35 ms·

A Swedish startup’s bid to build a green rival to AWS

213 points by foolswisdom 3y ago

meghan_rain 3y ago
> green ambitious, applaudable, but doomed to market realities
KomoD 3y ago
I kind of struggled to find the name of the company in the start of the article. Turns out its https://evroc.com https://evroc.com
- dgellow 3y ago
  It’s in the subheading: > Having just raised a €13m pre-seed round, evroc aims to raise €3bn within the next two years
  - Someone 3y ago
    And in the first paragraph and in the third paragraph, in the fifth, etc. I count twelve occurrences. I think it doesn’t pop out because it’s written without capital letters.
- melx 3y ago
  This must be the biggest-paddings-between-blocks website ever. At least for mobile.
  - upon_drumhead 3y ago
    They left room for the solar panels to power the DCs
neximo64 3y ago
Would never use a cloud service simply because "its European", it's got to be better and cheaper than AWS.
- capableweb 3y ago
  Seems they're aiming to capture the market of people who want "green" clouds, not "European" clouds. Besides, if you just want better and cheaper AWS, there is so many options already.
  - laurencerowe 3y ago
    Doesn't look like being a green cloud will be a differentiator for very long. "Amazon is the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy and is on a path to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025" https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/renewable-energy https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/renewable...
    - adrian_mrd 3y ago
      This is for Amazon as a whole (so not AWS) but recent news (26 May 2023) seems that they are targeting net-zero by 2040: "The ecommerce giant recently backed out of a commitment to make 50% of its shipments net-zero carbon by 2030. Amazon said in a statement that it would roll this goal into a broader Climate Pledge to reach net-zero carbon across all its operations by 2040. That's a decade later than the 50% goal, which was called "Shipment Zero" at the time." [0] [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-shipment-zero-gives-up-most-important-part-climate-pledge-2023-5?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-shipment-zero-gives-u... Also worth noting that this is a target. And targets can always shift eg 2040, 2050, etc
  - re-thc 3y ago
    > Seems they're aiming to capture the market of people who want "green" clouds, not "European" clouds. Just make a green colored logo and website?
- gumballindie 3y ago
  A lot of european companies would. You’d be surprised how often saas clients told me to _never_ allow client data to get anywhere near a us company. People around europe are very privacy aware.
foolswisdom 3y ago
They want to create competing to US cloud companies in Europe. If I understand the business strategy as presented they initially will target companies that can't use US cloud for legal reasons, so US clouds can't even compete (so the competition while they get off the ground is small scale cloud providers in Europe), which will then give them a base from which to fight the big clouds for clients. Quick googling says that AWS, Azure and GCP have 69% of the European cloud market. I wonder how big Europe is for their overall profits, and if this could potentially be a big problem for then in the future.
- scroot 3y ago
  The market share of these services in the EU might end up being affected by the passage of the Digital Services Act and its sister bill the Digital Markets Act
- nikanj 3y ago
  EU is pouring huge amounts of money into development grants, because they want to decrease their dependency on the global markets. Expect GAaaS startups (grant applications as a service) to pop up left and right, offering extremely slick pitch decks, founders in well-fitting suits and ridiculous pie-in-the-sky business ideas. It’s some version of ”build it and they will come”. Granting millions in free money to anyone who promises to create an EU alternative to AWS / Intel / Facebook gets you a lot of said promises.
  - belval 3y ago
    > Over the next two years, it plans to raise €3bn — that averages out as €125m a month for everyone keeping score at home The EU pledged €2bn so it's mostly government funding. Imagine burning €125m in public money every month.
    - foolswisdom 3y ago
      The 2bn from the EU is not earmarked for Evroc, I understood that it was a general allocation (though perhaps they expect to get a lot of it).
prepend 3y ago
I think there’s an opportunity for an IkeaCloud or AldiCloud that is just barebones and cheap but still is a proper cloud. Given that Microsoft and google are struggling to match aws it seems we’re still decades away from someone truly being able to deliver the same features, scale, and reliability.
- asciimike 3y ago
  Doesn't this already exist in the form of Digital Ocean, Linode/Akamai, OVH, etc.?
  - cultofmetatron 3y ago
    also hetzner
    - GordonS 3y ago
      Hetzner is great for servers and storage, but it's not a "proper cloud" like AWS/GCP/Azure/Oracle/IBM.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - cultofmetatron 3y ago
        well yea, we are talking ikea cloud. cheap but serviceable (https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud)
  - f_devd 3y ago
    Those are not cheap, but they do exist already yes
- ju-st 3y ago
  "LidlCloud" is a thing... https://www.stackit.de/en/ https://www.stackit.de/en/
JohnMakin 3y ago
If the concern mentioned in this article of "Americans can view sensitive data on European citizens," they should just go the route China did - it hosts its own version of AWS that's pretty walled off, from what I know.
- asciimike 3y ago
  China was able to pressure the west to do so because western companies: - "need" to operate in China - The Chinese government requires majority state ownership of enterprises I don't think the conditions are the same in Europe, especially given the historical precedents of Safe Harbor/Privacy Shield/etc.
- niederman 3y ago
  Well, yeah, that's what evroc is aiming to be.
  - electroly 3y ago
    China has literally AWS, though, not just something similar. All the same services, just with a CCP official looking over your shoulder and a Chinese company operating it.
    - eyilmaz 3y ago
      Not really all the same services.. there is a ton of them missing in CN AWS. It is like few years behind..
      - electroly 3y ago
        True enough, but how many services is a completely new European startup going to have?
    - cavisne 3y ago
      Not literally though, it’s run by some company that is not Amazon.
nilespotter 3y ago
> “Amazon, Google and Microsoft are really good, but US authorities have the right to see the data stored on non-American citizens." Unfortunately Mattias, they don't care if they have the right or not. American citizens are routinely subject to surveillance, dragnet and otherwise. I'd be very surprised if any of your data centers stay out of view of our unconscionable surveillance apparatus.
_ezah 3y ago
It sounds like it's layering on the European aspect to get government/EU backing. Fair enough, I hope they succeed.
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  It's a necessary evil to combat a larger one.
belval 3y ago
