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The talent is there, the money could be there if Europeans governments take it seriously, so why not? What's stopping EU from building an AWS equivalent? It's n

The talent is there, the money could be there if Europeans governments take it seriously, so why not? What's stopping EU from building an AWS equivalent? It's not rocket science. If Europe could come up with companies like ASML which are at the top of chip engineering, they can definitely build software infrastructure. Some of your points ring true but A) What used to be doesn't mean it will always be B) U.S has it's own problems as you can see

viraptor 6y ago
> What's stopping EU from building an AWS equivalent? Years of experience running their own massive platform before entering the market of renting those services to others? > they can definitely build software So can OVH and Rackspace. So why would this project take off better than those established companies? Don't get me wrong, I'll be cheering this to succeed, but how is this effort different?
- sitkack 6y ago
  Cern has more than enough folks that have run systems that are harder to run cloud scale compute. Even if running a DC is rocket science (it isn't), it is no particle physics. The EU should absolutely have its own homegrown tech stack, from silicon to billing. I'd start with an EU run internet backbone and federated object storage in each member state.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    CERN still runs on openstack for the non-specialised projects, I believe. They do improve the project, but it's not their own solution. I can't see Gaia-x mentioning a ready solution anywhere and it seems very secret and proprietary for a project that's meant to be transparent, federated, and lunching end of this year. (Unless I missed something?)
- guiriduro 6y ago
  If I rememberm AWS CTO is dutch. Throw €100bn in a tech fund and poach him or someone like him, give them free reign, done. Poverty of imagination and obsessive financial conservatism and control freakery from the euro investment community is the real problem, not lack of talent.
  - joelbluminator 6y ago
    I'd be surprised if a decent AWS equivalent can't be built in 10-15B. That should be enough to hire good people and buy infrastructure. How do you figure 100B? It doesn't have to serve AWS traffic from day one...
Vosporos 6y ago
I am French and the few last software projects the state has been involved in were utter catastrophes. The code that is used to dispatch high-school graduates according to their choice was recently audited by the Court of Auditors[0], and the StopCOVID application's source code was released[1]. The problem is that innovation is just a buzzword. They still hand out millions to private actors like Atos, Accenture, etc, while managers are patting themselves on the back and produce the shittiest software possible to get a 10 years maintenance contract that will cost hundreds of millions. I'm not saying it's better in other countries, I'm just saying that people must realise that the French state should not be trusted to produce high-quality software. [0]: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Flinuxfr.org%2Fnews%2Faudit-du-code-source-de-parcoursup-par-la-cour-des-comptes https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&tl=en&u=h... [1]: https://gitlab.inria.fr/stopcovid19/stopcovid-android https://gitlab.inria.fr/stopcovid19/stopcovid-android
- ur-whale 6y ago
  > that the French state should not be trusted to produce high-quality software. States should neither be trusted nor simply be involved in producing anything. That's not what they're for and they are therefore profoundly incapable of doing it. The simple fact that they are not subjected to competitive pressure is argument enough to prove my point, but it's far from the only one.
ur-whale 6y ago
> What's stopping EU from building an AWS equivalent? 1. Culture, tradition, apathy, risk-averseness 2. Regulations
- joelbluminator 6y ago
  So you're saying building an AWS equivalent is harder to do than building ASML? Again: if Europe could come up with ASML (which is just an example I'm familiar with, I assume there are successful companies), why can't it build in AWS equivalent? Which is even easier to do since the problem of scaling server instances is better understood and more intuitive than developing lithography machines like ASML is doing.
  - afr0ck 6y ago
    You should really reconsider your assumptions about server scaling and AWS business in general. AWS builds truely complex and ahead-of-time distributed systems that humans could never build before because of lack of knowledge and concentrated efforts. Distributed systems are really hard and not very well understood and algorithms are immensly complex and even harder to to engineer espeically on AWS scale. See DynamoDB for example, it's a masterpiece of engineering in distributed systems. You can read the paper entitled "Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-Value Store" to get a real feel of the challenge. I consider the way you see things as another part of Europs failure to build software quality awareness that can compete with the US engineering.
    - joelbluminator 6y ago
      The main business in AWS is not DynamoDB. I'm not even sure what it is without checking, and seems like people hosting on Google / Microsoft / other big corp can do without. Nor does Europe need to copy 100% of AWS's feature set.
      - orf 6y ago
        I’m pretty sure that under the hood a lot of AWS services like S3 are backed by dynodb, and if so then ‘chopping up and selling dynodb’ is a pretty core focus.
barrenko 6y ago
Those systems and any other functioning and innovative system will be by definition built bottom-up and not top-down which the EU will never figure out and always actively discourage.

