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But how to get to that European cloud?
- chichaglisha 2y ago[dead]
- tony-allan 2y agoPlease can Australia join these initiatives. We have the same issues but are too small to do it ourselves.
- shakow 2y agoSo that you can AUKUS us once again after signing the first waves of contracts? :)
- tony-allan 2y agoSome here think that we should have stayed with the French contract
- _carbyau_ 2y agoBut we do contribute to Eurovision. That'll do as a trade right? :-)
- Towaway69 2y agoThe Eurovision Song Cloud - Europes next cloud provider. If anyone can build a European cloud surely it must have an Euro-vision! /s
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- brabel 2y agoAustralia needs to have a rethinking of its geopolitics strategy. It still seems to think it's part of Europe while at the same time being one of the members of Five Eyes, which makes it an extension of USA and UK's intelligence network (which has become problematic from the EU's perspective). In reality, Australia's biggest trade partners are all Asian (China, Japan, South Korea, India). If anything, Australia should be seeking to join efforts with its Asian partners and neighbours.
- grumpy-de-sre 2y agoI'd argue Aus should really seek a policy of neutrality, and strong Asian trade. Remaining neutral requires strong diversification and the EU is a great independent technology supplier to keep on board.
- tony-allan 2y agoAll true but I would like the option of a local European cloud provider because of the EU privacy rules.
- jajko 2y agoAny free country should be able to join, maybe one day US can too
- DrNosferatu 2y agoThink further: we need a European DARPA.
- woodson 2y agoThere’s plenty of R&D funding in the EU. How would that help get a European cloud?
- menaerus 2y agoThe recipe is simple but nobody supposedly wants to do it. 1. Find all (e.g. LinkedIn) the EU-based engineers working or having worked for American cloud companies. 2. Offer them a proportional salary to join and start building the EU cloud product. 3. Incentivize the engineers to top-performance by giving them bonuses, stocks, whatever ... 4. Go back to the garage engineering and cut-off the bureaucratic BS with endless PMs, milestones, JIRA boards, scrum masters, chapter masters, architects, and all other similar BS. But EU doesn't want to do it - they rather spend money in ways so that "EU funds", which are supposedly public, end up running up to their pockets directly. Dozens of examples out there but "AI factories" being the last embodiment of that.
- rapsey 2y agoThe EU is ran by lawyers and political science majors. They have absolutely zero idea how to setup proper incentives. Any hope of EU getting its act together is wasted. Much like our tax euros.
- DrNosferatu 2y agoTalking about solutions and helping them gain mindshare is the first step to make things happen.
- jononor 2y agoYou describe a plan for building it. That is but one piece of the equation. How will you sell it? Why should people pick you over established AWS/Azure/GC? Will you target new projects, or get people to migrate? How does the strategies there differ? What is the timeline to becoming profitable? How will you fund it in the meantime?
- dataking 2y agoI didn’t see any mention of EU’s last attempt to build a sovereign cloud: Gaia-X. I think that didn’t really go anywhere due to disagreements over technical direction. Much like Quaero. Don’t get me wrong, I hope it goes better this time and the author acknowledges the many pitfalls of such a complex undertaking. Edit: The author previously discussed Gaia-X at length here: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-distraction https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-dis...
- Aeolun 2y agoIf you start with a shitty name like that you have failed before you even start in my opinion. Even the utterly straightforward eucloud is better. Or make it cloud.eu :)
- cadamsdotcom 2y agoDisagreements over direction should be solved by making separate orgs/initiatives to go test each approach. Better than funding “one true initiative” and force people to work together to keep the funding. The VC funding model succeeds in experimental domains by letting many experiments run at once. Kind of a form of Darwinism. How to do that with funded initiatives is a really interesting challenge.
- realusername 2y agoAt the end it's just a market problem, no alternative can emerge because the US cloud companies are way too large. Remove them of the picture and the market will solve itself very quickly, most of the companies to replace them are already there in a weaker form. The cloud platforms are nowhere near as hard to replace as the chips.