Corporate fluff aside, AWS is on track to run on 100% renewables by 2025[1] so the selling is mostly "European cloud" since the green part will be mostly expected by the time they actually ramp up. Competition is always good though. > Studies by 451 Research have shown that AWS’ infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median of U.S. enterprise data centers surveyed and up to five times more energy efficient than the average in Europe. 451 Research also found that AWS can lower customers’ workload carbon footprints by nearly 80% compared to surveyed enterprise data centers, and up to 96% once AWS is powered with 100% renewable energy—a target we’re on path to meet by 2025. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/energy/sustainability/ https://aws.amazon.com/energy/sustainability/ EDIT: - GCP, 100% renewable by 2030 https://cloud.google.com/sustainability - Azure, 100% renewable by 2025 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/explore/global-infrastructure/sustainability - Oracle, 100% renewable in Europe already https://www.oracle.com/sustainability/green-cloud/
- api 3y ago
  For real or are they purchasing dodgy “offsets?”
  - Bang2Bay 3y ago
    offset is what its name suggests. sometimes its ok if a company innovates or pays money to others to innovate.
    - vladf 3y ago
      Sure, but the reasons offsets are dodgy is because they actually aren't fungible in the way you're hoping for. Say a paper maker is about to cut down a forest in the US. It buys up the rights to do so for $1M. Then, instead, it sells $1M worth of carbon credits to Amazon (maybe for a premium) for its data center greenwashing and doesn't end up cutting the US forest. But then, secretly, or through some shell company machinery, it buys a plot of land in the Amazon and cuts trees down anyway to match its demand. Even though US law makers evaluate the counterfactual of the paper maker cutting trees down in the US, the net amount of trees in the world goes down.
BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
they seem to have misunderstood the why and the how of startup culture in the valley it has been a way to get startup entrepreneurs (founders) to absorb the negative cost of trying out new things; and whatever actually works well gets bought by an established winner. what's fundamentally unproven about how to build data-centers? this seems to be about using a different sort of 'power supply' for the whole project what is to stop AWS from being even more green even faster (by buying 'greener' power supplies?) the only way this makes sense is if their real end-game is to get bought by some already established datacenter company. then again, it's not 2018 anymore. The VC scheme is also changing a lot. they should find a way to chuck "AI" in their pitch to get startup money now
- nikanj 3y ago
  Their real end game is living comfortably for years on large salaries financed by EU development grants.
- Nifty3929 3y ago
  They are taking advantage of regulatory capture - that's all. I don't think I'm blaming anybody here. Maybe these are good regulations. Regardless, it creates a business opportunity. The EU passes laws which require data/compute/whatever to run in the EU. So a company springs up with a product for that.
eagleoftruth 3y ago
Has "Europe is investing $X billions to rival $AMERICAN_TECH_GIANT" ever worked? I'm highly skeptical of planned enterprises. Inovation often happens organically.
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  It works better when they use Legislation to keep the great satan in check. They're addicted to that market and they(we?) need checks and balances to constrain that which we have wrought
- dopidopHN 3y ago
  Airbus ?
- wmf 3y ago
  IaaS but in Europe isn't innovation though. If you want a factory just build it; don't wait for it to emerge organically.
dontupvoteme 3y ago
US cloud companies are just a subsidiary of the NSA, so this sounds good.
cheriot 3y ago
> “Amazon, Google and Microsoft are really good, but US authorities have the right to see the data stored on non-American citizens. That means that many companies and authorities in Europe cannot put sensitive data on the American cloud and instead store it on servers in the cellar,” Åström says. Isn't this FUD? US authorities can't subpoena data on a server in the EU even if it's owned by a US company
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  Anything which passes through cloudflare, AWS, Apple, or any corporation with an HQ in America is part and parcel of the American 3 letter industry
  - cheriot 3y ago
    If you're worried about the spy agencies, data is safer inside the US that out.
- Gwypaas 3y ago
  Let me introduce you to the CLOUD act, which multiple times have been ruled to be fundamentally incompatible with GDPR. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
  - kixiQu 3y ago
    Curious to see whether pessimism about big-$$$ companies getting to shape US law to their will could win versus pessimism about the seemingly inevitable creep of the security state, if Europe actually forces tech companies' hands here... one can kind of imagine it being possible to repeal the CLOUD act if enough lobbyist dollars were spent.
poisonborz 3y ago
> When the sun is shining in Spain, then we move the data there, and when the wind is blowing in the Netherlands then we move it there. I'm sure this sounds great for the laymen and politicians, but does it really make sense technically?
- datadeft 3y ago
  Not really
- eptcyka 3y ago
  No. Nothing beats a truck full of drives for bandwidth, nothing beats fiber for latency, they need both.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    And nothing is expensive like an idle data center. This whole idea of moving compute around based on where the free power doesn't actually work. Power has grown as a fraction of data center cost over time, that's very very true, but saving 50% on power doesn't offset having a data center 90% idle.
  - re-thc 3y ago
    > Nothing beats a truck full of drives You need pigeons!
datadeft 3y ago
Good luck, they gonna need it.
tkiolp4 3y ago
Sounds interesting, but It’s a shame that they only hire you if you’re willing to relocate to Sweden.
commitpizza 3y ago
There is already a grest swedish cloud peovider called GleSYS. They are 100% running on renewable energy and the have an awesome control panel to control your servers. I only wish that they had more hosted solutions like digital ocean. Other than that, there is hetzner which I also use and is very good and probably the cheapest cloud provider out there. Then there is the french ovh.
- java-man 3y ago
  Oh boy, this one is not cheap: VPS hosting, for example, is 2x..4x than that of DotBlock.
kayo_20211030 3y ago
~250x in two years? Starting with a 13m pre-seed round? Does this make any sense?
mr90210 3y ago
A lot of “US vs Europe” in the comments. The focus ought to be to provide great services rather than just “it’s built here and not there”. I use Hetzner over other providers because it’s dead simple to create and delete VMs and the prices are competitive … and yes it’s a European company. The EU flag alone is not enough - Stable services, great UX and second to none support is the alternative that the market has been longing.
- Johnny555 3y ago
