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Gaia-X is a disaster. The article misrepresents it. Gaia-X is not a framework for what a European cloud should look like. This would be useful. In beautiful EU

• intunderflow 2y ago
  Can be shown by how everyone who actually produces cloud services of value quit Gaia-X very quickly Scaleway published an entire blog post on why they quit: https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/full-steam-ahead-towards-a-true-multi-cloud-offering-to-deliver-on-broken-promises/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/full-steam-ahead-towards-a-...
• awesomeMilou 2y ago
  > It represents to me everything that is wrong with the EU today. A bureaucratic monster that can't decide how to talk about things or come to any form of alignment. I think that the EU can very well find a consensus when it wants to, going so far to push for legislature that will be clearly thrown out by the ECJ or HUDOC (see Chat Control for great example). It's just that we also have a lot of "token projects" which serve for virtual signaling for topics where there is a lack of domestic competence. Gaia-X is one of these things, the idea of a "european cloud" as laughable to begin with, due to dependence on foreign technologies to facilitate it.
• raverbashing 2y ago
  Yup https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-distraction/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-dis...
• opentokix 2y ago
  Gaia-X is a place where the hasbeens of the yesteryear can poison any reasonable developent made by saying "We have always done it this way".
• p1esk 2y ago
  Wow, 5 years later and what have they actually accomplished? Look at the milestones section: https://gaia-x.eu/what-is-gaia-x/about-gaia-x/ https://gaia-x.eu/what-is-gaia-x/about-gaia-x/
  • echelon 2y ago
    This is too funny. What's to stop an American cloud hyperscaler from creating a "properly patriated" subsidiary that it simply licenses the tech to? Wouldn't that side step the "sovereign" protectionism? An American company would run circles around this mess.
    • szszrk 2y ago
      That's exactly what is going on nowadays, anyway. In Poland we have Chmura Krajowa (national cloud), aimed at public, non profit and finance companies. It's basically more controlled local Azure and GPC region.
      • snowpid 2y ago
        In Polish people don't use Cloud but Chmura?
        • bartekpacia 2y ago
          It depends. If we’re talking about e.g. GCP we use “cloud”, but Chmura Krajowa is a Polish product and it has a Polish name, so we use “chmura”. We basically use the original name in this context.
          • snowpid 2y ago
            Interesting. In Germany government uses the word cloud . Not Wolke. TIL something new.
            • szszrk 2y ago
• tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
  While most Western governments have gotten increasingly good at communicating with their citizens (i.e. making their web sites and forms accessible in human language, rather than bureaucrat language), and often even go so far as to offer versions in "Simple English" or local-language equivalents, the EU seems to be going the opposite way. I'd consider myself reasonably accustomed to and able to deal with bureaucracy and formal language, and still find every interaction with official EU sites massively off-putting. Now imagine someone who isn't a native speaker in any of the EU's languages, mentally impaired, or generally quickly feels overwhelmed by bureaucracy.
  • Certhas 2y ago
    Because the EU is not a national government. It issues no passports. It has no citizens. It levies no taxes. It has no army. It's an organisation that coordinates sovereign states. Often it doesn't even set the law directly but establishes a framework that allows it to specify some requirements that national legislative bodies then have to turn into actual legislation. Frameworks for how to talk about things is very apropos for what the EU is and for how it came about. I am not defending this state of affairs. Simply pointing out that it's a category error to compare it to national governments. I think it would be good if we had more of an EU state. It seemed to be heading there 25ish years ago. But the nation states do have little appetite to cede authority to the central institutions, so that's probably not on the table. And it's also undeniable that as a coordination mechanism the EU has been spectacularly successful. The fact that people treat it as a national government is proof of that.
    • effie 2y ago
      > it's also undeniable that as a coordination mechanism the EU has been spectacularly successful. I get you like the EU, but "spectacularly sucessful" isn't something many people would use. See covid response, and Ukraine war response. I would describe EU's mechanisms as moderately successful, i.e. somewhat better if states did everything on their own and bilaterally. > The fact that people treat it as a national government is proof of that. People with triste knowledge of how EU works do that. I do not think having most people in dark about how EU works is "spectacularly successful".