- throwawayFanta 2y agoThis will be harder-when AWS (and the others follow) launch the EU sovereign cloud[0] Word is that it'll be run similar to the top secret (lol) cloud [1] that they run for the USA 3 letter agencies. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/europe-digital-sovereignty/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/europe-digital-sovereignty... [1] https://aws.amazon.com/federal/top-secret-cloud/ https://aws.amazon.com/federal/top-secret-cloud/
- zoul 2y agoThe author addresses this in the text: > There are also false prophets—we all want quick solutions, and sometimes we get (too) excited about people who promise them. For example, in Germany, some claim they have “made Microsoft’s cloud European” through SAP. However, this turns out to be not quite the case. If the U.S. refuses to cooperate, they (by their own admission) would be down within a few months. Amazon also claims they are going to do something similar, but they’ve been saying that for years, and they conveniently avoid addressing what happens in case of a conflict with the U.S.
- XorNot 2y agoAn EU sovereign cloud by Amazon though would be built in the EU and staffed by EU employees though. The effect of the US trying to insist it won't co-operate would be similar to what happened to most Russian based American franchise locations: troublesome but it's not like the facilities, people or inventory just vanished.
- cheeseface 2y agoAll proprietary software that runs in the cloud would vanish.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gmueckl 2y agoWell, that's why code escrow exists as a scheme.
- BlackFly 2y agoIf Europe wants cloud protectionism then they need apply the usual methods: tariffs on foreign cloud services and requirements on public funds to be spent on the European cloud providers. They could apply Chinese policy and require foreign cloud corporations to have locally owned partners that will own the technology produced locally.
- locusofself 2y agoEven China has an Azure cloud though. I know because I work in it sometimes.
- fifilura 2y agoOr subsidies or funding R&D? Tariffs are a trade disabler, so in general a loose-loose proposition.
- wqaatwt 2y agoTariffs are not particularly different to subsidies. Effectively they are a subsidy except that consumers are paying for it more directly (being forced to pay more for inferior local products) instead of through other taxes. The source of funding and effect on prices are the most meaningful differences.
- dragonwriter 2y ago> Tariffs are not particularly different to subsidies. Tariffs are the exact opposite of subsidies; though a tariff applied globally to all imports of a class is, I guess, sonewhat similar to a subsidy to domestic products of that class.
- wqaatwt 2y agoIn what way are they so different? Both increase prices for the the consumer it’s just they end up having to pay for the subsidy indirectly through taxes and such instead of having to pay a higher price. From the sellers perspective as long as subsidies are only available for domestic producers they are even more similar to tariffs since they reduce the competitiveness of imported products.
- robert_dipaolo 2y agoIs OVH not a European cloud provider? There are also smaller players like Hetzner.
- realusername 2y agoThey try hard to brand themselves as a cloud provider but I'd say that they mostly are a VPS provider. The cloud side isn't polished enough to pretend to be a cloud provider.
- danielscrubs 2y agoI wouldn’t describe Google nor Microsofts products as ”polished”. Humongous maybe?
- blablabla123 2y agoYes, especially Azure's success seems largely driven by their generous free tier for startups and the lock-in of the Windows ecosystem. While I like the user interface, after having used it for more than a year I've successfully stayed away from it ever since.
- blablabla123 2y agoMeanwhile AWS' popularity was largely driven by EC2 servers which are VPS. Also they are literally called OVHcloud...
- everfrustrated 2y agoCalling yourself a cloud doesn't make you one. Can you do auto scale groups with dynamically scaling load balancers yet on OVH? AWS has had that for 15 years now.