  A lot of “US vs Europe” in the comments I think the previous administration spooked Europe and made it clear that the USA is an unreliable partner.
  - f6v 3y ago
    The French president got treated to a proper American meal by a proper American president and looked very happy. It’s all forgotten now.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  The EU has made a big pot of money available to try to get an EU cloud provider, a lot of people are interested in that money. I just don't think most of these people grasp how complex it's going to be. None of the existing EU hosting providers have succeeded in providing even a small subset of the services AWS provides. You also just can start out with an S3, SQS and EC2 clone anymore, customers expect more features from day one. Bootstrapping an new cloud provider is going to cost and insane amount of money and billions of Euros, all of which may be wasted if the EU and US can reach an agreement on data processing. As an example, look at Google, they have the money, the people and the technology, and they are having a hard time competing with AWS and Azure.
strictfp 3y ago
I'm interested to hear their business plan, given that there's already established ones like https://elastx.se/en/ https://elastx.se/en/, and they're not running terribly well, although they have quite a good product IMO.
- f6v 3y ago
  It’s in the article. They plan to keep raising money and opening offices while selling “green EU cloud” to clueless businesses and politicians.
nologic01 3y ago
Data sovereignty is a thing and low environmental impact appreciated as well but they will have to find something else to differentiate from AWS (and the other two, I forget the names) What could that be? Its not easy but on the other hand you dont win the future by doing easy stuff.
sacnoradhq 3y ago
There is nothing defensible about this business model. It's entering a crowded category with entrenched players who have far deep pockets and can negate all of this startup's so-called advantages. It's really about the worst kind of business to enter besides the restaurant industry.
- funnymony 3y ago
  Why restaurant business is bad for you?
  - brabel 3y ago
    No OP, but restaurants are the most competitive industry possible. Anyone can start a restaurant, and lots of people want and can do it. Because it's intrinsically a physical business, the market reach is limited to a small area unless it's in downtown or a highly trafficked area - where it also costs a lot more in rent. There's almost no way to make a restaurant profitable as many restaurants are a labour of love, basically.
    - sacnoradhq 3y ago
      As an interesting historical legend, Sequoia Capital invested in Il Fornaio, an Italian restaurant chain. It's not a grand concern but it has endured as an okay restaurant. Darden, OTHO, is a sizeable corporation that's growth oriented and has acquired some good regional chains. McDonald's, etc. are really real estate companies.
- mongol 3y ago
  In that case they need to negotiate with Washington first, to remove the legislation that sets them apart from this startup.
Signez 3y ago
> The biggest European provider, Deutsche Telekom OVHcloud, holds 1-2% of the market. Wait what? It's OVHcloud, not "Deutsche Telekom OVHcloud". There is no mention of any relationship between the two companies beside a common project named "Gaia-X" which is still in a very very early stage of planning. This doesn't inspire confidence in the journalist.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Ovhcloud is French. Telekom is a German company and they have open telekom cloud. We actually use this on a project (and I don't recommend that to friends). Gaia-X is a european initiative and consortium to build some standardized cloud ecosystem. The goals are a bit hand wavy and since Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are actually part of the consortium, it's not really clear what the goals are at this point. I haven't heard much about this since it was announced a few years ago. I've used AWS, Gcloud, Hetzner, Telekom Cloud, and a few other things. My view on this space is that it needs disruption. Amazon was disruptive when they launched in 2006. It was great and it enabled a lot of companies to stop worrying about maintaining infrastructure. That's 15 years ago. It's a commodity product at this point. The problems I see: - Companies overcharge for their services. AWS especially is very expensive to use. To the point that the monthly cost of some of their more expensive things about pays for the hardware they give you. Of course it delivers a lot of value. But it creates an opportunity for others to offer cheaper services. - Most providers try to lock you into their platform with a combination of complexity and convenience. Once you are on a platform, switching it out for another becomes really expensive. Things like openstack exist of course but are a combination of complex and not that comprehensive. - The services offered by these companies are very hard to use for what they do. You end up micro managing lots of bits and pieces and you need expensive devops people to do that for you. There are better ways to deploy software to server these days that feature higher levels of automation and convenience. To disrupt the big providers, you'd need to be as good but an order of magnitude cheaper. Instead of focusing the commodity things that everybody has (buckets, vms, load balancers, etc.), the real value is in the more advanced stuff they offer. Things like Fargate or Google cloud run. Basically Kubernetes without all the moving parts to worry about. Don't offer database servers but scalable elastic data bases. In short, that's where the money is and the reason Amazon is so ridiculously wealthy. They overcharge for this stuff and they don't get any real competition so they get away with it. If you think about it, a lot of this stuff is very resource efficient. So it should be cheaper than getting a lot of hardware that you then under utilize. Instead, it's more expensive. AWS pockets the difference. That's what needs disrupting but it will be a race to the bottom once this starts happening. I think that's overdue though. So this Swedish company might be onto something.
osigurdson 3y ago
>> Amazon, Google and Microsoft are really good, but US authorities have the right to see the data stored on non-American citizens That doesn't sound right. If the data center is located outside of the US, there should be absolutely no reason why US authorities could have access. In fact, US authorities should not even have access to the data within the US. Sure you might catch the odd bad guy but government creeps eroding everyone's trust is not a worthwhile tradeoff.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
devjab 3y ago
