading cloud providers have already moved quickly to build up this market,” said Gartner analyst Rene Buest. Person not poised to make exorbitant money off venture thinks venture a waste of time. Alternatively, person who might lose money if venture goes ahead thinks venture a waste of time.
- ludamad 6y ago
  But also, point that speaks for itself. Either you agree that market entrenchment will be a huge obstacle or you don't
Havoc 6y ago
>One important concept underpinning Gaia-X is “reversibility”, a principle that would allow users to easily switch providers. Switching providers would imply some new tech or standard, no? A bit like docker is portable. Except for all parts of the cloud. So are they thinking a FAAS standard, a load balancer standard? Bit confused about where they're going with this
- WatchDog 6y ago
  Build a platform based on open source systems like openstack and k8s?
  - Havoc 6y ago
    Well that's kinda my question. Modern cloud have like 50+ distinct "things" in them. I just don't see how they think this can even be standardized without it being a massive standard. Specific areas are low hanging fruit - like you say k8s but what they're promising is a pretty comprehensive if you can move from one provider to another for your cloud needs
- heipei 6y ago
  My bet would be focusing on things like a common interface for Object Storage (everyone is making their products S3 and DynamoDB protocol compatible already) plus a common interface for cloud API operations (creating / managing infrastructure). Those would go a long way. Then you can think about how compatible more niche services like the various message queues etc can be made.
- Fiahil 6y ago
  Kubernetes is your answer. For parts like blob storage, DNS, and identity provider, you can already use a few commercial or open source products (Minio, Keycloak, ...)
fongitosous 6y ago
this european cloud computing champion already exists: OVH. maybe policies should help him to grow
nemo44x 6y ago
On one hand, the tech is well enough understood that making a clone is doable. On the other hand, 2012 called.
bickfordb 6y ago
AWS/AZURE/GCP aren't exactly beloved by their customers, product quality is sporadic, domiciling things with the US is more questionable than ever before, and their margins are high. This seems like a great time for solid international (ie non-US) competition.
thamer 6y ago
It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company. Qwant[1], launched as "The French Google" with a focus on privacy, serves 10 million searches a day (a ridiculously small number). No one has heard of it, no one uses it, and it's another project with a dream of restoring France to its old glory by an old guard convinced that somehow their country is so exceptional that it can just launch any product and that people will switch to it. The story is more sinister when it comes to cloud platforms. A government project to free its companies from American domination over this sector will typically involve a bidding process in which established and well-connected companies with a history of costly, slow, outdated tech will win the contracts through their political connections with no consideration for their capacity to deliver or innovate. MPs will make sure their buddies get the contracts. The kind of buddies that lead companies that have so little understanding of cloud technologies that they went with OpenStack[2] to build this new world leader in computing. It's always the same thing. Old, well-connected companies like Bull that have zero ability to innovate and not a clue about the domain will rake in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money and deliver some garbage platform that no one will use except other government-funded moonshot companies. Always behind, always getting paid, never actually doing anything remotely useful. Source: I am French. I know how this works, I've seen these ridiculous projects get political support and fail miserably due to corruption and ineptitude. This is more of the same. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant [2] https://gigaom.com/2013/11/18/a-guide-to-the-french-national-clouds/ https://gigaom.com/2013/11/18/a-guide-to-the-french-national...
- linksnapzz 6y ago
  Or Outscale; the "French AWS" owned by Dassault Systemes...they did do a great job of cloning the AWS console feature set; but the backend was supposedly all VMware & Cisco UCS. Surprisingly not Bull hw, given that the people responsible for it came from there. Coulden't be cheap to run, and I've always wondered who used it outside of 3DS.
  - orwin 6y ago
    If you want a real "French AWS", you should look at Scaleway (well, their VPS will be entering beta Q3 2020 so it's not AWS yet, but it's coming closer and closer)
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
I wonder how much they will be paying their software developers. Right now, a senior developer that really understands cloud and distributed computing can make more than $500,000/yr at Amazon, Azure, or Microsoft. If they want to attract the talent to build this, they are going to have to pay a lot more than they are used to paying for software engineers.
- ReticentVole 6y ago
  USA Payroll tax: 15.3% combined, first $127,000 only (3.89% effective) France Payroll tax: 20% for salaries over €151,965. USA Income tax: 42%, including State (CA) and Federal, excluding deductions France Income Tax: 50%. So the labour cost will be a lot higher due to payroll taxes, and the employee will take home less due to income taxes. High VAT (20% in France, 8.5% in SF) means consumer purchases are also more expensive. If you are in Paris, you're at a latitude 48.8N, SF 37.7N. The same is true for moving to other Anglo countries: UK, Canada, Australia have similar lower-tax regimes. France, Germany etc. are charging huge payroll, income and sales taxes to fund their huge welfare states and bureaucracies, but in the process ruining their competitiveness.
  - MaximumYComb 6y ago
    San Fran also has over 8k homeless in a population of 800k. The overall homeless rate in France is about 5x lower per capita. My opinion on paying taxes changed drastically after I visited the USA 2 years ago (San Fran, LA, Vegas). I was absolutely shocked by the amount of poverty I saw and I had never realised that America had such a drastically different culture to Australia.
    - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
      https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/19/21027974/san-francisco-homeless-decade-2010s-kositsky-navigation-center-friedenbach https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/19/21027974/san-francisco-home... For the 2019-2020 fiscal year, San Francisco will spend $364 million on the homeless. I think there are other major issues besides lack of money from lack of taxes. For one thing, when comparing per capita, you shouldn't just look at the population of San Francisco. A lot of those 8k homeless people came from other parts of the state or even other parts of the country to San Francisco. This is in large part that San Francisco has nice weather and is relatively welcoming to the homeless compared to a lot of cities and jurisdictions. Whereas in a lot of cities, homeless residents might get a lot of harrassment from the police, in San Francisico for the most part they are left alone. So when doing per capita homelessness in San Francisco, you probably need to look at a much larger overall population that just that of San Francisco.
supercanuck 6y ago
Competition is good.
plandis 6y ago
> but would instead referee a common set of European rules. That sounds less like innovation and more like regulation to hinder foreign companies. The US should retaliate economically if that becomes the case.
- tastroder 6y ago
  Realistically that will just yield guidelines on GDPR compliance, which was already adopted by major providers, and interoperability. Even if this non-political actor would lead to regulatory advice, we already have similar guidelines in areas like security, framing that alone as anti-competitive seems somewhat odd. I doubt a major cloud provider is "hindered" by suggestions such as "give your users something to control where their data goes" / "give your users the ability to get their data back out of your infrastructure". Startups might have problems work existing regulation that essentially says "make sure this data doesn't leave the country/union" but I don't see much difference to investing in any other compliance on the other side of the pond there.
DeonPenny 6y ago
I have sadly no faith in europe to get this right. While capitalism is under fire right now it does one thing better than anything we know right now. Innovate. I don't see a government competition with a group of smart, capable people, who would reap all the money from said effort.
jariel 6y ago
This might sound terrible ... but this will come from Scandinavia/Finland or not at all. Possibly in the form of one or a few, very well thought out startups and/or standards that the rest of Europe can buy into. This is not about size, it's about 'getting it right' - and then having the system follow along one way or another.
zoobab 6y ago
Usual suspects, SAP and Deutsche Telekom, which shows the corruption of our elites.
- zoobab 6y ago
  Strangely enough, the same both SAP and Deutsche Telekom doing the german Corona app.
  - Tomte 6y ago
    What's strange about it? SAP and T-Systems are by far the largest IT consulting shops in Germany. Of course they get almost every huge contract. Now, I agree that a more diverse landscape in that industry would be preferable, but feigning surprise is not helping one bit.
    - ahartmetz 6y ago
      The corona app doesn't need to be a huge contract. But SAP and T-Systems can sure waste a huge amount of time and charge a huge amount of money for it.
      - Tomte 6y ago
        Everything the federal government does is a huge contract. Of course, in a hypothetical paradise it wouldn't have to be. But in the real world, it is. That's still no reason to be surprised.
        majewsky 6y ago
        From what I know, SAP and Deutsche Telekom were chosen because: - SAP built an app on very short notice where Germans traveling abroad could register for one of the government-organized flights back to Germany. The government was satisfied with how this played out, therefore they were the first choice for building the app part. - Telekom is already operating several backend services for the RKI (the German counterpart of the CDC) and the local health offices, so they were the first choice for building the backend part that needs to integrate with these systems. Disclosure: I work at SAP, but not on the Corona app. I'm not referring to any internal knowledge. What I know, I know from public media.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
This once again ignores what are probably more profound issues. Europe has tech companies and independent cloud providers. Yet they seem to never grow large or fast enough to become leaders globally or even in Europe. SAP is mentioned, which is a giant. But it is 50 years old. This is not the type of company that is going to challenge the status quo and come up with disrupting technology. I think countries like France and Germany should really look at their tech and business environments, including universities, finance, tax, labour law, etc.
- ragebol 6y ago
  > Europe has tech companies and independent cloud providers. Yet they seem to never grow large or fast enough to become leaders globally or even in Europe. Very true, but I'm unsure why that is the case. My guess it's the country/language fragmentation, ie. companies looking mostly at suppliers from their own country. But I'm not sure that is the case. Also another guess is that European companies buy US software but US companies don't often buy European software perhaps? Again, nothing to back that up with except for a hunch.
- jonathanstrange 6y ago
  ...and the issue is that the products are too expensive due to a vast number of factors. I'm just a private hobby developer, so maybe there are markets where this is different. But when I was looking for cold storage backup and virtual hosting providers in the EU none of the offers were even remotely competitive with US offers. They're twice or even more as expensive and less reputable. Especially concerning backup this bothers me a lot. I'm currently with Crashplan for Small Business and it works well. I would love to have all my data on EU servers, but where is the EU backup solution with decent backup software that allows me to store more than 2 TB of data for $3.06 per month? I can't see how this French initiative would change this. If you look up "Gaia-x" it doesn't even come with a web page where you can buy the product or check out its pricing and conditions. It's nebulous vaporware - so typical.
dang 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23423921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23423921 was earlier on the same topic but since this article has a lot more information, perhaps we'll merge those comments hither.
jialutu 6y ago
I get the sentiment, but why not invest in companies like https://www.scaleway.com/en/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/ a bit more?
- Jdam 6y ago
  because they are not well connected to politics.
  - conradfr 6y ago
    It is owned by Xavier Niel, so yes, they are.
- tilolebo 6y ago
  How does Scaleway compare to OVH?
  - jialutu 6y ago
    Personally, I've not used OVH, so I cannot judge. But here is how I would rate Scaleway. Pros: - They are really really cheap! This is not just for the VMs themselves, but their VMs come with NVMe disks and comes with uncapped networking - Their customer support has been phenomenonal, and this was when I was on their free tier support Cons: - They are only limited to 2 regions, Paris and Netherlands - I've seen their VMs become out of stock quite often Personally though, their pros far outweigh their cons, so I would very much love to see them expand their service.
- Dunstark 6y ago
  They are part of the working group https://blog.scaleway.com/2020/gaia-x-catalog-demonstrator-graph/ https://blog.scaleway.com/2020/gaia-x-catalog-demonstrator-g...
CalRobert 6y ago
"repository of existing services and resources that are available in the ecosystem, including the capability to search this repository" Yeah I totally want to spend my time digging around in there for "which random company can I get a crappy version of AWS Lambda from?" I'm no fan of monocultures and US/Chinese influence but if they want it to actually work they could say "here's a terraform provider that figures it out for you". That would be nice. So far it sounds like this is just "we'll make a list of cloud providers and some of their services"
- thiht 6y ago
  > Yeah I totally want to spend my time digging around in there for "which random company can I get a crappy version of AWS Lambda from?" Or seen another way: "where can I get a better alternative to the suckish and overpriced AWS lambda, which also respects my data?". Perspective. AWS is not the best everywhere.
  - klohto 6y ago
    How does AWS not respect your data? And in which way is Lambda suckish? It’s the leader in serverless workloads and grounds for Firecracker...
tannhaeuser 6y ago