- omnimus 2y agoI dont think you realize how small scale majority of EU gov software has to be. When you have country with population under 10mil and your gov form is used by 10% of those people a year… Thats 80k submissions a month, split by 20 workdays = 4k submissions a day over 8 work hours = 500 submissions hour or about 8 submissions a minute. I know these are wrong numbers and there are peaks etc. But many would dare to put this on single server with sqlite. Even if you 10x that. You do need autoscale groups or self healing architectures. Govs requirements are CRUD apps whos biggest issues are design, accessibility, data permissions etc. Not scale.
- DeathArrow 2y agoI don't think bureaucrats can build a successful cloud by enforcing laws, adding even more regulations, making policies and using subsidies. This is not how the market likes to work. There has to be a demand and the free market forces will build a supply. Governments can help by reducing regulation and bureaucracy, reducing taxes.
- threeseed 2y ago> There has to be a demand and the free market forces will build a supply Not in all cases it doesn't. If the return on investment isn't there or if companies are unable to fulfil the demand then the market has failed. Recent example of this has been EVs where regulation needed to step in to force the market forward.
- DeathArrow 2y ago>If the return on investment isn't there or if companies are unable to fulfil the demand then the market has failed. If there's no demand, there's no problem. Also there's no money to be made. If there's demand there will always be companies to supply that demand. Of course, it takes a time. Politics shouldn't dictate to economy. >Recent example of this has been EVs where regulation needed to step in to force the market forward Then why should people be forced to use EVs instead of whatever they like? That is not freedom.
- scarby2 2y agoBecause we have wider goals as a society that go beyond absolute freedom. However things like EV incentives don't make you less free, you can still buy whatever you want.
- eesmith 2y ago> If there's demand there will always be companies to supply that demand. I want to walk around town without cameras tracking me. Can companies supply my demand? I want PFAS and microplastics out of the evironment. Can companies supply my demand? I want net-zero CO2 emissions in all the products I buy. Can companies supply my demand? How do I trust they are not green-washing? Do I depend on even more companies? How do I trust those companies? Sure seems simpler to have the government enforce privacy and pollution laws. > Politics shouldn't dictate to economy. Which means you think William Wilberforce's most famous work was completely wrong. > Then why should people be forced to use EVs instead of whatever they like? You should consider how government-subsidized oil production and distribution has forced you to use fossil fuel cars instead of whatever you like. You should consider even more how government-subsidized planning forces you to use a car in the first place, and often closed off alternative solutions like walking, bike, and mass transit.
- Animats 2y agoThere are large European data centers run by European telecoms, including Telia and Altice. So there's something to scale up from.
- roenxi 2y ago> The European cloud industry has struggled to take off, partly because existing players lacked the will or vision to compete effectively (among many other reasons). The EU would have come after them. It is coming after Google, AWS and Azure even though they have diplomatic support from the US proper; how is an EU cloud provider supposed to compete? The people with the will and vision exist, if anyone can build EuroCloud they would be wealthy beyond the dreams of mortals and it really just needs to be an OK AWS clone. The unfortunate part is that anyone who sees that far can also see how the story will end when the bureaucrats get involved early instead of after they have multiple billions for compliance. It'll cripple any ability the project has to compete.
- vixen99 2y agoToo true!
- jajko 2y agoIt doesn't have to compete 1:1 when tariffs and regulations get applied, same principle as in all other industries ie cars. Its not the best approach but it can work, we have half a billion rich domestic market and some subsidies to kick start things would be rewarded in long run tremendously.
- flanked-evergl 2y agoThe reason why Europe won't have a cloud is because you can't have managed decline and nice things. This is the same reason Europe will forever be depdent on someone else for defence and why it will always be the meek but somehow petulant follower of whoever is the world hegemon. This is why China and Russia cares so little about them also, they know that Europe will fall in line once their current patron no longer can or want to sustain them.
- krige 2y agoThat would be believable 2 years ago, but right now it seems like you're engaging in wishful thinking.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- realusername 2y agoA few years ago I would have maybe said the same but we're now entering a new era where the US capital will likely go towards the EU which is seen as more stable and future oriented. The US tech companies where somewhat insulated in Europe thanks to the US defense but now that is out of the picture, I don't see much else to protect them.