I think that we're going to see a lot of these initiatives in the coming years. I know a lot of non Europeans, and even a lot of Europeans outside of non-tech Enterprise IT might be sleeping on this a little, but there are some serious powers moving against the non-European Cloud. These powers aren't going to slow down either, they've only been ramping up since 2016 when the EU sort of woke to the threat of a transatlantic relationship that might not be as it had been. For context I've worked a decade in the public sector of Denmark, and while the GDPR didn't actually change much on the back-end because we already took privacy and data serious, many of the compliance contracts and standards that work with AWS and almost with Azure in GDPR contexts aren't viable in what is now considered national security. Today I work in an investment bank that builds green energy solutions around the globe, you would think that we wouldn't be too affected by these powers in the EU, but the financial sector (and the energy sector) are all considered on the same level as our public services. In the past year, I've had to write up a plan on how we can leave Azure in a couple of days, if the EU deems it necessary to demand that 50% of the European finance sector needs to move away from Azure as a single cloud solution because it's too risky to rely on a single vendor, especially one that is not an EU vendor. Easy enough for my team, we build software, it all runs in containers and it doesn't really care where it runs. Sure we'll have to replace Azure Functions with Express in our node functions, but we've build some automation to make it possible to do in a day to be in compliance. It's much harder to do with our document storage in SharePoint Online and all our federated security build into Azure Active Directory, and, well... Outlook or Windows. I'm not sure anyone has a plan on how to exit Outlook or Windows, but if the EU points at Microsoft and tells us that our number came up, we actually need to tell them how we plan to do it. The cloud isn't Windows or Outlook though. It'll be hard for us to leave SharePoint Online (you could know this as OneDrive, but in enterprise it's all SharePoint Online), AAD and a lot of the more Operations sided stuff in regards to well running an IT department (I'm sorry, I don't know too much about all those Runbooks), but it also won't be hard for us the same way leaving Outlook or Windows would. But if someone comes a long with viable EU alternatives to Azure, then we're likely going to jump on them. Not because we dislike Azure, but because the bureaucratic measures which force us to maintain these "you need to get out in a day" plans is a lot of work. It also limits us in the services we want to buy, we were looking into the Azure managed Kubernetes product that I forgot the name of, but we decided it wouldn't be a good idea because of how much work it would add for us to plan for an exit that will likely never come. I'm sure that last part has a lot of you rolling eyes. It has us rolling eyes too, but it's the world we live in, and it's not going to change. With the war in the Ukraine, the troubles with China and the risk of America electing another EU-unfriendly president/government, it's likely only going to accelerate, and someone, maybe even this Swedish initiative, are going to be the company or organization, that eventually gets the EU cloud alternative right. I think it'll be more a matter of timing and luck, than being able to actually compete with AWS or Azure in terms of services though. I think it's unrealistic for someone to build an AWS, but it won't be unrealistic to build something that's enough AWS and convenient as legislation pushes harder and harder. What I'm personally curious about is to see what they plan on doing with smartphones. In Denmark your iPhone is your payment tool, your drivers licence, your social security license, you passport, your national digital ID, your bank and so on, and I'm not sure how the EU plans on having an European smartphone to rival Apple or Google.
mehukatti 3y ago
What happened to Gaia-X, the previous European cloud project? If I recall correctly, its main objective was not to build new data centers but rather to develop an overlay on top of the existing European VPS providers.
lelag 3y ago
They want to raise 3 billions in 3 years to build a Cloud from scratch and with no real USP. What a joke. This guy probably think that you can throw money at a hard problem and it will fix itself by magic. Building the tech that power a cloud service at hyper scale is no small feat. You can have all the money in the world, building a team that can do that is hard and will take time. It's not like he can install OpenStack and be done with it. Also, as others have pointed out, real EU competition exists and most are already on a path to sustainable computing (disclaimer: I work for a EU cloud provider on Sustainability topics).
- helsinkiandrew 3y ago
  > .. to build a Cloud from scratch and with no real USP. What a joke. Using a cloud not owned by a US company is quite a big USP for many non US organisations. I can't name any big EU cloud providers, but I imagine that a large chunk of that 3 Billion will be spent on marketing so people will have heard of evroc in a few years.
- mongol 3y ago
  There is a USP and it is very strong. If you are a government organisation, you don't have many clouds to chose from, given the legislative situation. It is a greenfield basically. I am surprised not more people have seen it.
bullen 3y ago
The hardware is peaking. So software is where you can make the difference: http://host.rupy.se http://host.rupy.se
- PhilippGille 3y ago
  I wonder why they are HTTP only. Despite some of the hosted (3rd party?) pages having login forms.
  - bullen 3y ago
    The login uses OTP: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289 No need for HTTPS.
- wuming2 3y ago
  Didn’t know them. Anything comparable for other languages?
  - bullen 3y ago
    You want Java on the server. VM with GC is the way.
openplatypus 3y ago
FTA: > The lack of home-grown cloud providers in Europe Not accurate. OVH (France), IONOS (Germany), Scaleway (Sweden) are few examples thar had been serving customers for years/decades. On lower end there even more competitors like Servers.com and Hetzner. The reason AWS is such prevalent is not lack of options. It is VCs pushing "free" credits on their portfolio companies till it became synonymous with cloud for some engineers and founders. Most are already carbon neutral (nuclear) or renewable powered. OVH even has patented highly efficient water cooling used on large scale. Rather than announcing US cloud rivalry, we should make community aware of better, cheaper solution at "home".
- daneel_w 3y ago
  Scaleway is a French venture.
  - openplatypus 3y ago
    Ah, sorry, mixed it something else. Thanks for correction.
langsoul-com 3y ago
Why do I, a user, care about the energy type used? In this world of capitalism, only the price matters. Pure green would be more expensive than the cheapest energy option at all times.
alexfromapex 3y ago
I hope they will have a US cloud region since the European laws are pretty strict and hard to keep up with
wuming2 3y ago
Plenty of reasons for infrastructure/platform/software independence. But if Munich and Bavaria, one of the richest regions in all of Europe, could not escape the shackles of Microsoft I think there’s not enough free will to scale a Swedish startup to continental scale.
voidr 3y ago
€3bn to rival AWS that is going to be more secure and will also only use green energy, sounds like something EU bureaucrats would come up with. I'm deeply disappointed that the EU is afraid of doing real investments with realistic goals into information infrastructure while it happily throws away billions on the failing Ukraine war.