Does anybody have any technical details to share about Gaia-X? I mean service discovery, interchangeable services/interfaces, etc. has been around since the SOAP days (~ 2003) at least. Cloud can mean many things. Does there exist anything at all or is it just talk at the political level atm? Do they intend to fund new research into bringing these things, or will they pick existing tech?
- mlatu 6y ago
  Well, if you know German there is this longwinded brochure: https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/DE/Publikationen/Digitale-Welt/das-projekt-gaia-x.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=24 https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/DE/Publikationen/Digitale-Welt...
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
    Thanks, that's exactly what I feared and would call strategical/non-technical ;) I mean it mentions "open source technologies", and contains a vague general description of the concept of identity providers, and, of course, platitudes a la "industry 4.0" but nothing concrete. I want to hear about protocols, operating systems/POSIX/Linux, integration into TelCo provisioning platforms maybe if that's on the radar and they want to have 5G on board, payment standards, containers (chroot, VMs, Docker-like/Linux-only namespace containers, or whatever), or even IP networking. Also, going by the stock photos and the use case example, I'm a bit surprised this is targetting industry applications rather than public authorities, schools, medical etc.
- thiht 6y ago
  This was published today: https://www.ovh.com/blog/gaia-x-catalogue-search-engine-under-the-hood/ https://www.ovh.com/blog/gaia-x-catalogue-search-engine-unde... Apparently more posts are coming.
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
    That's at least something. Unfortunately, this reads more like a program to keep academic research institutes busy and rehashes phantasies of dynamically matching service providers to consumers and policies, something that was a hot topic in academia, and academia only, during the SOAP times, but wasn't used at all in practice (even today you're using lots of yaml to bind stuff on clouds). Moreover, it doesn't use any established logic programming paradigm and re-invents an ad-hoc service ontology/taxonomy and query language (this after the EU spend lots of money in the last decade to fund research on SemWeb ontologies) and they're just using Neo4j (which is fine as a graph DB but not a standard by any means). On top of that, they're using OpenAPI and JSON payloads; this isn't a good fit when the majority of established protocols one would like to use (and that have been created by lots of EU money) are based on WSDL and XML (payment protocols) or even EDIFACT (logistics). OpenAPI/SmartBear has certainly sold their primitive JSON Schema thing well I guess (that just exists on paper or in the form of broken Swagger Java apps). Didn't they want to push European tech? Then why are they promoting gitlab and k8s? I could go on and on, but this doesn't look promising. Tbh, making an undergrad project out of this is embarrassing for French academia who has produced some of the best work in the field.
pinkfoot 6y ago
I they are smart they will create an open app store with GMS, etc. compliant services. And use EU competition rules to mandate the the most popular apps must be in there.
renewiltord 6y ago
Most of old Europe saw China succeed in its "Copy a successful American thing" manner and decided to try the same. Except they don't have the competence overall as orgs.
- pyvpx 6y ago
  competence at what, exactly?
  - allendoerfer 6y ago
    They are not shielding their market, putting everything behind a firewall, requiring joint ventures. Instead they actually respect human rights and the power of law. They don’t even use a non-latin language.
    - hackissimo123 6y ago
      I think the residents of Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and the entirety of central and eastern Europe (except Romania) would be surprised to hear that they don't speak a Latin language.
      - amaccuish 6y ago
        I assume you're speaking of alphabet? Because the languages you just listed are definitely not descendants of Latin.
        hackissimo123 6y ago
        Fuck, I need to proof-read my posts better. I got it the wrong way round - the European countries not listed are the ones that speak Latin languages.
      - allendoerfer 6y ago
        German might not be a Latin language, but has very obvious roots there. Which are btw. more apparent than in English, because the grammar has not been simplified yet. I suspect the way to learn both languages is not that different. It also has to be way easier if you already know a similiar language, which was my point.
Jdam 6y ago
I think the title of this article sums it up quite well: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/german-economy-minister-launches-euro-cloud-initiative-falls-stage/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/german-economy-mi...
ksec 6y ago
If they want Competition to "HyperScalers" then why not just use OVH? Generally speaking, I dont think any of the Europeans have technical problems, I think they have a Product Placement, Marketing and Sales problem. And I think it is more or a cultural issue. ( Not saying it is a bad thing )
- dgellow 6y ago
  IMHO the broader issue is that there isn’t a european culture or market. Instead you have a fragmented set of markets, each with their own expectations and regulations. That makes it incredibly hard to create a product that serves Europe as a whole instead of just Germany, or France, or something else. Even just the basics are way harder than they should be, for example the lack of a common language is already a pain to deal with.
- thiht 6y ago
  > If they want Competition to "HyperScalers" then why not just use OVH? They do. OVH is one of the biggest actors in Gaia-X.
- jpfr 6y ago
  The goal is not to built yet-another-hyperscaler. The existing hyperscalers will integrate in GAIA-X. Rather we want to give users the power to see where their data is stored and to control the use of their data if they choose to share it in an "ecosystem". Many EU countries are scared to put their data from public administration / hospitals / ... into a cloud where lawful interception could be enforced via the US Cloud Act or similar.
cageface 6y ago
American internet companies can address a large, relatively homogeneous market of 300 million people that all speak the same language. This alone is a big competitive advantage over any European company.
- raverbashing 6y ago
  More than that, if a service is created in the US, then it's much more than 300mi people potentially using it.
- 9q9 6y ago
  That is true for customer-facing softwre, but would not be relevant in e.g. semiconductors, compilers, formal verification.
  - jogundas 6y ago
    For these B2B applications, it is important to have your potential customers in your network. One can argue that achieving such a network is easier in the US, where most of the potential customers presumably are.
- effie 6y ago
  Indeed. And not only common language, but ease of doing business with companies across the continent in general. Here in Europe, due to legal/language/cultural differences, and due to laziness, the default mode of operation for small companies in services is to avoid or neglect doing business with strangers from other parts of Europe. It is safe and comfortable, but does not create big multinational juggernauts.
roenxi 6y ago
There is a really interesting discussion to be had here about if and what the EUs past policy failing was. Is the issue that they were insufficiently capitalist and drove all their innovators to the US? Is the issue that they let their markets too open, and should have copied the Chinese approach? Is the issue that they shouldn't be concentrating on tech at all and should be leaving it to people better at it than Europeans? There is a real litmus test of something in the EU and their technology situation.
- jialutu 6y ago
  Having been to a few tech conferences held by the EU commission, I would say the issue is not (wholly) to it being too open. The biggest problem with the EU is that it is ultimately 27 sovereign states with different language and cultures and very different economic situations. What the EU tries to do is to bring these 27 states closer by awarding grants based on cross-border collaborations (so company A in France needs to collaborate with company B in Italy) and also helping the poorer states. This is a very rigid process, hence I guess this is why we've not seen much success stories so far.
baxtr 6y ago
This is so sad. As a European I would love to see some Internet giants created. Everybody says it's because we don't have homogenous market and so on. But my hunch is it is something different: Existing European companies are much more protected than their US counterparts, or even their UK counterparts. Think ThomasCook - would have been definitely been "saved" like TUI in Germany. That doesn't happen that much in the US I believe. Instead new comers are generated at a higher rate creating completely new markets, think Tesla, Facebook, amazon etc. That entire life cycle of companies dying and being newly born seems somewhat skewed over here.
- brmgb 6y ago
  > Existing European companies are much more protected than their US counterparts That's a complete myth. The USA affords a lot of direct and indirect protection to its companies, far more than Europe does usually. You have things like the "Buy American Act" ensuring US companies don't face external competition for public markets, a different system of measures and crucially norms slowing the entry of external actors and a strong cultural emphasis amongst the population on economic patriotism and buying American which mostly doesn't exist in Europe.
- iagovar 6y ago
  > Existing European companies are much more protected than their US counterparts I'm sorry but that's not even remotely true. You have several instances of EU companies acquired by foreign capital.
- eythian 6y ago
  Do we need internet giants though? Are they a good thing for people? Perhaps a system that encourages a handful of really big companies in de facto control of large swaths of our communications infrastructure is not something that's actually good for the world.
thiht 6y ago
I see a lot of hate in this thread regarding a disruption to US hegemony. I guess that's why we need projects like Gaia-X. I wholeheartedly hope it will succeed, and given the companies that are involved in it, I'm pretty confident about it.
- cyborgx7 6y ago
  No kidding. I would love European tech sovereignty. Something I've been advocating for a long time. I wish the Linux in public institutions that was tried in Germany caught on.
  - maze-le 6y ago
    > I wish the Linux in public institutions that was tried in Germany caught on. Linux doesn't have a lot of lobbying power, and no important public figures like Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates that would personally intervene on its behalf. https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/ https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/
- thecleaner 6y ago
  I dont hate US hegemony. They are there because they got things right. American companies are more innovayive and fast paced than their European counterparts (assuming they even have counterparts). In general, I would love to have American tech culture with a European safety net.
  - thiht 6y ago
    > They are there because they got things right. American companies are more innovayive and fast paced than their European counterparts That's naive. Europe simply wouldn't allow (rightly so) a company to become Google or Amazon. A conglomerate like Gaia-X seems like a safer alternative to US tech giants.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      Hm. What do you think of Bertelsmann and all its subsidiaries then? Like independence of media, while the heiress is best friends with our chancellor? "Staat im Staat". Also Arvato and Infoscore, which almost nobody knows while rambling about the SCHUFA... edit: apart from Bertelsmann: DATEV
sek 6y ago
They are competing with Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Those are not normal companies. I also think that people underestimate that this space will get very low margin eventually and become even more commoditized. Most companies totally overpaid for IT enterprise solutions the last decades, they are sales driven and live off lock in effects of their hardware to milk their customers. Now we got rid of physical hardware then it will take companies another 10 years to figure out that they also don't need 90% of all the cloud solutions they got sold on. The rest you can run everywhere cloud neutral with kubernetes or something else. Will those three companies earn a trillion dollars during that process? Sure.
PeterStuer 6y ago
The problem with European software plays is a monetary problem. EU capital is much more expensive than US capital (ultimately due to the latter's status as the 'world reserve' currency due to the enforced petro-dollar regime). This is why Europe's IT sector is much more focused on B2B servuces/bespoke developments (low risk business models) and hardware/infrastructure (historic manufacturing/telecoms legacy). in terms of software products/B2C/SaaS high risk/hit businessmodels the US can relax and cherrypick from the European R&D knowing they can buy out any local player due to cheaper money. The EU has in the past always declared IT and the Knowledge Economy as 'strategic', but has never protected the sector from US appropriation.
- antpls 6y ago
  That looks like a good analysis to me. There are so many regulations in EU that if something happens, even organically, it has to be in order with EU regulations and priorities. The USA appropriation was never out of EU control, it was rather an accepted strategic choice. (At least, that's how I like to think about it...)
  - cdavid 6y ago
    The US are not exactly regulation-free. Actually, I remember seeing people in HN who mentioned legal costs for companies tend to be much higher than in (continental) Europe. The cost of capital is indeed one of the core issue. In Europe, almost your only way to get funding is through banks, the whole concept of VC is near absent. In terms of innovation, etc. I think a lot of it is cultural essentialist BS. Just look at OSS: lots of core projects have a strong root in Europe, or even originated from there. But the culture of VC + university that is one core of innovation post WW2 in the US is completely absent in Europe. Intuitively, the fact that the market is more fragmented feels like an issue, but I don't know of any serious study on that.
- jdm2212 6y ago
  Why wouldn't an entrepreneur just borrow dollars in the US and exchange them for Euros? Or just take equity investments instead of debt and not bother with interest rates in the first place?
heipei 6y ago