• seydor 2y ago
  The EU is a bureaucratic body so the production of bureaucracy counts as success
• nosianu 2y ago
  I used to work for a company that gets Gaia-X money. I will not mention concrete names, so you'll have to believe this anonymous source, me, choosing to remain vague to not be identified. All we did for Gaia-X was the paperwork to get the money. It had zero impact on anything we actually did. Somebody I know who knew what other firms receiving Gaia-X funds did told me the others did even less than us. We certainly did not take it very seriously, apart from it being a great source of free money, and I say that as someone who reported quite a few developer hours for Gaia-X. I think at most this project is about sending some money to some European firms, with little regard for actual outcomes, kind of as a concealed subsidy. I'm not sure if those who started the project actually wanted that outcome in the first place? A lot of these things are just ways to use the current system to achieve goals that the system does not directly allow. It could just be incompetence, but it could also be the case that somebody knows exactly what they created with Gaia-X and is perfectly okay with the outcome.
  • danpalmer 2y ago
    It's not great, but this is far from abnormal. I worked for a company (not my current employer) that got R&D grants or tax breaks (I'm not sure which) from a government. The engineers were asked to come up with defined projects that could be justified as R&D in the way the government wanted. We did, and we actually did the projects, but might have done them anyway. Governments want to grow areas of their economies that they think could be beneficial. It's not acceptable to just hand out cash, and that can be trivially abused, so they put a little work around it to make sure the right companies are applying, and they tie it to token artifacts to make it seem more specific. Some companies commit outright fraud, but they're likely the minority and it's just a cost of the program, some put in a ton of effort and do it properly, and that's fine, and the majority just carry on doing the work they were already doing that the government was trying to encourage, and they'll hopefully be just a bit more successful as a result of the extra cash. It's all a bit silly, but I don't think it's malicious or actually that bad if you assume that the government isn't trying to achieve a specific outcome beyond growing a sector, despite what they say.
    • girvo 2y ago
• matthewmorgan 2y ago
  A lot of busy-work for a lot of highly overpaid bureaucrats.
• gman83 2y ago
  EU: 440 million people, 60,000 EU bureaucrats. US: 330 million people, 2 MILLION+ US federal employees. Maybe what they need is more bureaucrats, so we don't get half-assed programs like this.
  • redleader55 2y ago
    If you were not being sarcastic, it's not a fair comparison. Those 66k EU bureaucrats only deal with some of the stuff. You'll have to add some of the public administration employees from each of the countries that deal with things that in US would be considered "federal".
    • manquer 2y ago
      The flip side is a lot of governance in US which is typically centralized is distributed to states and yet there are 2M federal employees. Also only country with comparable language complexity to EU is India, so many languages adds enormous amount of paperwork and bureaucracy, US does not simply have to deal with it.
      • AlotOfReading 2y ago
        1.4M of those are defense, VA, or homeland security. It's not much of a secret that the US has a large military, and it dominates employment numbers. The highest federal employment total was 4.4M at the end of WW2. It decreased to 2M after the war ended, with clear bumps for the Korean, Vietnam, Cold, and Middle Eastern wars.
• roenxi 2y ago
  That sounds like an EU success story - the bureaucrats aren't getting the way so Lidl is free to set up an AWS competitor. The EU isn't supposed to be a tech company, the point of companies is that they should be doing the part where services get provided. The US government was not a direct player in setting up AWS. The danger would be if Gaia-X were kicking goals and laying down the law ... and had banned Lidl from setting up their own cloud until all the paperwork was signed off by 13 major committees, 666 undersecretaries of The Cloud and the High Bureaucrat was satisfied that there was a genuine market need for a new AWS competitor. The EU has a lot of clever and motivated people. If the legal situation wasn't blocking success I expect they would succeed.
• vuxie 2y ago
  I am not sure the job of the EU should even be to make technical standards in this case. The point is to develop strategy and to convince an endless amount of non-technical stakeholders on value, and that is something the EU usually does well.
• vjk800 2y ago
  As others here have pointed out, Gaia-X successfully funnels money to EU cloud companies and maybe this is what it's supposed to do. The deal is: company agrees to write some bs on how it contributes to this project and they get the money. The point is to get local cloud tech sector to grow here in the EU and maybe it's too difficult politically or otherwise to just give money to the companies directly.