213 points by foolswisdom 3y ago

> green ambitious, applaudable, but doomed to market realities

I kind of struggled to find the name of the company in the start of the article. Turns out its https://evroc.com https://evroc.com

dgellow 3y ago
It’s in the subheading: > Having just raised a €13m pre-seed round, evroc aims to raise €3bn within the next two years
- Someone 3y ago
  And in the first paragraph and in the third paragraph, in the fifth, etc. I count twelve occurrences. I think it doesn’t pop out because it’s written without capital letters.
melx 3y ago
This must be the biggest-paddings-between-blocks website ever. At least for mobile.
- upon_drumhead 3y ago
  They left room for the solar panels to power the DCs

neximo64 3y ago

Would never use a cloud service simply because "its European", it's got to be better and cheaper than AWS.

capableweb 3y ago
Seems they're aiming to capture the market of people who want "green" clouds, not "European" clouds. Besides, if you just want better and cheaper AWS, there is so many options already.
- laurencerowe 3y ago
  Doesn't look like being a green cloud will be a differentiator for very long. "Amazon is the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy and is on a path to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025" https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/renewable-energy https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/renewable...
  - adrian_mrd 3y ago
    This is for Amazon as a whole (so not AWS) but recent news (26 May 2023) seems that they are targeting net-zero by 2040: "The ecommerce giant recently backed out of a commitment to make 50% of its shipments net-zero carbon by 2030. Amazon said in a statement that it would roll this goal into a broader Climate Pledge to reach net-zero carbon across all its operations by 2040. That's a decade later than the 50% goal, which was called "Shipment Zero" at the time." [0] [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-shipment-zero-gives-up-most-important-part-climate-pledge-2023-5?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-shipment-zero-gives-u... Also worth noting that this is a target. And targets can always shift eg 2040, 2050, etc
- re-thc 3y ago
  > Seems they're aiming to capture the market of people who want "green" clouds, not "European" clouds. Just make a green colored logo and website?
gumballindie 3y ago
A lot of european companies would. You’d be surprised how often saas clients told me to _never_ allow client data to get anywhere near a us company. People around europe are very privacy aware.

foolswisdom 3y ago

They want to create competing to US cloud companies in Europe. If I understand the business strategy as presented they initially will target companies that can't use US cloud for legal reasons, so US clouds can't even compete (so the competition while they get off the ground is small scale cloud providers in Europe), which will then give them a base from which to fight the big clouds for clients. Quick googling says that AWS, Azure and GCP have 69% of the European cloud market. I wonder how big Europe is for their overall profits, and if this could potentially be a big problem for then in the future.

scroot 3y ago
The market share of these services in the EU might end up being affected by the passage of the Digital Services Act and its sister bill the Digital Markets Act
nikanj 3y ago
EU is pouring huge amounts of money into development grants, because they want to decrease their dependency on the global markets. Expect GAaaS startups (grant applications as a service) to pop up left and right, offering extremely slick pitch decks, founders in well-fitting suits and ridiculous pie-in-the-sky business ideas. It’s some version of ”build it and they will come”. Granting millions in free money to anyone who promises to create an EU alternative to AWS / Intel / Facebook gets you a lot of said promises.
- belval 3y ago
  > Over the next two years, it plans to raise €3bn — that averages out as €125m a month for everyone keeping score at home The EU pledged €2bn so it's mostly government funding. Imagine burning €125m in public money every month.
  - foolswisdom 3y ago
    The 2bn from the EU is not earmarked for Evroc, I understood that it was a general allocation (though perhaps they expect to get a lot of it).

prepend 3y ago

I think there’s an opportunity for an IkeaCloud or AldiCloud that is just barebones and cheap but still is a proper cloud. Given that Microsoft and google are struggling to match aws it seems we’re still decades away from someone truly being able to deliver the same features, scale, and reliability.

asciimike 3y ago
Doesn't this already exist in the form of Digital Ocean, Linode/Akamai, OVH, etc.?
- cultofmetatron 3y ago
  also hetzner
  - GordonS 3y ago
    Hetzner is great for servers and storage, but it's not a "proper cloud" like AWS/GCP/Azure/Oracle/IBM.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - cultofmetatron 3y ago
      well yea, we are talking ikea cloud. cheap but serviceable (https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud)
- f_devd 3y ago
  Those are not cheap, but they do exist already yes
ju-st 3y ago
"LidlCloud" is a thing... https://www.stackit.de/en/ https://www.stackit.de/en/

JohnMakin 3y ago

If the concern mentioned in this article of "Americans can view sensitive data on European citizens," they should just go the route China did - it hosts its own version of AWS that's pretty walled off, from what I know.

asciimike 3y ago
China was able to pressure the west to do so because western companies: - "need" to operate in China - The Chinese government requires majority state ownership of enterprises I don't think the conditions are the same in Europe, especially given the historical precedents of Safe Harbor/Privacy Shield/etc.
niederman 3y ago
Well, yeah, that's what evroc is aiming to be.
- electroly 3y ago
  China has literally AWS, though, not just something similar. All the same services, just with a CCP official looking over your shoulder and a Chinese company operating it.
  - eyilmaz 3y ago
    Not really all the same services.. there is a ton of them missing in CN AWS. It is like few years behind..
    - electroly 3y ago
      True enough, but how many services is a completely new European startup going to have?
  - cavisne 3y ago
    Not literally though, it’s run by some company that is not Amazon.

nilespotter 3y ago

> “Amazon, Google and Microsoft are really good, but US authorities have the right to see the data stored on non-American citizens." Unfortunately Mattias, they don't care if they have the right or not. American citizens are routinely subject to surveillance, dragnet and otherwise. I'd be very surprised if any of your data centers stay out of view of our unconscionable surveillance apparatus.