As a German who's been exclusively working in the US tech space for the past few years, there's so many anecdotes that come to mind to highlight how far behind the old world is, both in tech as in spirit: - Article about Gaia-X in major German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales", from your home! - When I tried to read or watch reviews about SaaS solutions for invoicing / bookkeeping for German companies, the first half of the review is usually spent trying to convince people that moving off paper-based invoices and folders to all-digital is a good idea in the first place. - University-educated people in my social circle are often woefully unaware of economic trends that have swept the US, be it the gig economy, X-as-a-service, the nature of Venture Capital, the idea of scaling a company aggressively, the value of information, mobility of labor and paying market rate for experts, the high profit margins of offering a software product vs. (for example) doing one-off consulting for a German industrial company, etc. None of these things bode well for the best talent in Europe working on anything remotely resembling an innovative European tech company. Not even saying we're worse off for it, but the reality is that any European who truly grasps the pace of the US tech industry would rather go there directly than work for a Franco-German government moonshot and hope to be paid maybe a 10% premium over their regular European salary.
- mattlutze 6y ago
  But we are super proud of coining Industrie 4.0, so, that's something. It would be wonderful to see more free and open innovation and investment in a couple of bleeding-edge tech centers in Germany. A lot of the big internationals are in Munich and Berlin is slowly growing steam for startups, but it's a disappointment to me that there's so many Germans with so much wealth prime for investment and creating a culture of exploration, but instead it sits in real estate or something.
  - woodpanel 6y ago
    "But we are super proud of coining Industrie 4.0, so, that's something." Regarding Industrie 4.0: Currently at a client of mine, a "hidden champion" i.e. world market leader in industry XYZ (1.6B in revenue), I'm struggling to have them migrate from Cobol to Java. They are using their versioning system as a backup for their data, not for versioning the code. Deployments are done via dragging a zip file somewhere. Every new version means the whole system (handling invoices e.g.) is out of service for 10-14 days.
Pedrit0 6y ago
Europe has to start from somewhere in a market currently dominated by the US and the Chinese... This project may look like a joke for people in the Silicon Valley but everything we do in Europe looks like a joke for Americans. They laugh at the EU, at our spaceship program, at our industry, at our techs... Whatever we do they say we are old and finished. OK have good times laughing. Meanwhile we go on progressing. Discretly, maybe ridiculously, but we do.
- Udik 6y ago
  > Europe has to start from somewhere in a market currently dominated by the US and the Chinese... Yes, and it has to start by copying them. Copying to the letter, like following a recipe, humbly. That's how absolute beginners learn. Not by proclaiming absurd moonshots (by the way, it's "France and Germany", as usual, not the EU) and insisting that we'll build something different, new and innovative and blah blah. Just copy: it will force us to do the things we don't want to do, it will go against our values and culture. Which are probably what's holding us back now.
  - Pedrit0 6y ago
    I think you did not get the purpose of the project and its context. 1. What should we copy ? We already have cloud companies in Europe. The issue is not about a lack of knowledge about cloud technologies. It is a matter of market share. Our companies are not big enough to provide adequate services to european states and sensitive industries. 2. The goal is not to create from scratch a European cloud giant that would be able to challenge Chinese and US powerhouses. It is just way not to rely on them as they cannot be trusted in any manner when it comes to data management and fair competition. As stated many times by Trump and Xi Jiping, EU is a competitor or even worse an enemy. In Europe we share this same bellicose analysis too now. And cloud is a battle among others, but an important one.
    - Udik 6y ago
      True, I don't think we need to copy the technology: that is probably easily available, you just need good engineers and money. The problem is exactly the second you mention: why is it that EU companies don't have the market share that US ones have? Why are our companies not big enough? What prevents entrepreneurs in Europe from creating tech giants such as the US ones? These are the things we need to copy- not the technology. > The goal is not to create from scratch a European cloud giant ... It is just way not to rely on them And how do you avoid relying on them? Are you going to force EU companies to choose a EU cloud provider, even when they would have preferred a US one? No, you need to create an offer that is competitive: and once it is, it will be competitive for everyone, not just our companies.
acd 6y ago
I hope Gaia-X will be built as an Open source project. Because of economics of scale closed source companies usually cannot compete with Open source projects. Meaning that open source projects can attract more developers from different companies and backgrounds than closed source. Plus if its open source everyone in the world benefits not just Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale https://opensource.com/article/18/9/awesome-economics-open-source https://opensource.com/article/18/9/awesome-economics-open-s... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_economics
JeremyS 6y ago
From the article "The companies will inject an annual €1.5 million combined in the underlying association, with plans to double the sum later." 1.5 million ... I hope this is a typo.
k__ 6y ago
I'm from Germany and just last week I saw a building with a sign. OVH - Biggest Hoster in Europe I never heard of this company in my life. I looked at their offering and they were basically selling 20 year old technology. Nothing compared to AWS, Azure, or Google. Germany is so far behind in IT, it's crazy. I also stopped reading German IT news 10 years ago, because they are always weeks or month late. All good IT people I knew sooner or later moved to the US.
motohagiography 6y ago
The description of Gaia-X and that of old world culture sounds like a standard government/enterprise project with all the same problems. The US model comes from venture funding, where you seed 10 firms solving the same type of problem, and the most desirable result prevails. The institutional model of increasing stakeholders to produce something that satisfies all of them is what makes enterprise development such a farce. The mentality is captured in the criticism that something is, "underfunded," which is the expression of a worldview that "funding," comes from some welfare oriented source, and not earned as compensation for providing value. The strategies to "get funding," vs. the ones that earn revenue are largely orthogonal, and people with the funding mentality have in effect the opposite of the "growth mindset," that is necessary to build things others want. These development cultures build lots of things, just very few things that anyone uses willingly. It's just more solutions to govern, not tools people need.
mark_l_watson 6y ago
I wish them good luck. I think that right now the US and China really have a lock on cloud and AI. Europe has lead the world in user privacy and rights, so I hope they can leverage that and bake human rights into their systems. Hetzner is a very good cloud provider. I would use them exclusively if it were not for the tiny latency lag between the SouthWest USA (where I live) and Germany.
blopeur 6y ago
This project is still born because they are missing a federated accounting and payment service at the heart of the platform. Why? Because it's damn near impossible to deliver such feature for dynamically orchestrated services from a federation of providers. Sovereignity, interoperability, compliance is a nice sales pitch. But it seems that when it comes to getting paid or paying you are on your own. Imagine trying to pay for hundreds of services from companies spread across dozens of countries...
- kazen44 6y ago
  how is this a problem? SEPA has already solved this issue?
raghava 6y ago
Had seen https://medium.com/@Regulatory/gaia-x-5-reasons-why-the-european-cloud-might-fail-c097d14499db https://medium.com/@Regulatory/gaia-x-5-reasons-why-the-euro... on this topic. Few of the points made sense.
sershe 6y ago
Alas, looks like a PR move to cobble something together from existing components by consultants for EUR1.5m a year (from the article, unless I misread what that is for). I've been developing backend distributed systems for a while, and kinda want to have a gig in Europe, so the title got me too excited I guess. But, my dreams of reinventing the wheel in Europe for a (relatively) high paycheck aside; what could possibly go wrong? :)
arcturus17 6y ago
The article seems to conflate cloud services with merely storing data. Of course that's part of any cloud stack, but to the average HN reader it is evident that cloud services are much more than that, such as running software and transforming data. I think this might be a reflection of a misunderstanding that also happens on a higher level in European politics. Cloud services are much more than just "computers that store data" and the political implications of data sovereignty or what have you. Cloud services are insanely complex systems built on the latest advances in areas like operating systems, networking, hardware, etc. You don't get there with political statements of good-will, even when they're backed by what looks like a non-committal, lukewarm coalition of private companies. You don't stumble upon it by just saying "Ha! We need a Europe response to cloud services!" You get there by being obssessive and single-minded about the problem, employing all your energy and focus on the task at hand, most likely fueled by the ambition of a lucrative or economically strategic incentive. It saddens me as a European that the latter is what Europe seems to lack sometimes, and this initiative doesn't give me any hope for a change of course.
dalf 6y ago
Perhaps an out of topic comment. I've been working for one of these CORDIS European projects : https://cordis.europa.eu/projects/en https://cordis.europa.eu/projects/en The project was politically driven while most of the slides were selling dreams. As usual in this kind of project - there was a schedule carved in stone - the Conway's law gets a beautiful practical example so the research becomes quickly a joke. Some people: - worked on out of topic subjects. At least no harm. - criticized because of external/past/personal/out of topic reasons. - criticized the work of others while doing literally nothing. My boss knew it, but since they are well known to wrote nice documents to get the fund for many years. - worked very hard while being criticized through hidden communication. - were here because of the data. - were here to get the technology if by luck it ends up to be working project. The usual burdens, I guess, but it basically kills the motivation (it is my experience in one specific project). In the end, people went to the different meetings to see Europe. It seems some other projects are driven in the same way according to what I have heard. It is only a sum up of experience. YMMV. I sincerely hope that Gaia-X will be managed in better way.
maelito 6y ago
France was able to build world-class high speed rail and a very low carbon electricity grid. They emerged from the government. Why can't we build alternatives to the big US tech services ? Is it just a matter of momentum ?
joyceschan 6y ago
Governement Productions (TM), this is gonna end up like CDC's productions during the pandemic
dzonga 6y ago
didn't some search engine Cliq shut down, because they had no support in Europe ? would love to hear their response to those officials
jokoon 6y ago
If China wants tech sovereignty, I don't see why Europe shouldn't. I don't understand the negative comments here. The core problem isn't really the innovation, the economics, or europe's ability to compete with american giants, it's rather geopolitics, privacy, GDPR, surveillance, industrial espionage, tax havens.
BiteCode_dev 6y ago
So, instead of working with well established EU companies like OVH or Lease Web, they, once again, build-to-fail a sovereing solution. They will not be able to hire the necessary talent, don't benefit from decades of expertise, have to build trust with multiple communities plus a client portfolio and have to pay for building infrastructures. As @heipei said, Europe mentality is already years late when it's about tech. And while I do think we desparatly need our own alternative to the US GAFAM and clouds, this is, once again, a doomed attempt that will mostly enrich a few well connected people.
oneplane 6y ago
> " a platform joining up cloud-hosting services from dozens of companies, allowing business to move their data freely" This is practically dead before it's created. The other platforms (AWS, GCP etc.) are hyperscale due to their useful integrated nature of building blocks. You're not going to get that with a bunch of random vendors. It's hard enough as it is for a large company to create a somewhat homogenous environment, and existing projects that are supposed to be multi-vendor like OpenStack (and CloudStack) are just not on par. Say you have a few vendors, one runs VMWare, one runs Hyper-V, and you need a workload with scalable counts of CPUs, and the datacenter of the VMWare guys is full and you now need to use some of the CPUs in the other datacenter. Are you going to have a single API (and perhaps console) where you say: I want a machine with specs X, image Y and parameters Z to do that and have the lower layers resolve it? Probably not.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  > Are you going to have a single API (and perhaps console) where you say: I want a machine with specs X, image Y and parameters Z to do that and have the lower layers resolve it? Probably not. Why not? Isn't Kubernetes already most of the way there? (I have only played with it very briefly, but it looks like it should solve this. The workload is most likely a container anyways, mostly resolving the "image" issue, so the key parameters are CPU, storage and RAM. Ignoring dependencies between containers (e.g. you probably want your web app server and database to be colocated), for the simplest implementation, couldn't you simply create a Kubernetes cluster covering VMs from all providers? It seems like an orchestrator that places your jobs is part of what the project tries to develop, according to https://www.heise.de/news/Bundeswirtschaftsminister-Gaia-X-als-weltweiter-Goldstandard-fuer-Cloud-Dienste-4774826.html https://www.heise.de/news/Bundeswirtschaftsminister-Gaia-X-a...
  - oneplane 6y ago
    Not: because you would either lose platform-specific functionality between whatever hypervisor the different vendors happen to use, or you would get multiple APIs. I'm sure attempts other than libvirt exist, but nobody has really succeeded. It's all either Xen, KVM, or VMWare so far, and a little bit of Hyper-V, and none of them are compatible.
panzagl 6y ago
This is great because it will be so easy to spin up instances- just provide your VAT registration, detailed plan for GPDR, mechanism for 'right to be forgotten', cookie policy, application for any protected region of origin usages, and pandemic mitigation policy and after a short series of review and revisions you will be put in the queue for the no-bid government IT contractor to reject your request because they phased out the instance type you requested.
zachguo 6y ago
In terms of geopolitics this is a good move, a superpower should have its own tech infrastructure.

