5 ms·

A coherent European/non-US cloud strategy

45 points by TechTechTech 1y ago

ETH_start 1y ago
Economic development is too complex to be micromanaged from the top down. It also suffers from the kind of trade barriers this plan advocates. Most importantly, all economic development initiatives face an uphill challenge if the underlying macro conditions aren't right. The solution for the UK, the EU and Canada is simple but politically anathema: cut taxes A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in corporate taxes causes even larger declines. The study is quite rigorous too: https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/tax-cuts-and-innovation https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/tax-cuts-and...
- nottorp 1y ago
  This is about software. Companies patent software just to have legal ammunition to fight other companies that patent software. # of patents in software is not a measure of innovation but of how litigious the business environment is. > Helicopter money by supplying large amounts of funds How about "helicopter money" for any EU cloud provider that develops tools to migrate data out of the big US providers? After all, no matter which US cloud provider you choose, you're locked in even wrt to other US cloud providers.
  - raxxorraxor 1y ago
    Patens aren't a good indicator for software, but it can be a metric for the ability to innovate. And this probably can be applied to software, not the patents themselves. Capital collected by the state is just so much less effective.
- TFYS 1y ago
  Does this innovation in the form of patents increase the quality of life in the country? Not everything is fixed by "numbers go up", it matters where those numbers end up. If they end up in the hands of the wealthy, the quality of life for the average person will most likely decrease or stagnate at best. Taxation is at the moment the only realistic way (stronger unions might work as well) to make sure that not all of the gains from innovation go to the already wealthy. The average person in many parts of Europe is more satisfied with their life than the average person in the US and other more business friendly countries, even if the numbers are lower on paper. So even if cutting taxes would help create the kind of innovation the EU needs, it might not be worth the cost. We need to come up with ways to encourage innovation that don't involve giving more wealth and power to those who already have the most.
sam_lowry_ 1y ago
I really don't understand the obsession with AWS-like EU clouds. The EU cloud may win only by shifting the paradigm. Take Microsoft Office as an 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 and they either failed or stuck in their small niche... 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, enables so much sought properties of distributed file systems in an efficient and commercially viable way. Back to EU clouds. Scaleway tried replicating AWS, but they are and will always be a worse AWS than AWS itself. That Microsoft and Google could force their way through is more of a marketing win and just proves my point.
- rightbyte 1y ago
  > I really don't understand the obsession I think it is some strange way to try to push for some sort of pan-european jingoism and/or profit from it.
- benterix 1y ago
  Actually S3 is a good example - it became the new de-facto standard for object storage management, and is used both by open source projects like minio and other clouds alike. This benefits the users/customers as switching from AWS S3 to another solution is a bit less painful. What Amazon did with AWS, offering access to compute, storage and other services, was a good thing, and many EU cloud providers are implementing a small subset of their core services already. It's a good thing, there are no downsides really.
  - bot403 1y ago
    The gem of a point here is that a solid set of core services can go a very long way. You don't need to emulate beanstalk, sagemaker, lightsail, appsync and the like. What you need is CloudFront,vpc, ec2, albs, RDS, S3, ecs, and other base services and many businesses can build a lot of great things.
raxxorraxor 1y ago
Plain and simple, I don't want EU hosted services because the EU isn't a good proprietor. It offers less privacy or speech guarantees than alternative locations. I am an EU citicen but believe the EU is a lobby group with its proponents often idealists in the best or fanatics in the worst case. Both don't allow any criticism and cannot hold this mostly purely executive behemoth to account. It is fundamentally unbalanced construct that needs strong restrictions. And therefore it would also not be the best place to host anything.
- benterix 1y ago
  Good, so go host your stuff wherever you want, it's a free world. We're talking about those people/organizations that made the decision to host in the EU.
  - raxxorraxor 1y ago
    Well, I do host in the EU because of proximity. But it isn't any dream wonderland hosting place compared to other countries. I have zero EU hosting patrionism. Instead, this might be in my country in particular though, it tends to promote bad lawyers to serve notices to people that forgot something in their impressum and similar tiny mistakes. Usually a clear abuse of rights but being right and getting justice are two separate things and that is true for the EU as well. In the near future it will demand age vertification for online content. It just is that paternalistic. Sure, it sucks less than the current UK, an even worse place to host. But maybe just make hosting attractive?