_ezah 3y ago

It sounds like it's layering on the European aspect to get government/EU backing. Fair enough, I hope they succeed.

dontupvoteme 3y ago
It's a necessary evil to combat a larger one.

belval 3y ago

Corporate fluff aside, AWS is on track to run on 100% renewables by 2025[1] so the selling is mostly "European cloud" since the green part will be mostly expected by the time they actually ramp up. Competition is always good though. > Studies by 451 Research have shown that AWS’ infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median of U.S. enterprise data centers surveyed and up to five times more energy efficient than the average in Europe. 451 Research also found that AWS can lower customers’ workload carbon footprints by nearly 80% compared to surveyed enterprise data centers, and up to 96% once AWS is powered with 100% renewable energy—a target we’re on path to meet by 2025. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/energy/sustainability/ https://aws.amazon.com/energy/sustainability/ EDIT: - GCP, 100% renewable by 2030 https://cloud.google.com/sustainability - Azure, 100% renewable by 2025 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/explore/global-infrastructure/sustainability - Oracle, 100% renewable in Europe already https://www.oracle.com/sustainability/green-cloud/

api 3y ago
For real or are they purchasing dodgy “offsets?”
- Bang2Bay 3y ago
  offset is what its name suggests. sometimes its ok if a company innovates or pays money to others to innovate.
  - vladf 3y ago
    Sure, but the reasons offsets are dodgy is because they actually aren't fungible in the way you're hoping for. Say a paper maker is about to cut down a forest in the US. It buys up the rights to do so for $1M. Then, instead, it sells $1M worth of carbon credits to Amazon (maybe for a premium) for its data center greenwashing and doesn't end up cutting the US forest. But then, secretly, or through some shell company machinery, it buys a plot of land in the Amazon and cuts trees down anyway to match its demand. Even though US law makers evaluate the counterfactual of the paper maker cutting trees down in the US, the net amount of trees in the world goes down.

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago

they seem to have misunderstood the why and the how of startup culture in the valley it has been a way to get startup entrepreneurs (founders) to absorb the negative cost of trying out new things; and whatever actually works well gets bought by an established winner. what's fundamentally unproven about how to build data-centers? this seems to be about using a different sort of 'power supply' for the whole project what is to stop AWS from being even more green even faster (by buying 'greener' power supplies?) the only way this makes sense is if their real end-game is to get bought by some already established datacenter company. then again, it's not 2018 anymore. The VC scheme is also changing a lot. they should find a way to chuck "AI" in their pitch to get startup money now

nikanj 3y ago
Their real end game is living comfortably for years on large salaries financed by EU development grants.
Nifty3929 3y ago
They are taking advantage of regulatory capture - that's all. I don't think I'm blaming anybody here. Maybe these are good regulations. Regardless, it creates a business opportunity. The EU passes laws which require data/compute/whatever to run in the EU. So a company springs up with a product for that.

eagleoftruth 3y ago

Has "Europe is investing $X billions to rival $AMERICAN_TECH_GIANT" ever worked? I'm highly skeptical of planned enterprises. Inovation often happens organically.

dontupvoteme 3y ago
It works better when they use Legislation to keep the great satan in check. They're addicted to that market and they(we?) need checks and balances to constrain that which we have wrought
dopidopHN 3y ago
Airbus ?
wmf 3y ago
IaaS but in Europe isn't innovation though. If you want a factory just build it; don't wait for it to emerge organically.

dontupvoteme 3y ago

US cloud companies are just a subsidiary of the NSA, so this sounds good.

cheriot 3y ago

> “Amazon, Google and Microsoft are really good, but US authorities have the right to see the data stored on non-American citizens. That means that many companies and authorities in Europe cannot put sensitive data on the American cloud and instead store it on servers in the cellar,” Åström says. Isn't this FUD? US authorities can't subpoena data on a server in the EU even if it's owned by a US company

dontupvoteme 3y ago
Anything which passes through cloudflare, AWS, Apple, or any corporation with an HQ in America is part and parcel of the American 3 letter industry
- cheriot 3y ago
  If you're worried about the spy agencies, data is safer inside the US that out.
Gwypaas 3y ago
Let me introduce you to the CLOUD act, which multiple times have been ruled to be fundamentally incompatible with GDPR. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
- kixiQu 3y ago
  Curious to see whether pessimism about big-$$$ companies getting to shape US law to their will could win versus pessimism about the seemingly inevitable creep of the security state, if Europe actually forces tech companies' hands here... one can kind of imagine it being possible to repeal the CLOUD act if enough lobbyist dollars were spent.

poisonborz 3y ago

> When the sun is shining in Spain, then we move the data there, and when the wind is blowing in the Netherlands then we move it there. I'm sure this sounds great for the laymen and politicians, but does it really make sense technically?

datadeft 3y ago
Not really
eptcyka 3y ago
No. Nothing beats a truck full of drives for bandwidth, nothing beats fiber for latency, they need both.
- hinkley 3y ago
  And nothing is expensive like an idle data center. This whole idea of moving compute around based on where the free power doesn't actually work. Power has grown as a fraction of data center cost over time, that's very very true, but saving 50% on power doesn't offset having a data center 90% idle.
- re-thc 3y ago
  > Nothing beats a truck full of drives You need pigeons!

datadeft 3y ago

Good luck, they gonna need it.

tkiolp4 3y ago

Sounds interesting, but It’s a shame that they only hire you if you’re willing to relocate to Sweden.

commitpizza 3y ago

There is already a grest swedish cloud peovider called GleSYS. They are 100% running on renewable energy and the have an awesome control panel to control your servers. I only wish that they had more hosted solutions like digital ocean. Other than that, there is hetzner which I also use and is very good and probably the cheapest cloud provider out there. Then there is the french ovh.

java-man 3y ago
Oh boy, this one is not cheap: VPS hosting, for example, is 2x..4x than that of DotBlock.

kayo_20211030 3y ago

~250x in two years? Starting with a 13m pre-seed round? Does this make any sense?

mr90210 3y ago

A lot of “US vs Europe” in the comments. The focus ought to be to provide great services rather than just “it’s built here and not there”. I use Hetzner over other providers because it’s dead simple to create and delete VMs and the prices are competitive … and yes it’s a European company. The EU flag alone is not enough - Stable services, great UX and second to none support is the alternative that the market has been longing.