215 points by tpush 6y ago

Thats really the only thing the Europeans can put together these days...more policies :( How about just getting your hands dirty and start building great stuff? (Former european here)

mmmBacon 6y ago

I don’t see how a government bureaucracy can compete with Azure, AWS, and GCP.

monadic2 6y ago
Really? Typically the concern is that they can compete too well.
- redisman 6y ago
  Can you point us to some examples of governments beating the private sector in software? I can’t imagine that EU governments can pull together funding greater than Google or Amazon tbh. Besides you then have to convince the private sector to move to your new unproven cloud platform
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - monadic2 6y ago
    I wouldn’t read the lack of public investment into software as accidental. Just look how terrible investments like healthcare.gov are to see why: massive mountains of cash if you’re not a worker and no need to deliver anything usable. There’s money in not understanding how software works if you’re a politician or a contractor. That said, I don’t think I have ever heard of governments releasing copyrighted, closed-source software, let alone trying to make money off it. That just doesn’t make any sense. I don’t see any reason why the lack of a profit motive would be a detriment to competition in the event governments do invest in free software Honestly this seems like something a trade treaty would be useful for if it weren’t written by multinational corporations. Until then we’re gonna be stuck with really, really shitty decisions as individuals, like ios vs android. Hell, have you seen any competition in software in private markets? There’s isolated pockets of competition in certain circumstances, but from my perspective the major markets all colluded to fuck us roughly the same ways. That said, this effort will fail for lack of decent hardware investment to keep costs down.
  - hobofan 6y ago
    Just recently, the DWD (German Meteorological Service) was banned from providing a free (and ad-free) general purpose weather app, after they were sued by other app developers that felt that competing with a government financed agency would be unfair. Of course an app is a much smaller project than launching a cloud provider.
shockinglytrue 6y ago
The EU could build support for this 1000 different ways. They need only shake another GDPR-shaped stick that gently encourages business to buy local and the rest would be history. But they can't really do that yet, because there is no viable local market. Look at Huawei to see how effective government bureaucracies can be when they decide to compete with efficient business.
jackcosgrove 6y ago
There were similar pronouncements made fifteen years ago or so about making a European search engine.
- djohnston 6y ago
  Is there a European search engine?
  - Jdam 6y ago
    https://www.qwant.com/ https://www.qwant.com/
    - alibert 6y ago
      Does it still use Bing behind the scene?
  - mc32 6y ago
    Yandex is European, but maybe not the right kind of European.
    - djohnston 6y ago
      yeah definitely not what the eu means when they discuss technical sovereignty lol
ryuukk_ 6y ago
it worked well for alibaba ;) Azure and AWS are both state funded ;)