- redrove 2y agoThe elephant in the room here is pay. You can’t expect people to bend over backwards for 70k/yr. Start paying 2-300k in Europe and watch shit being built.
- yieldcrv 2y agoThe cultures across Europe are anti growth and anti speculation That facilitate it for other people, but not enough interest culture wide It’s kind of interesting “why don’t we just make the same amount quarter after quarter” like, wow who knew you could do that? But speculation drives innovation. Permission to fail results in faster selective pressures.
- simonask 2y agoPerhaps you mean "investment" rather than "speculation"? All mainstream European politicians are in favor of more growth, more investment, more industry, more jobs, and so on, across the continent. The parties who are about "de-growth" are marginal, even as the climate crisis is on full steam. The actual problem is lack of pro-risk capital. Almost all of Europe's capital is concentrated in 1) conservative industry giants, and 2) huge conservative pension funds. Basically all capital in Europe, public as well as private, is risk averse. There are very few actual "VC"s. I'm not sure that's unambiguously a bad thing, but it is the difference.
- yieldcrv 2y agoNo I didn’t mean investment, I meant speculation. Because I was talking about individuals and risk capital. We are talking about the same things. Speculation drives innovation
- simonask 2y agoAre you saying that people innovate because they want to attract investment? Perhaps. Most of the time I’ve seen people innovate because they had the combination of passion and time to focus on doing something useful.
- elric 2y agoI've done quite a bit of government contracting for governments in Europe, including various government levels in Belgium and the EU itself. Every single time, I encountered a lot of friction regarding hosting. The applications were always hosted by a partner [1] that won a large public tender, usually by virtue of supposedly being the cheapest. Those hosting partners were invariably awful and incompetent. Simple tasks would take weeks. Complex tasks wouldn't happen at all. There was enough red tape to go to the moon and back. Every project I worked on, developers (consultants like me) advocated for finding a way of bypassing the hosting partner, and either doing their thing on top of platforms like Hetzner, or switching to AWS/Azure. Not because they particularly love AWS, but because the default hosting solution sucks so much arse. I can totally see EU cloud infrastructure working for the public sector, but ONLY if they come with the same level of self-service management as the big cloud providers. Without that, it's a non-starter. [1] One of those is a large French company on the verge of banruptcy.
- F-W-M 2y agoI have been working for large European utilities and even within AWS/Azure deploying something takes weeks.
- Aeolun 2y agoFairly certain this is true for large anythings if they haven’t been explicitly set up to avoid that problem.
- omnimus 2y agoIn my experience this is mix of lack of knowledge sometimes mixed with self-dealing/corruption. But it can be prevented by writing hosting specs well. If in your proposed solution you specify really detailed hosting envinronment then most of these old incopetent companies wont even apply.
- elric 2y agoUnfortunately, the way my governments have dealt with the issue is by writing one very large tender, from which a Hosting Framework Agreement is derived. Individual projects have no say in it, and they're certainly not consulted when the agreements are drafted. So basically they're stuck with whatever is on offer, which isn't much. A choice example was a hosted K8S solution: it was supposed to be highly available, but the framework agreement only specified 2 datacentre locations. The hosting provider thus couldn't build a reliable stretched cluster, and instead built two identical clusters. Forcing every project to figure out how to deploy their applications in a HA fashion on top of two clusters. Much fun. Not a giant waste of resources at all. /s
- Aeolun 2y agoI think the big problem is this: That NLNet thing he mentions gives subsidies of the insanely large amount of €5-50k that’s not even worth getting out of bed over, much less quitting your job on the off chance you are successful in the 3 months that gives you.
- presentation 2y agoDo onerous EU regulations have to do with the inability to produce a competitive cloud locally?
- albertgoeswoof 2y agoI’m dreaming of a set of individual providers, all building with similar dev experience, auth, billing functions, quality of service etc. I own https://mailpace.com https://mailpace.com and would love to expand from there- reach out if you want to help.