Johnny555 3y ago
A lot of “US vs Europe” in the comments I think the previous administration spooked Europe and made it clear that the USA is an unreliable partner.
- f6v 3y ago
  The French president got treated to a proper American meal by a proper American president and looked very happy. It’s all forgotten now.
mrweasel 3y ago
The EU has made a big pot of money available to try to get an EU cloud provider, a lot of people are interested in that money. I just don't think most of these people grasp how complex it's going to be. None of the existing EU hosting providers have succeeded in providing even a small subset of the services AWS provides. You also just can start out with an S3, SQS and EC2 clone anymore, customers expect more features from day one. Bootstrapping an new cloud provider is going to cost and insane amount of money and billions of Euros, all of which may be wasted if the EU and US can reach an agreement on data processing. As an example, look at Google, they have the money, the people and the technology, and they are having a hard time competing with AWS and Azure.

strictfp 3y ago

I'm interested to hear their business plan, given that there's already established ones like https://elastx.se/en/ https://elastx.se/en/, and they're not running terribly well, although they have quite a good product IMO.

f6v 3y ago
It’s in the article. They plan to keep raising money and opening offices while selling “green EU cloud” to clueless businesses and politicians.

nologic01 3y ago

Data sovereignty is a thing and low environmental impact appreciated as well but they will have to find something else to differentiate from AWS (and the other two, I forget the names) What could that be? Its not easy but on the other hand you dont win the future by doing easy stuff.

sacnoradhq 3y ago

There is nothing defensible about this business model. It's entering a crowded category with entrenched players who have far deep pockets and can negate all of this startup's so-called advantages. It's really about the worst kind of business to enter besides the restaurant industry.

funnymony 3y ago
Why restaurant business is bad for you?
- brabel 3y ago
  No OP, but restaurants are the most competitive industry possible. Anyone can start a restaurant, and lots of people want and can do it. Because it's intrinsically a physical business, the market reach is limited to a small area unless it's in downtown or a highly trafficked area - where it also costs a lot more in rent. There's almost no way to make a restaurant profitable as many restaurants are a labour of love, basically.
  - sacnoradhq 3y ago
    As an interesting historical legend, Sequoia Capital invested in Il Fornaio, an Italian restaurant chain. It's not a grand concern but it has endured as an okay restaurant. Darden, OTHO, is a sizeable corporation that's growth oriented and has acquired some good regional chains. McDonald's, etc. are really real estate companies.
mongol 3y ago
In that case they need to negotiate with Washington first, to remove the legislation that sets them apart from this startup.

Signez 3y ago

> The biggest European provider, Deutsche Telekom OVHcloud, holds 1-2% of the market. Wait what? It's OVHcloud, not "Deutsche Telekom OVHcloud". There is no mention of any relationship between the two companies beside a common project named "Gaia-X" which is still in a very very early stage of planning. This doesn't inspire confidence in the journalist.

jillesvangurp 3y ago
Ovhcloud is French. Telekom is a German company and they have open telekom cloud. We actually use this on a project (and I don't recommend that to friends). Gaia-X is a european initiative and consortium to build some standardized cloud ecosystem. The goals are a bit hand wavy and since Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are actually part of the consortium, it's not really clear what the goals are at this point. I haven't heard much about this since it was announced a few years ago. I've used AWS, Gcloud, Hetzner, Telekom Cloud, and a few other things. My view on this space is that it needs disruption. Amazon was disruptive when they launched in 2006. It was great and it enabled a lot of companies to stop worrying about maintaining infrastructure. That's 15 years ago. It's a commodity product at this point. The problems I see: - Companies overcharge for their services. AWS especially is very expensive to use. To the point that the monthly cost of some of their more expensive things about pays for the hardware they give you. Of course it delivers a lot of value. But it creates an opportunity for others to offer cheaper services. - Most providers try to lock you into their platform with a combination of complexity and convenience. Once you are on a platform, switching it out for another becomes really expensive. Things like openstack exist of course but are a combination of complex and not that comprehensive. - The services offered by these companies are very hard to use for what they do. You end up micro managing lots of bits and pieces and you need expensive devops people to do that for you. There are better ways to deploy software to server these days that feature higher levels of automation and convenience. To disrupt the big providers, you'd need to be as good but an order of magnitude cheaper. Instead of focusing the commodity things that everybody has (buckets, vms, load balancers, etc.), the real value is in the more advanced stuff they offer. Things like Fargate or Google cloud run. Basically Kubernetes without all the moving parts to worry about. Don't offer database servers but scalable elastic data bases. In short, that's where the money is and the reason Amazon is so ridiculously wealthy. They overcharge for this stuff and they don't get any real competition so they get away with it. If you think about it, a lot of this stuff is very resource efficient. So it should be cheaper than getting a lot of hardware that you then under utilize. Instead, it's more expensive. AWS pockets the difference. That's what needs disrupting but it will be a race to the bottom once this starts happening. I think that's overdue though. So this Swedish company might be onto something.