Zenst 6y ago

Interesting that Lidl only recently made news about moves into the cloud computing area. Reading the article "German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier, speaking in Berlin, described Gaia-X as a “moonshot” that would help reassert Europe’s technological sovereignty, and invited other countries and companies to join." It's not clear if this is limited to European based countries and companies only and if not, kinda moots the statement a bit. Be interesting how this progresses and competition is good and some standards would also work well. Though I do fear that the usual company suspects will pile into this pie just because they have a European satellite office, like Amazon, Google, Microsoft..... I hope this is an EU wide initiative and not just another FraGer based one for many reasons. So many questions and could just be a tool to bash the Tech giants into opening up more. Further reading upon this: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/legal-entity-gaia-x-established-european-cloud https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/legal-entity-gaia... https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Publikationen/Digitale-Welt/das-projekt-gaia-x-executive-summary.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=6-platform-now-official/ https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Publikationen/Digitale-Welt...

FridgeSeal 6y ago

> That is already far too late, according to analysts at Gartner, who forecast that the global market for public cloud services will grow by 17% to $228 billion this year. “The leading cloud providers have already moved quickly to build up this market,” said Gartner analyst Rene Buest. Person not poised to make exorbitant money off venture thinks venture a waste of time. Alternatively, person who might lose money if venture goes ahead thinks venture a waste of time.

ludamad 6y ago
But also, point that speaks for itself. Either you agree that market entrenchment will be a huge obstacle or you don't

Havoc 6y ago

>One important concept underpinning Gaia-X is “reversibility”, a principle that would allow users to easily switch providers. Switching providers would imply some new tech or standard, no? A bit like docker is portable. Except for all parts of the cloud. So are they thinking a FAAS standard, a load balancer standard? Bit confused about where they're going with this

WatchDog 6y ago
Build a platform based on open source systems like openstack and k8s?
- Havoc 6y ago
  Well that's kinda my question. Modern cloud have like 50+ distinct "things" in them. I just don't see how they think this can even be standardized without it being a massive standard. Specific areas are low hanging fruit - like you say k8s but what they're promising is a pretty comprehensive if you can move from one provider to another for your cloud needs
heipei 6y ago
My bet would be focusing on things like a common interface for Object Storage (everyone is making their products S3 and DynamoDB protocol compatible already) plus a common interface for cloud API operations (creating / managing infrastructure). Those would go a long way. Then you can think about how compatible more niche services like the various message queues etc can be made.
Fiahil 6y ago
Kubernetes is your answer. For parts like blob storage, DNS, and identity provider, you can already use a few commercial or open source products (Minio, Keycloak, ...)

fongitosous 6y ago

this european cloud computing champion already exists: OVH. maybe policies should help him to grow

nemo44x 6y ago

On one hand, the tech is well enough understood that making a clone is doable. On the other hand, 2012 called.

bickfordb 6y ago

AWS/AZURE/GCP aren't exactly beloved by their customers, product quality is sporadic, domiciling things with the US is more questionable than ever before, and their margins are high. This seems like a great time for solid international (ie non-US) competition.

thamer 6y ago

It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company. Qwant[1], launched as "The French Google" with a focus on privacy, serves 10 million searches a day (a ridiculously small number). No one has heard of it, no one uses it, and it's another project with a dream of restoring France to its old glory by an old guard convinced that somehow their country is so exceptional that it can just launch any product and that people will switch to it. The story is more sinister when it comes to cloud platforms. A government project to free its companies from American domination over this sector will typically involve a bidding process in which established and well-connected companies with a history of costly, slow, outdated tech will win the contracts through their political connections with no consideration for their capacity to deliver or innovate. MPs will make sure their buddies get the contracts. The kind of buddies that lead companies that have so little understanding of cloud technologies that they went with OpenStack[2] to build this new world leader in computing. It's always the same thing. Old, well-connected companies like Bull that have zero ability to innovate and not a clue about the domain will rake in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money and deliver some garbage platform that no one will use except other government-funded moonshot companies. Always behind, always getting paid, never actually doing anything remotely useful. Source: I am French. I know how this works, I've seen these ridiculous projects get political support and fail miserably due to corruption and ineptitude. This is more of the same. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant [2] https://gigaom.com/2013/11/18/a-guide-to-the-french-national-clouds/ https://gigaom.com/2013/11/18/a-guide-to-the-french-national...

linksnapzz 6y ago
Or Outscale; the "French AWS" owned by Dassault Systemes...they did do a great job of cloning the AWS console feature set; but the backend was supposedly all VMware & Cisco UCS. Surprisingly not Bull hw, given that the people responsible for it came from there. Coulden't be cheap to run, and I've always wondered who used it outside of 3DS.
- orwin 6y ago
  If you want a real "French AWS", you should look at Scaleway (well, their VPS will be entering beta Q3 2020 so it's not AWS yet, but it's coming closer and closer)

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

I wonder how much they will be paying their software developers. Right now, a senior developer that really understands cloud and distributed computing can make more than $500,000/yr at Amazon, Azure, or Microsoft. If they want to attract the talent to build this, they are going to have to pay a lot more than they are used to paying for software engineers.

ReticentVole 6y ago
USA Payroll tax: 15.3% combined, first $127,000 only (3.89% effective) France Payroll tax: 20% for salaries over €151,965. USA Income tax: 42%, including State (CA) and Federal, excluding deductions France Income Tax: 50%. So the labour cost will be a lot higher due to payroll taxes, and the employee will take home less due to income taxes. High VAT (20% in France, 8.5% in SF) means consumer purchases are also more expensive. If you are in Paris, you're at a latitude 48.8N, SF 37.7N. The same is true for moving to other Anglo countries: UK, Canada, Australia have similar lower-tax regimes. France, Germany etc. are charging huge payroll, income and sales taxes to fund their huge welfare states and bureaucracies, but in the process ruining their competitiveness.
- MaximumYComb 6y ago
  San Fran also has over 8k homeless in a population of 800k. The overall homeless rate in France is about 5x lower per capita. My opinion on paying taxes changed drastically after I visited the USA 2 years ago (San Fran, LA, Vegas). I was absolutely shocked by the amount of poverty I saw and I had never realised that America had such a drastically different culture to Australia.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/19/21027974/san-francisco-homeless-decade-2010s-kositsky-navigation-center-friedenbach https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/19/21027974/san-francisco-home... For the 2019-2020 fiscal year, San Francisco will spend $364 million on the homeless. I think there are other major issues besides lack of money from lack of taxes. For one thing, when comparing per capita, you shouldn't just look at the population of San Francisco. A lot of those 8k homeless people came from other parts of the state or even other parts of the country to San Francisco. This is in large part that San Francisco has nice weather and is relatively welcoming to the homeless compared to a lot of cities and jurisdictions. Whereas in a lot of cities, homeless residents might get a lot of harrassment from the police, in San Francisico for the most part they are left alone. So when doing per capita homelessness in San Francisco, you probably need to look at a much larger overall population that just that of San Francisco.

supercanuck 6y ago

Competition is good.

plandis 6y ago

> but would instead referee a common set of European rules. That sounds less like innovation and more like regulation to hinder foreign companies. The US should retaliate economically if that becomes the case.

tastroder 6y ago
Realistically that will just yield guidelines on GDPR compliance, which was already adopted by major providers, and interoperability. Even if this non-political actor would lead to regulatory advice, we already have similar guidelines in areas like security, framing that alone as anti-competitive seems somewhat odd. I doubt a major cloud provider is "hindered" by suggestions such as "give your users something to control where their data goes" / "give your users the ability to get their data back out of your infrastructure". Startups might have problems work existing regulation that essentially says "make sure this data doesn't leave the country/union" but I don't see much difference to investing in any other compliance on the other side of the pond there.