viraptor 6y ago

> What's stopping EU from building an AWS equivalent? Years of experience running their own massive platform before entering the market of renting those services to others? > they can definitely build software So can OVH and Rackspace. So why would this project take off better than those established companies? Don't get me wrong, I'll be cheering this to succeed, but how is this effort different?

sitkack 6y ago
Cern has more than enough folks that have run systems that are harder to run cloud scale compute. Even if running a DC is rocket science (it isn't), it is no particle physics. The EU should absolutely have its own homegrown tech stack, from silicon to billing. I'd start with an EU run internet backbone and federated object storage in each member state.
- viraptor 6y ago
  CERN still runs on openstack for the non-specialised projects, I believe. They do improve the project, but it's not their own solution. I can't see Gaia-x mentioning a ready solution anywhere and it seems very secret and proprietary for a project that's meant to be transparent, federated, and lunching end of this year. (Unless I missed something?)
guiriduro 6y ago
If I rememberm AWS CTO is dutch. Throw €100bn in a tech fund and poach him or someone like him, give them free reign, done. Poverty of imagination and obsessive financial conservatism and control freakery from the euro investment community is the real problem, not lack of talent.
- joelbluminator 6y ago
  I'd be surprised if a decent AWS equivalent can't be built in 10-15B. That should be enough to hire good people and buy infrastructure. How do you figure 100B? It doesn't have to serve AWS traffic from day one...

Vosporos 6y ago

I am French and the few last software projects the state has been involved in were utter catastrophes. The code that is used to dispatch high-school graduates according to their choice was recently audited by the Court of Auditors[0], and the StopCOVID application's source code was released[1]. The problem is that innovation is just a buzzword. They still hand out millions to private actors like Atos, Accenture, etc, while managers are patting themselves on the back and produce the shittiest software possible to get a 10 years maintenance contract that will cost hundreds of millions. I'm not saying it's better in other countries, I'm just saying that people must realise that the French state should not be trusted to produce high-quality software. [0]: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Flinuxfr.org%2Fnews%2Faudit-du-code-source-de-parcoursup-par-la-cour-des-comptes https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&tl=en&u=h... [1]: https://gitlab.inria.fr/stopcovid19/stopcovid-android https://gitlab.inria.fr/stopcovid19/stopcovid-android

ur-whale 6y ago
> that the French state should not be trusted to produce high-quality software. States should neither be trusted nor simply be involved in producing anything. That's not what they're for and they are therefore profoundly incapable of doing it. The simple fact that they are not subjected to competitive pressure is argument enough to prove my point, but it's far from the only one.

ur-whale 6y ago

> What's stopping EU from building an AWS equivalent? 1. Culture, tradition, apathy, risk-averseness 2. Regulations

joelbluminator 6y ago
So you're saying building an AWS equivalent is harder to do than building ASML? Again: if Europe could come up with ASML (which is just an example I'm familiar with, I assume there are successful companies), why can't it build in AWS equivalent? Which is even easier to do since the problem of scaling server instances is better understood and more intuitive than developing lithography machines like ASML is doing.
- afr0ck 6y ago
  You should really reconsider your assumptions about server scaling and AWS business in general. AWS builds truely complex and ahead-of-time distributed systems that humans could never build before because of lack of knowledge and concentrated efforts. Distributed systems are really hard and not very well understood and algorithms are immensly complex and even harder to to engineer espeically on AWS scale. See DynamoDB for example, it's a masterpiece of engineering in distributed systems. You can read the paper entitled "Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-Value Store" to get a real feel of the challenge. I consider the way you see things as another part of Europs failure to build software quality awareness that can compete with the US engineering.
  - joelbluminator 6y ago
    The main business in AWS is not DynamoDB. I'm not even sure what it is without checking, and seems like people hosting on Google / Microsoft / other big corp can do without. Nor does Europe need to copy 100% of AWS's feature set.
    - orf 6y ago
      I’m pretty sure that under the hood a lot of AWS services like S3 are backed by dynodb, and if so then ‘chopping up and selling dynodb’ is a pretty core focus.

barrenko 6y ago

Those systems and any other functioning and innovative system will be by definition built bottom-up and not top-down which the EU will never figure out and always actively discourage.