osigurdson 3y ago

>> Amazon, Google and Microsoft are really good, but US authorities have the right to see the data stored on non-American citizens That doesn't sound right. If the data center is located outside of the US, there should be absolutely no reason why US authorities could have access. In fact, US authorities should not even have access to the data within the US. Sure you might catch the odd bad guy but government creeps eroding everyone's trust is not a worthwhile tradeoff.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

devjab 3y ago

I think that we're going to see a lot of these initiatives in the coming years. I know a lot of non Europeans, and even a lot of Europeans outside of non-tech Enterprise IT might be sleeping on this a little, but there are some serious powers moving against the non-European Cloud. These powers aren't going to slow down either, they've only been ramping up since 2016 when the EU sort of woke to the threat of a transatlantic relationship that might not be as it had been. For context I've worked a decade in the public sector of Denmark, and while the GDPR didn't actually change much on the back-end because we already took privacy and data serious, many of the compliance contracts and standards that work with AWS and almost with Azure in GDPR contexts aren't viable in what is now considered national security. Today I work in an investment bank that builds green energy solutions around the globe, you would think that we wouldn't be too affected by these powers in the EU, but the financial sector (and the energy sector) are all considered on the same level as our public services. In the past year, I've had to write up a plan on how we can leave Azure in a couple of days, if the EU deems it necessary to demand that 50% of the European finance sector needs to move away from Azure as a single cloud solution because it's too risky to rely on a single vendor, especially one that is not an EU vendor. Easy enough for my team, we build software, it all runs in containers and it doesn't really care where it runs. Sure we'll have to replace Azure Functions with Express in our node functions, but we've build some automation to make it possible to do in a day to be in compliance. It's much harder to do with our document storage in SharePoint Online and all our federated security build into Azure Active Directory, and, well... Outlook or Windows. I'm not sure anyone has a plan on how to exit Outlook or Windows, but if the EU points at Microsoft and tells us that our number came up, we actually need to tell them how we plan to do it. The cloud isn't Windows or Outlook though. It'll be hard for us to leave SharePoint Online (you could know this as OneDrive, but in enterprise it's all SharePoint Online), AAD and a lot of the more Operations sided stuff in regards to well running an IT department (I'm sorry, I don't know too much about all those Runbooks), but it also won't be hard for us the same way leaving Outlook or Windows would. But if someone comes a long with viable EU alternatives to Azure, then we're likely going to jump on them. Not because we dislike Azure, but because the bureaucratic measures which force us to maintain these "you need to get out in a day" plans is a lot of work. It also limits us in the services we want to buy, we were looking into the Azure managed Kubernetes product that I forgot the name of, but we decided it wouldn't be a good idea because of how much work it would add for us to plan for an exit that will likely never come. I'm sure that last part has a lot of you rolling eyes. It has us rolling eyes too, but it's the world we live in, and it's not going to change. With the war in the Ukraine, the troubles with China and the risk of America electing another EU-unfriendly president/government, it's likely only going to accelerate, and someone, maybe even this Swedish initiative, are going to be the company or organization, that eventually gets the EU cloud alternative right. I think it'll be more a matter of timing and luck, than being able to actually compete with AWS or Azure in terms of services though. I think it's unrealistic for someone to build an AWS, but it won't be unrealistic to build something that's enough AWS and convenient as legislation pushes harder and harder. What I'm personally curious about is to see what they plan on doing with smartphones. In Denmark your iPhone is your payment tool, your drivers licence, your social security license, you passport, your national digital ID, your bank and so on, and I'm not sure how the EU plans on having an European smartphone to rival Apple or Google.

mehukatti 3y ago

What happened to Gaia-X, the previous European cloud project? If I recall correctly, its main objective was not to build new data centers but rather to develop an overlay on top of the existing European VPS providers.

lelag 3y ago

They want to raise 3 billions in 3 years to build a Cloud from scratch and with no real USP. What a joke. This guy probably think that you can throw money at a hard problem and it will fix itself by magic. Building the tech that power a cloud service at hyper scale is no small feat. You can have all the money in the world, building a team that can do that is hard and will take time. It's not like he can install OpenStack and be done with it. Also, as others have pointed out, real EU competition exists and most are already on a path to sustainable computing (disclaimer: I work for a EU cloud provider on Sustainability topics).

helsinkiandrew 3y ago
> .. to build a Cloud from scratch and with no real USP. What a joke. Using a cloud not owned by a US company is quite a big USP for many non US organisations. I can't name any big EU cloud providers, but I imagine that a large chunk of that 3 Billion will be spent on marketing so people will have heard of evroc in a few years.
mongol 3y ago
There is a USP and it is very strong. If you are a government organisation, you don't have many clouds to chose from, given the legislative situation. It is a greenfield basically. I am surprised not more people have seen it.

bullen 3y ago

The hardware is peaking. So software is where you can make the difference: http://host.rupy.se http://host.rupy.se

PhilippGille 3y ago
I wonder why they are HTTP only. Despite some of the hosted (3rd party?) pages having login forms.
- bullen 3y ago
  The login uses OTP: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289 No need for HTTPS.
wuming2 3y ago
Didn’t know them. Anything comparable for other languages?
- bullen 3y ago
  You want Java on the server. VM with GC is the way.

openplatypus 3y ago

FTA: > The lack of home-grown cloud providers in Europe Not accurate. OVH (France), IONOS (Germany), Scaleway (Sweden) are few examples thar had been serving customers for years/decades. On lower end there even more competitors like Servers.com and Hetzner. The reason AWS is such prevalent is not lack of options. It is VCs pushing "free" credits on their portfolio companies till it became synonymous with cloud for some engineers and founders. Most are already carbon neutral (nuclear) or renewable powered. OVH even has patented highly efficient water cooling used on large scale. Rather than announcing US cloud rivalry, we should make community aware of better, cheaper solution at "home".

daneel_w 3y ago
Scaleway is a French venture.
- openplatypus 3y ago
  Ah, sorry, mixed it something else. Thanks for correction.

langsoul-com 3y ago

Why do I, a user, care about the energy type used? In this world of capitalism, only the price matters. Pure green would be more expensive than the cheapest energy option at all times.

alexfromapex 3y ago

I hope they will have a US cloud region since the European laws are pretty strict and hard to keep up with

wuming2 3y ago

Plenty of reasons for infrastructure/platform/software independence. But if Munich and Bavaria, one of the richest regions in all of Europe, could not escape the shackles of Microsoft I think there’s not enough free will to scale a Swedish startup to continental scale.

voidr 3y ago

€3bn to rival AWS that is going to be more secure and will also only use green energy, sounds like something EU bureaucrats would come up with. I'm deeply disappointed that the EU is afraid of doing real investments with realistic goals into information infrastructure while it happily throws away billions on the failing Ukraine war.