DeonPenny 6y ago

I have sadly no faith in europe to get this right. While capitalism is under fire right now it does one thing better than anything we know right now. Innovate. I don't see a government competition with a group of smart, capable people, who would reap all the money from said effort.

jariel 6y ago

This might sound terrible ... but this will come from Scandinavia/Finland or not at all. Possibly in the form of one or a few, very well thought out startups and/or standards that the rest of Europe can buy into. This is not about size, it's about 'getting it right' - and then having the system follow along one way or another.

zoobab 6y ago

Usual suspects, SAP and Deutsche Telekom, which shows the corruption of our elites.

zoobab 6y ago
Strangely enough, the same both SAP and Deutsche Telekom doing the german Corona app.
- Tomte 6y ago
  What's strange about it? SAP and T-Systems are by far the largest IT consulting shops in Germany. Of course they get almost every huge contract. Now, I agree that a more diverse landscape in that industry would be preferable, but feigning surprise is not helping one bit.
  - ahartmetz 6y ago
    The corona app doesn't need to be a huge contract. But SAP and T-Systems can sure waste a huge amount of time and charge a huge amount of money for it.
    - Tomte 6y ago
      Everything the federal government does is a huge contract. Of course, in a hypothetical paradise it wouldn't have to be. But in the real world, it is. That's still no reason to be surprised.
      - majewsky 6y ago
        From what I know, SAP and Deutsche Telekom were chosen because: - SAP built an app on very short notice where Germans traveling abroad could register for one of the government-organized flights back to Germany. The government was satisfied with how this played out, therefore they were the first choice for building the app part. - Telekom is already operating several backend services for the RKI (the German counterpart of the CDC) and the local health offices, so they were the first choice for building the backend part that needs to integrate with these systems. Disclosure: I work at SAP, but not on the Corona app. I'm not referring to any internal knowledge. What I know, I know from public media.

mytailorisrich 6y ago

This once again ignores what are probably more profound issues. Europe has tech companies and independent cloud providers. Yet they seem to never grow large or fast enough to become leaders globally or even in Europe. SAP is mentioned, which is a giant. But it is 50 years old. This is not the type of company that is going to challenge the status quo and come up with disrupting technology. I think countries like France and Germany should really look at their tech and business environments, including universities, finance, tax, labour law, etc.

ragebol 6y ago
> Europe has tech companies and independent cloud providers. Yet they seem to never grow large or fast enough to become leaders globally or even in Europe. Very true, but I'm unsure why that is the case. My guess it's the country/language fragmentation, ie. companies looking mostly at suppliers from their own country. But I'm not sure that is the case. Also another guess is that European companies buy US software but US companies don't often buy European software perhaps? Again, nothing to back that up with except for a hunch.
jonathanstrange 6y ago
...and the issue is that the products are too expensive due to a vast number of factors. I'm just a private hobby developer, so maybe there are markets where this is different. But when I was looking for cold storage backup and virtual hosting providers in the EU none of the offers were even remotely competitive with US offers. They're twice or even more as expensive and less reputable. Especially concerning backup this bothers me a lot. I'm currently with Crashplan for Small Business and it works well. I would love to have all my data on EU servers, but where is the EU backup solution with decent backup software that allows me to store more than 2 TB of data for $3.06 per month? I can't see how this French initiative would change this. If you look up "Gaia-x" it doesn't even come with a web page where you can buy the product or check out its pricing and conditions. It's nebulous vaporware - so typical.

dang 6y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23423921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23423921 was earlier on the same topic but since this article has a lot more information, perhaps we'll merge those comments hither.

jialutu 6y ago

I get the sentiment, but why not invest in companies like https://www.scaleway.com/en/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/ a bit more?

Jdam 6y ago
because they are not well connected to politics.
- conradfr 6y ago
  It is owned by Xavier Niel, so yes, they are.
tilolebo 6y ago
How does Scaleway compare to OVH?
- jialutu 6y ago
  Personally, I've not used OVH, so I cannot judge. But here is how I would rate Scaleway. Pros: - They are really really cheap! This is not just for the VMs themselves, but their VMs come with NVMe disks and comes with uncapped networking - Their customer support has been phenomenonal, and this was when I was on their free tier support Cons: - They are only limited to 2 regions, Paris and Netherlands - I've seen their VMs become out of stock quite often Personally though, their pros far outweigh their cons, so I would very much love to see them expand their service.
Dunstark 6y ago
They are part of the working group https://blog.scaleway.com/2020/gaia-x-catalog-demonstrator-graph/ https://blog.scaleway.com/2020/gaia-x-catalog-demonstrator-g...

CalRobert 6y ago

"repository of existing services and resources that are available in the ecosystem, including the capability to search this repository" Yeah I totally want to spend my time digging around in there for "which random company can I get a crappy version of AWS Lambda from?" I'm no fan of monocultures and US/Chinese influence but if they want it to actually work they could say "here's a terraform provider that figures it out for you". That would be nice. So far it sounds like this is just "we'll make a list of cloud providers and some of their services"

thiht 6y ago
> Yeah I totally want to spend my time digging around in there for "which random company can I get a crappy version of AWS Lambda from?" Or seen another way: "where can I get a better alternative to the suckish and overpriced AWS lambda, which also respects my data?". Perspective. AWS is not the best everywhere.
- klohto 6y ago
  How does AWS not respect your data? And in which way is Lambda suckish? It’s the leader in serverless workloads and grounds for Firecracker...

tannhaeuser 6y ago

Does anybody have any technical details to share about Gaia-X? I mean service discovery, interchangeable services/interfaces, etc. has been around since the SOAP days (~ 2003) at least. Cloud can mean many things. Does there exist anything at all or is it just talk at the political level atm? Do they intend to fund new research into bringing these things, or will they pick existing tech?

mlatu 6y ago
Well, if you know German there is this longwinded brochure: https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/DE/Publikationen/Digitale-Welt/das-projekt-gaia-x.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=24 https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/DE/Publikationen/Digitale-Welt...
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Thanks, that's exactly what I feared and would call strategical/non-technical ;) I mean it mentions "open source technologies", and contains a vague general description of the concept of identity providers, and, of course, platitudes a la "industry 4.0" but nothing concrete. I want to hear about protocols, operating systems/POSIX/Linux, integration into TelCo provisioning platforms maybe if that's on the radar and they want to have 5G on board, payment standards, containers (chroot, VMs, Docker-like/Linux-only namespace containers, or whatever), or even IP networking. Also, going by the stock photos and the use case example, I'm a bit surprised this is targetting industry applications rather than public authorities, schools, medical etc.
thiht 6y ago
This was published today: https://www.ovh.com/blog/gaia-x-catalogue-search-engine-under-the-hood/ https://www.ovh.com/blog/gaia-x-catalogue-search-engine-unde... Apparently more posts are coming.
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  That's at least something. Unfortunately, this reads more like a program to keep academic research institutes busy and rehashes phantasies of dynamically matching service providers to consumers and policies, something that was a hot topic in academia, and academia only, during the SOAP times, but wasn't used at all in practice (even today you're using lots of yaml to bind stuff on clouds). Moreover, it doesn't use any established logic programming paradigm and re-invents an ad-hoc service ontology/taxonomy and query language (this after the EU spend lots of money in the last decade to fund research on SemWeb ontologies) and they're just using Neo4j (which is fine as a graph DB but not a standard by any means). On top of that, they're using OpenAPI and JSON payloads; this isn't a good fit when the majority of established protocols one would like to use (and that have been created by lots of EU money) are based on WSDL and XML (payment protocols) or even EDIFACT (logistics). OpenAPI/SmartBear has certainly sold their primitive JSON Schema thing well I guess (that just exists on paper or in the form of broken Swagger Java apps). Didn't they want to push European tech? Then why are they promoting gitlab and k8s? I could go on and on, but this doesn't look promising. Tbh, making an undergrad project out of this is embarrassing for French academia who has produced some of the best work in the field.

pinkfoot 6y ago

I they are smart they will create an open app store with GMS, etc. compliant services. And use EU competition rules to mandate the the most popular apps must be in there.

renewiltord 6y ago

Most of old Europe saw China succeed in its "Copy a successful American thing" manner and decided to try the same. Except they don't have the competence overall as orgs.

pyvpx 6y ago
competence at what, exactly?
- allendoerfer 6y ago
  They are not shielding their market, putting everything behind a firewall, requiring joint ventures. Instead they actually respect human rights and the power of law. They don’t even use a non-latin language.
  - hackissimo123 6y ago
    I think the residents of Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and the entirety of central and eastern Europe (except Romania) would be surprised to hear that they don't speak a Latin language.
    - amaccuish 6y ago
      I assume you're speaking of alphabet? Because the languages you just listed are definitely not descendants of Latin.
      - hackissimo123 6y ago
        Fuck, I need to proof-read my posts better. I got it the wrong way round - the European countries not listed are the ones that speak Latin languages.
    - allendoerfer 6y ago
      German might not be a Latin language, but has very obvious roots there. Which are btw. more apparent than in English, because the grammar has not been simplified yet. I suspect the way to learn both languages is not that different. It also has to be way easier if you already know a similiar language, which was my point.