- grumpy-de-sre 2y agoSorry to be a killjoy, I see these sentiments everywhere across the EU sovereign cloud space. The dream of distributed "cloud providers" made up of individual companies products, all cooperating and communicating together in some utopian way. That's the stuff that Gaia-X was huffing. Make no mistake, this will absolutely be curb stomped by vertical integration. But I get the sentiment, we need to figure out a way of collaborating on this. Perhaps airbus is a good example.
- invaliduser 2y agoAlthough you are from UK, so not the european union anymore, you could try getting listed on https://european-alternatives.eu/category/transactional-email-service https://european-alternatives.eu/category/transactional-emai... Anyway yes, we need to better list and advertise the european alternatives for services like yours.
- mike_hearn 2y agoNo he couldn't. That site uses a non-geographical definition of Europe that excludes Britain. "EU, EEA, EFTA, or DCFTA member country" also excludes Serbia, Turkey, Belarus and Russia but includes several countries that aren't able to join the EU at all due to corruption or misaligned legal systems. This really shows the incoherence of the whole Euro project. There's no such thing as European-ness: when the sort of people who wave the blue flag use the word Europe they are imagining an ideological construct subject to inconsistent and ever-shifting definitions. They don't even agree with each other what European means. One minute Britain is in Europe and Ukraine isn't, events happen, and suddenly Ukraine is European via DCFTA and Britain isn't. Switzerland is a similar case: sometimes it's considered to be European by these types, and other times not. Why should I, a man born in Britain now living in Switzerland who has worked on two different US clouds, want to apply that experience to a Eurocloud given this history? This of thing is why it will never inspire much loyalty, and why Bert instantly gives up on the idea of a European cloud being used because it's actually good. The resort to force of law underpins the entire project because the European identity is a sort of social engineering programme, not something organically developed.
- DrFalkyn 2y agoCloud is highly overrated for a lot of projects. While in theory you could scale up or down based on demand, my experience the need for it was rare. More common was provisioned resources sitting there for months. And S3 encourages you to basically save everything And there was another aspect, since compute / storage was a consumable. Devops were less shy about spinning up services as if they were candy, rather than being more economical with resources that were fixed in the short term.
- apexalpha 2y agoCloud isn't just scaling. It also takes care of backups, disaster recovery, maintenance, HW replacement and offers many services right out of the box that would require at least a single extra DevOps guy to do on-prem. Managed databases and managed storage like S3 is where it's at.
- omnimus 2y agoThe issue is not lack of european providers. The issue is almost natural lobby from the likes of Microsoft and Amazon. All the unis are infected with former corpo programmers who push their preferred employer stacks. Students get free credits to use on Azure. Some of them become gov employees or consultants. You end up with all sides agreeing Microsoft Azure is the most trustworthy solution. Everything gov in my country seems to be built with asp.net to point where its often requirement in the contract. Lets start with erasing all the proprietary tech taught at universities. Microsoft can do their education. Universities dont have to do it for them for free.
- p_v_doom 2y agoAlso Microsoft consultants are everywhere, and management consultants like McKinsey usually work closely with Microsoft, and many corporations are already locked in. In many ways its kind of really scary how so much of the digital infrastructure even of key enterprises and entire states is owned and operated by a private company.
- jpeter 2y agoWhat is the problem with asp.net? It is open source.
- omnimus 2y agoIt didnt use to be open-source. Its closely tied to MS which can do whatever about it. It will always have better support on MS and Azure. It still MS stack and if you want to get out of that you have bazilion better more free options.
- sam_lowry_ 2y agoIn practice, it is source-available, not open source.
- hackandthink 2y agoCloud is easy nowadays. There is everything: Servers/Storage/Network/Linux/Kubernetes Experts are still rare but people can learn.