  • username_my1 2y ago
    This also blows my mind, instead of adding more berucracy to apply for funding to review funding to give funding. just give tax credits based on innovation / investment criteria, to both companies and employees, Europe needs digitalization so badly, yet they find more complex ways to enable it.
    • Temporary_31337 2y ago
      Tax credits make sense for companies already with a steady profit margin. Cloud in particular is a capex heavy business so for a new company that is not very useful for at least the first few years.
      • username_my1 2y ago
        that's why you give credit to investors not just compnaies.
        • jacobr1 2y ago
          Just give it to the companies. That still incentivises equity investment (it lowers risk and raises the potential upside of profitability). It also make underwriting standard loans easier too.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • deanishe 2y ago
• fxtentacle 2y ago
  The core feature of Gaia-X is that it makes it easy for small EU software companies to get up to €200k in "de minimis" tax gifts. It also funnels money into open source office software and "European data spaces", which is (very loosely) tools to replace US clouds with open source. I would say it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, making it easier for EU companies to ditch US cloud services. And didn't exactly that happen here? 4 years ago, the "Schwarz IT KG" company was a day-1 member of Gaia-X. And now they have billions in revenue from AWS-like cloud services.
  • arianvanp 2y ago
    Need a third party citation on that. I'm highly skeptical by the press releases they bring out and seem to be taken over verbatim with very little due diligence. Given the fact they don't even allow public signups outside of DACH im highly skeptical of their claim they're doing billions of revenue in public cloud. It wouldn't surprise me if there is some interesting bookkeeping going on to boost the numbers. The current status quo is that people in this thread want to try this but fail to figure out how to even sign up. Also could you explain what part of being part of Gaia-X contributed to their success?
    • fxtentacle 2y ago
      Cloud&Heat receives GaiaX funding: https://www.cloudandheat.com/news-press/gaia-x-summit-2020/ https://www.cloudandheat.com/news-press/gaia-x-summit-2020/ Teams up with Schwarz group to create StackIT cloud: https://www.handelsblatt.com/technik/it-internet/schwarz-gruppe-nudeln-obst-speicherplatz-lidl-mutter-startet-anfang-2021-ihre-cloud-plattform/26658744.html https://www.handelsblatt.com/technik/it-internet/schwarz-gru... As for the revenue, I would trust a multi-billion international company that if they say billions in revenue, that'll be halfway accurate. Or else, that would be massive securities fraud. Here's their (independently audited) tax filling showing 1.2 billion € in revenue 2 years ago: https://www.unternehmensregister.de/ureg/result.html;jsessionid=7230B099F92CE2C85F87EA0027306810.web02-1?submitaction=showDocument&id=34548329 https://www.unternehmensregister.de/ureg/result.html;jsessio...
• jagermo 2y ago
  I have worked with Deutsche Telekom in the past and I'm convinced that every project that involves them will never get enough traction to beat US companies. The entitlement and refusal to listen to other people outside their direct org is mindboggling, its like if everyone at that company still thinks they are the hottest shit and they know everything better. Sadly, they are a gatekeeper. Super frustrating partner to work with
  • alephnerd 2y ago
    > The entitlement and refusal to listen to other people outside their direct org is mindboggling +1 on that. Same with the owner of the CSP mentioned in the article above. It's weird because it was always only German companies that gave truly unreasonable feature requests AND were extremely pushy, despite not spending much compared to other customers. T-Mobile is much easier to deal with, but they are also walking with their tail between their legs...
• crabbone 2y ago
  Living in the EU, and having by and large a meaningless job in a meaningless division of a quasi-government org... while reading the news coming from the East, I keep imagining how a war with EU will upend this little paradise of parasites and laziness, and it gives me nightmares :) Also, EU will probably kick me out before things will start getting more serious, I struggle to imagine any other sort of motivation less drastic than that to get things going in the "right direction" :(
• InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  To come to a decision is dangerous for a career in a bureaucratic monster. Its all about creating the most impractical swiss-knife of all trades with as little personal responsibility as possible. If the whole apparatus fails, that does not result in the whole apparatus being fired. Thats the crux. Another nice example, resulting in horrible deformed APIs: https://www.ibm.com/topics/what-is-a-digital-twin https://www.ibm.com/topics/what-is-a-digital-twin
• radiator 2y ago
  But Gaia-X is not the article's main focus, is it? I think it is about Schwarz Digits, which is a daughter company of Lidl.