Jdam 6y ago

I think the title of this article sums it up quite well: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/german-economy-minister-launches-euro-cloud-initiative-falls-stage/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/german-economy-mi...

ksec 6y ago

If they want Competition to "HyperScalers" then why not just use OVH? Generally speaking, I dont think any of the Europeans have technical problems, I think they have a Product Placement, Marketing and Sales problem. And I think it is more or a cultural issue. ( Not saying it is a bad thing )

dgellow 6y ago
IMHO the broader issue is that there isn’t a european culture or market. Instead you have a fragmented set of markets, each with their own expectations and regulations. That makes it incredibly hard to create a product that serves Europe as a whole instead of just Germany, or France, or something else. Even just the basics are way harder than they should be, for example the lack of a common language is already a pain to deal with.
thiht 6y ago
> If they want Competition to "HyperScalers" then why not just use OVH? They do. OVH is one of the biggest actors in Gaia-X.
jpfr 6y ago
The goal is not to built yet-another-hyperscaler. The existing hyperscalers will integrate in GAIA-X. Rather we want to give users the power to see where their data is stored and to control the use of their data if they choose to share it in an "ecosystem". Many EU countries are scared to put their data from public administration / hospitals / ... into a cloud where lawful interception could be enforced via the US Cloud Act or similar.

cageface 6y ago

American internet companies can address a large, relatively homogeneous market of 300 million people that all speak the same language. This alone is a big competitive advantage over any European company.

raverbashing 6y ago
More than that, if a service is created in the US, then it's much more than 300mi people potentially using it.
9q9 6y ago
That is true for customer-facing softwre, but would not be relevant in e.g. semiconductors, compilers, formal verification.
- jogundas 6y ago
  For these B2B applications, it is important to have your potential customers in your network. One can argue that achieving such a network is easier in the US, where most of the potential customers presumably are.
effie 6y ago
Indeed. And not only common language, but ease of doing business with companies across the continent in general. Here in Europe, due to legal/language/cultural differences, and due to laziness, the default mode of operation for small companies in services is to avoid or neglect doing business with strangers from other parts of Europe. It is safe and comfortable, but does not create big multinational juggernauts.

roenxi 6y ago

There is a really interesting discussion to be had here about if and what the EUs past policy failing was. Is the issue that they were insufficiently capitalist and drove all their innovators to the US? Is the issue that they let their markets too open, and should have copied the Chinese approach? Is the issue that they shouldn't be concentrating on tech at all and should be leaving it to people better at it than Europeans? There is a real litmus test of something in the EU and their technology situation.

jialutu 6y ago
Having been to a few tech conferences held by the EU commission, I would say the issue is not (wholly) to it being too open. The biggest problem with the EU is that it is ultimately 27 sovereign states with different language and cultures and very different economic situations. What the EU tries to do is to bring these 27 states closer by awarding grants based on cross-border collaborations (so company A in France needs to collaborate with company B in Italy) and also helping the poorer states. This is a very rigid process, hence I guess this is why we've not seen much success stories so far.

baxtr 6y ago

This is so sad. As a European I would love to see some Internet giants created. Everybody says it's because we don't have homogenous market and so on. But my hunch is it is something different: Existing European companies are much more protected than their US counterparts, or even their UK counterparts. Think ThomasCook - would have been definitely been "saved" like TUI in Germany. That doesn't happen that much in the US I believe. Instead new comers are generated at a higher rate creating completely new markets, think Tesla, Facebook, amazon etc. That entire life cycle of companies dying and being newly born seems somewhat skewed over here.

brmgb 6y ago
> Existing European companies are much more protected than their US counterparts That's a complete myth. The USA affords a lot of direct and indirect protection to its companies, far more than Europe does usually. You have things like the "Buy American Act" ensuring US companies don't face external competition for public markets, a different system of measures and crucially norms slowing the entry of external actors and a strong cultural emphasis amongst the population on economic patriotism and buying American which mostly doesn't exist in Europe.
iagovar 6y ago
> Existing European companies are much more protected than their US counterparts I'm sorry but that's not even remotely true. You have several instances of EU companies acquired by foreign capital.
eythian 6y ago
Do we need internet giants though? Are they a good thing for people? Perhaps a system that encourages a handful of really big companies in de facto control of large swaths of our communications infrastructure is not something that's actually good for the world.

thiht 6y ago

I see a lot of hate in this thread regarding a disruption to US hegemony. I guess that's why we need projects like Gaia-X. I wholeheartedly hope it will succeed, and given the companies that are involved in it, I'm pretty confident about it.

cyborgx7 6y ago
No kidding. I would love European tech sovereignty. Something I've been advocating for a long time. I wish the Linux in public institutions that was tried in Germany caught on.
- maze-le 6y ago
  > I wish the Linux in public institutions that was tried in Germany caught on. Linux doesn't have a lot of lobbying power, and no important public figures like Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates that would personally intervene on its behalf. https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/ https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/
thecleaner 6y ago
I dont hate US hegemony. They are there because they got things right. American companies are more innovayive and fast paced than their European counterparts (assuming they even have counterparts). In general, I would love to have American tech culture with a European safety net.
- thiht 6y ago
  > They are there because they got things right. American companies are more innovayive and fast paced than their European counterparts That's naive. Europe simply wouldn't allow (rightly so) a company to become Google or Amazon. A conglomerate like Gaia-X seems like a safer alternative to US tech giants.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    Hm. What do you think of Bertelsmann and all its subsidiaries then? Like independence of media, while the heiress is best friends with our chancellor? "Staat im Staat". Also Arvato and Infoscore, which almost nobody knows while rambling about the SCHUFA... edit: apart from Bertelsmann: DATEV

sek 6y ago

They are competing with Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Those are not normal companies. I also think that people underestimate that this space will get very low margin eventually and become even more commoditized. Most companies totally overpaid for IT enterprise solutions the last decades, they are sales driven and live off lock in effects of their hardware to milk their customers. Now we got rid of physical hardware then it will take companies another 10 years to figure out that they also don't need 90% of all the cloud solutions they got sold on. The rest you can run everywhere cloud neutral with kubernetes or something else. Will those three companies earn a trillion dollars during that process? Sure.

PeterStuer 6y ago

The problem with European software plays is a monetary problem. EU capital is much more expensive than US capital (ultimately due to the latter's status as the 'world reserve' currency due to the enforced petro-dollar regime). This is why Europe's IT sector is much more focused on B2B servuces/bespoke developments (low risk business models) and hardware/infrastructure (historic manufacturing/telecoms legacy). in terms of software products/B2C/SaaS high risk/hit businessmodels the US can relax and cherrypick from the European R&D knowing they can buy out any local player due to cheaper money. The EU has in the past always declared IT and the Knowledge Economy as 'strategic', but has never protected the sector from US appropriation.

antpls 6y ago
That looks like a good analysis to me. There are so many regulations in EU that if something happens, even organically, it has to be in order with EU regulations and priorities. The USA appropriation was never out of EU control, it was rather an accepted strategic choice. (At least, that's how I like to think about it...)
- cdavid 6y ago
  The US are not exactly regulation-free. Actually, I remember seeing people in HN who mentioned legal costs for companies tend to be much higher than in (continental) Europe. The cost of capital is indeed one of the core issue. In Europe, almost your only way to get funding is through banks, the whole concept of VC is near absent. In terms of innovation, etc. I think a lot of it is cultural essentialist BS. Just look at OSS: lots of core projects have a strong root in Europe, or even originated from there. But the culture of VC + university that is one core of innovation post WW2 in the US is completely absent in Europe. Intuitively, the fact that the market is more fragmented feels like an issue, but I don't know of any serious study on that.
jdm2212 6y ago
Why wouldn't an entrepreneur just borrow dollars in the US and exchange them for Euros? Or just take equity investments instead of debt and not bother with interest rates in the first place?

heipei 6y ago

As a German who's been exclusively working in the US tech space for the past few years, there's so many anecdotes that come to mind to highlight how far behind the old world is, both in tech as in spirit: - Article about Gaia-X in major German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales", from your home! - When I tried to read or watch reviews about SaaS solutions for invoicing / bookkeeping for German companies, the first half of the review is usually spent trying to convince people that moving off paper-based invoices and folders to all-digital is a good idea in the first place. - University-educated people in my social circle are often woefully unaware of economic trends that have swept the US, be it the gig economy, X-as-a-service, the nature of Venture Capital, the idea of scaling a company aggressively, the value of information, mobility of labor and paying market rate for experts, the high profit margins of offering a software product vs. (for example) doing one-off consulting for a German industrial company, etc. None of these things bode well for the best talent in Europe working on anything remotely resembling an innovative European tech company. Not even saying we're worse off for it, but the reality is that any European who truly grasps the pace of the US tech industry would rather go there directly than work for a Franco-German government moonshot and hope to be paid maybe a 10% premium over their regular European salary.

mattlutze 6y ago
But we are super proud of coining Industrie 4.0, so, that's something. It would be wonderful to see more free and open innovation and investment in a couple of bleeding-edge tech centers in Germany. A lot of the big internationals are in Munich and Berlin is slowly growing steam for startups, but it's a disappointment to me that there's so many Germans with so much wealth prime for investment and creating a culture of exploration, but instead it sits in real estate or something.
- woodpanel 6y ago
  "But we are super proud of coining Industrie 4.0, so, that's something." Regarding Industrie 4.0: Currently at a client of mine, a "hidden champion" i.e. world market leader in industry XYZ (1.6B in revenue), I'm struggling to have them migrate from Cobol to Java. They are using their versioning system as a backup for their data, not for versioning the code. Deployments are done via dragging a zip file somewhere. Every new version means the whole system (handling invoices e.g.) is out of service for 10-14 days.

Pedrit0 6y ago

Europe has to start from somewhere in a market currently dominated by the US and the Chinese... This project may look like a joke for people in the Silicon Valley but everything we do in Europe looks like a joke for Americans. They laugh at the EU, at our spaceship program, at our industry, at our techs... Whatever we do they say we are old and finished. OK have good times laughing. Meanwhile we go on progressing. Discretly, maybe ridiculously, but we do.