- jimbohn 2y agoChina was able to build its own IT technologies thanks to decades of protectionism and smart maneuvers from the party. Europe, being under the US "umbrella", was in an almost impossible position to do so, along with the very poor attitude of European elites, which is one of rent-seeking rather than investment. Regardless of the attitude, I don't see this happening without some form of protectionism, trump sperging out might be the chance of a century to reboot the European military and IT industries.
- mithron 2y agoHmm one other thing - USA is completely English but EU is quite multi-lingual so to be competitive within EU market services need a lot of more efforts.
- apexalpha 2y agoIf you take the triangle between London - Paris - Randstad (Amsterdam+) then we're talking about 60+ million people all connected via <4 hours of high speed rail where essentially everyone can speak English. (Okay maybe in Paris only people under 40 can but in IT it's usually okay imo). You don't need the entire EU, just a chunck of it that can carry the industry like Silicon Valley does for the US.
- pabs3 2y agoThe cloud is an anti-sovereign concept. Maybe Europe doesn't need other people's computers, but their own computers instead.
- invaliduser 2y agoYou are so right about computers, except from Raspberry Pi (UK) not much as been done in Europe. Regarding the eu cloud, it is definitely about sovereignty, specially since the CLOUD Act (H.R. 4943). In the context of the global trade war initiated by the US of A, it also makes sense from a European Union perspective.
- pabs3 2y agoA "cloud" is just other people's computers, so a "sovereign cloud" is an oxymoron; renting other people's computers is in no way sovereign.
- sunshine-o 2y agoI am really questioning that initial premise that "we need an European cloud". Here I roughly understand "we need a few big European hyperscaler with a dozen huge datacenters we can migrate to" because this is the model we understand. But you are fundamentally "fighting the last battle", the wrong battle. The idea of an European cloud has happened several time before and I was once strongly encouraged to select one so I investigated, here are my findings: About 10 years ago all those countries needed a cloud to put their government and sensitive industries on, so public money and contracts was given to friendly corporations. Once the initial chunk of free money ran out a lot of those companies got rid of the business. In France a lot got sold to Orange, the big telco partially owned by the state. I considered it because according to some metrics they had the biggest cloud in Europe. I found out quickly they actually immediately given everything to Huawei. So it was all managed by Huawei but if I remember correctly still hosted on Orange premises. Strangely information about it is more difficult to find now but you can still read about it on third party websites [0]. By the way all of this is GDPR whatever compliant. I just did a quick search and it seems they had to shut it down in 2024 because Huawei became such a radioactive topic. Information is hard to find about it in English. In the end the companies who were forced to select a "sovereign cloud" probably went through hell and moved around several time in the last 10 years. You are told you should/must go on a sovereign cloud, you then end up on a Chinese cloud and you are then kicked out of it. I am not pushing for the big american hyperscalers but be very careful before listening to politicians. - [0] https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/cloud/orange-introduces-public-cloud-service-with-huawei https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/cloud/orange-introduces-...
- kristiandupont 2y ago>But you are fundamentally "fighting the last battle" In your opinion, what is the current/future battle, then?
- sam_lowry_ 2y agoI am not OP but let me give you a Microsoft Office example. For many years, Open Source and businesses tried to make a Microsoft Office competitor by mimicking Microsoft Office. Naturally, all clones were worse than the original. Until Google changed the paradigm and rolled out Google Docs that had a unique feature of online collaboration. Then was the turn of Microsoft to mimic collaboration features of Google Docs in Microsoft Office and be worse at it almost by definition. Another example is S3. For years, businesses tried to have POSIX-capable filesystems seamlessly scale in size and in availability. It took Amazon to roll out a simpler alternative that, by having a smaller set of features, enable so much sought properties of distributed file systems in an efficient and commercially viable way. I think Hetzner Cloud is a sweet spot of a cloud. Instead of reimplementing AWS, EU should standardize of something like it.
- BrandoElFollito 2y agoYou also have Outscale (outscale.com), they are French, located near Paris. They are owned by Dassault Systèmes, a big French company.