Udik 6y ago
> Europe has to start from somewhere in a market currently dominated by the US and the Chinese... Yes, and it has to start by copying them. Copying to the letter, like following a recipe, humbly. That's how absolute beginners learn. Not by proclaiming absurd moonshots (by the way, it's "France and Germany", as usual, not the EU) and insisting that we'll build something different, new and innovative and blah blah. Just copy: it will force us to do the things we don't want to do, it will go against our values and culture. Which are probably what's holding us back now.
- Pedrit0 6y ago
  I think you did not get the purpose of the project and its context. 1. What should we copy ? We already have cloud companies in Europe. The issue is not about a lack of knowledge about cloud technologies. It is a matter of market share. Our companies are not big enough to provide adequate services to european states and sensitive industries. 2. The goal is not to create from scratch a European cloud giant that would be able to challenge Chinese and US powerhouses. It is just way not to rely on them as they cannot be trusted in any manner when it comes to data management and fair competition. As stated many times by Trump and Xi Jiping, EU is a competitor or even worse an enemy. In Europe we share this same bellicose analysis too now. And cloud is a battle among others, but an important one.
  - Udik 6y ago
    True, I don't think we need to copy the technology: that is probably easily available, you just need good engineers and money. The problem is exactly the second you mention: why is it that EU companies don't have the market share that US ones have? Why are our companies not big enough? What prevents entrepreneurs in Europe from creating tech giants such as the US ones? These are the things we need to copy- not the technology. > The goal is not to create from scratch a European cloud giant ... It is just way not to rely on them And how do you avoid relying on them? Are you going to force EU companies to choose a EU cloud provider, even when they would have preferred a US one? No, you need to create an offer that is competitive: and once it is, it will be competitive for everyone, not just our companies.

acd 6y ago

I hope Gaia-X will be built as an Open source project. Because of economics of scale closed source companies usually cannot compete with Open source projects. Meaning that open source projects can attract more developers from different companies and backgrounds than closed source. Plus if its open source everyone in the world benefits not just Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale https://opensource.com/article/18/9/awesome-economics-open-source https://opensource.com/article/18/9/awesome-economics-open-s... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_economics

JeremyS 6y ago

From the article "The companies will inject an annual €1.5 million combined in the underlying association, with plans to double the sum later." 1.5 million ... I hope this is a typo.

k__ 6y ago

I'm from Germany and just last week I saw a building with a sign. OVH - Biggest Hoster in Europe I never heard of this company in my life. I looked at their offering and they were basically selling 20 year old technology. Nothing compared to AWS, Azure, or Google. Germany is so far behind in IT, it's crazy. I also stopped reading German IT news 10 years ago, because they are always weeks or month late. All good IT people I knew sooner or later moved to the US.

motohagiography 6y ago

The description of Gaia-X and that of old world culture sounds like a standard government/enterprise project with all the same problems. The US model comes from venture funding, where you seed 10 firms solving the same type of problem, and the most desirable result prevails. The institutional model of increasing stakeholders to produce something that satisfies all of them is what makes enterprise development such a farce. The mentality is captured in the criticism that something is, "underfunded," which is the expression of a worldview that "funding," comes from some welfare oriented source, and not earned as compensation for providing value. The strategies to "get funding," vs. the ones that earn revenue are largely orthogonal, and people with the funding mentality have in effect the opposite of the "growth mindset," that is necessary to build things others want. These development cultures build lots of things, just very few things that anyone uses willingly. It's just more solutions to govern, not tools people need.

mark_l_watson 6y ago

I wish them good luck. I think that right now the US and China really have a lock on cloud and AI. Europe has lead the world in user privacy and rights, so I hope they can leverage that and bake human rights into their systems. Hetzner is a very good cloud provider. I would use them exclusively if it were not for the tiny latency lag between the SouthWest USA (where I live) and Germany.

blopeur 6y ago

This project is still born because they are missing a federated accounting and payment service at the heart of the platform. Why? Because it's damn near impossible to deliver such feature for dynamically orchestrated services from a federation of providers. Sovereignity, interoperability, compliance is a nice sales pitch. But it seems that when it comes to getting paid or paying you are on your own. Imagine trying to pay for hundreds of services from companies spread across dozens of countries...

kazen44 6y ago
how is this a problem? SEPA has already solved this issue?

raghava 6y ago

Had seen https://medium.com/@Regulatory/gaia-x-5-reasons-why-the-european-cloud-might-fail-c097d14499db https://medium.com/@Regulatory/gaia-x-5-reasons-why-the-euro... on this topic. Few of the points made sense.

sershe 6y ago

Alas, looks like a PR move to cobble something together from existing components by consultants for EUR1.5m a year (from the article, unless I misread what that is for). I've been developing backend distributed systems for a while, and kinda want to have a gig in Europe, so the title got me too excited I guess. But, my dreams of reinventing the wheel in Europe for a (relatively) high paycheck aside; what could possibly go wrong? :)

arcturus17 6y ago

The article seems to conflate cloud services with merely storing data. Of course that's part of any cloud stack, but to the average HN reader it is evident that cloud services are much more than that, such as running software and transforming data. I think this might be a reflection of a misunderstanding that also happens on a higher level in European politics. Cloud services are much more than just "computers that store data" and the political implications of data sovereignty or what have you. Cloud services are insanely complex systems built on the latest advances in areas like operating systems, networking, hardware, etc. You don't get there with political statements of good-will, even when they're backed by what looks like a non-committal, lukewarm coalition of private companies. You don't stumble upon it by just saying "Ha! We need a Europe response to cloud services!" You get there by being obssessive and single-minded about the problem, employing all your energy and focus on the task at hand, most likely fueled by the ambition of a lucrative or economically strategic incentive. It saddens me as a European that the latter is what Europe seems to lack sometimes, and this initiative doesn't give me any hope for a change of course.

dalf 6y ago

Perhaps an out of topic comment. I've been working for one of these CORDIS European projects : https://cordis.europa.eu/projects/en https://cordis.europa.eu/projects/en The project was politically driven while most of the slides were selling dreams. As usual in this kind of project - there was a schedule carved in stone - the Conway's law gets a beautiful practical example so the research becomes quickly a joke. Some people: - worked on out of topic subjects. At least no harm. - criticized because of external/past/personal/out of topic reasons. - criticized the work of others while doing literally nothing. My boss knew it, but since they are well known to wrote nice documents to get the fund for many years. - worked very hard while being criticized through hidden communication. - were here because of the data. - were here to get the technology if by luck it ends up to be working project. The usual burdens, I guess, but it basically kills the motivation (it is my experience in one specific project). In the end, people went to the different meetings to see Europe. It seems some other projects are driven in the same way according to what I have heard. It is only a sum up of experience. YMMV. I sincerely hope that Gaia-X will be managed in better way.

maelito 6y ago

France was able to build world-class high speed rail and a very low carbon electricity grid. They emerged from the government. Why can't we build alternatives to the big US tech services ? Is it just a matter of momentum ?

joyceschan 6y ago

Governement Productions (TM), this is gonna end up like CDC's productions during the pandemic

dzonga 6y ago

didn't some search engine Cliq shut down, because they had no support in Europe ? would love to hear their response to those officials

jokoon 6y ago

If China wants tech sovereignty, I don't see why Europe shouldn't. I don't understand the negative comments here. The core problem isn't really the innovation, the economics, or europe's ability to compete with american giants, it's rather geopolitics, privacy, GDPR, surveillance, industrial espionage, tax havens.

BiteCode_dev 6y ago

So, instead of working with well established EU companies like OVH or Lease Web, they, once again, build-to-fail a sovereing solution. They will not be able to hire the necessary talent, don't benefit from decades of expertise, have to build trust with multiple communities plus a client portfolio and have to pay for building infrastructures. As @heipei said, Europe mentality is already years late when it's about tech. And while I do think we desparatly need our own alternative to the US GAFAM and clouds, this is, once again, a doomed attempt that will mostly enrich a few well connected people.

oneplane 6y ago

> " a platform joining up cloud-hosting services from dozens of companies, allowing business to move their data freely" This is practically dead before it's created. The other platforms (AWS, GCP etc.) are hyperscale due to their useful integrated nature of building blocks. You're not going to get that with a bunch of random vendors. It's hard enough as it is for a large company to create a somewhat homogenous environment, and existing projects that are supposed to be multi-vendor like OpenStack (and CloudStack) are just not on par. Say you have a few vendors, one runs VMWare, one runs Hyper-V, and you need a workload with scalable counts of CPUs, and the datacenter of the VMWare guys is full and you now need to use some of the CPUs in the other datacenter. Are you going to have a single API (and perhaps console) where you say: I want a machine with specs X, image Y and parameters Z to do that and have the lower layers resolve it? Probably not.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
> Are you going to have a single API (and perhaps console) where you say: I want a machine with specs X, image Y and parameters Z to do that and have the lower layers resolve it? Probably not. Why not? Isn't Kubernetes already most of the way there? (I have only played with it very briefly, but it looks like it should solve this. The workload is most likely a container anyways, mostly resolving the "image" issue, so the key parameters are CPU, storage and RAM. Ignoring dependencies between containers (e.g. you probably want your web app server and database to be colocated), for the simplest implementation, couldn't you simply create a Kubernetes cluster covering VMs from all providers? It seems like an orchestrator that places your jobs is part of what the project tries to develop, according to https://www.heise.de/news/Bundeswirtschaftsminister-Gaia-X-als-weltweiter-Goldstandard-fuer-Cloud-Dienste-4774826.html https://www.heise.de/news/Bundeswirtschaftsminister-Gaia-X-a...
- oneplane 6y ago
  Not: because you would either lose platform-specific functionality between whatever hypervisor the different vendors happen to use, or you would get multiple APIs. I'm sure attempts other than libvirt exist, but nobody has really succeeded. It's all either Xen, KVM, or VMWare so far, and a little bit of Hyper-V, and none of them are compatible.

panzagl 6y ago

This is great because it will be so easy to spin up instances- just provide your VAT registration, detailed plan for GPDR, mechanism for 'right to be forgotten', cookie policy, application for any protected region of origin usages, and pandemic mitigation policy and after a short series of review and revisions you will be put in the queue for the no-bid government IT contractor to reject your request because they phased out the instance type you requested.

zachguo 6y ago

In terms of geopolitics this is a good move, a superpower should have its own tech infrastructure.