- hyperman1 1y ago
  What's your alternative? The same thing holds for the US services, except we don't have any control. We're basically begging the USA to take our money and fuck us over. Meanwhile, airbus works, GSM works, so Europe is capable of doing this if it wants to. Yes, it has been asleep at the wheel since 2000 or so, but Trump is busy kicking them back awake.
- airpoint 1y ago
  The EU has some of the strongest data protection laws in the world, most notably the GDPR which enforces strict rules on how personal data is collected, stored, and used, with significant penalties for violatiions. Independent watchdogs in each country enforce these rules. Freedom of expression is protected under Article 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. While the EU allows limited restrictions (like hate speech, incitement to violence, etc), so do most democratic jurisdictions, including the US and UK.
hyperman1 1y ago
While I like what he says, I wonder how serious I should take him. Is he part of an always ignored fringe group, or can he push his ideas forward? He sounds progressive, and all over Europe the politics shift to conservatism. Also, I've never heard about him on the news, only here on HN. Politics is unfortunately more about who is talking than what is said.
- sam_lowry_ 1y ago
  There is aversion and even outright hatred of techies among EU bureaucrats, so his influence is probably minimal, but Bert is the most influential Software Engineer in EU circles.
- PeterStuer 1y ago
  Believe it or not, Europe is finally taking sovereignty at least a little bit more serious. It is weird that it took 'Trump' instead of Echelon, Kosovo, Snowden or NordStream just to name a few, but better late than never I guess? The real question is what the EU will do if and when their neo-con buddies are back in the Whitehouse. Will they finally have learned the lesson? As it stands, it seems there's still a non negligible contingent of EU administrators that would be very comfortable with things just getting back to where they were.
delbronski 1y ago
I'd focus on building a modern product that is easier to use, has more transparent pricing and better support, and makes transitioning from AWS/Azure/GCP a breeze. Start simple, and keep iterating. Start with a platform where I can easily deploy my favorite popular web framework and hook it up to a popular SQL database. Most companies just have a web application with a database. Make it super simple to get off App Engine/Elastic, Cloud SQL/RSD GCP/AWS Storage. Get small and midsize customers to switch, and then keep iterating up to big companies. They'll come if the tech and service is solid. It is not that hard to beat the big American cloud providers at this. Their services are bloated, difficult to understand, have poor service, and terrible pricing models. The reason most EU companies don't want to switch now is because alternatives suck even more and it cost too much time and effort.
- bananapub 1y ago
  > I'd focus on building a modern product that is easier to use, has more transparent pricing and better support, and makes transitioning from AWS/Azure/GCP a breeze. Start simple lol AWS or GCP is person-millenia of work, and they aren't even "a breeze" to transition between them.
  - constantcrying 1y ago
    >AWS or GCP is person-millenia of work So is designing and building a passenger aircraft.
  - delbronski 1y ago
    We understand cloud solutions a lot better these days. You would not have to start where they started. Think about all the tooling available today versus what was available in 2006 when AWS launched.
acivitillo 1y ago
I wonder if a managed K8S approach wouldn’t be better? Most Enterprises I know will anyway need to deploy legacy software, so the need for something like K8S never really goes away. The question is if EU Enterprises really need stuff like AWS Sagemaker rather than just spinning up Jupyter Hub on K8S…
- sam_lowry_ 1y ago
  It was a wonder to observe Kubernetes take over the server room infrastructure by storm while morphing from being exactly the wrong tool to manage legacy software to the default option for lift-and-shift cloud migrations. I still wonder how much K8S is a the right platform to deploy database software or weblogic clusters. But people do it on a massive scale.
- raffael_de 1y ago
  > if EU Enterprises really need stuff like AWS Sagemaker The author already makes it clear that replicating for example AWS is not desirable. AWS Sagemaker is basically an app running on EC2 (for Notebooks, training, inference) and S3 for the data. And that's what needs to be set up first: EC2 and S3 (and incidentally also IAM, VPC and SQS). Unsurprisingly those have been also the first services that AWS released.
- sebazzz 1y ago
  > legacy software, so the need for something like K8S never really goes away TIL software running in Docker containers is legacy. What cloud kool-aid are you drinking?
Havoc 1y ago
The various cloud primitives like s3 and cloud functions are making good progress but don’t see anything with the breadth and integration of US clouds appearing any time soon. Then again anyone building on that sort of integration is likely locked in on a provider level never mind country
constantcrying 1y ago
No. There is no relevant strategy which does not answer "who is going to build it". The 11 Points are irrelevant unless you can actually create a real product and create real corporations providing these services. Point 6 "following the Airbus model", would mean a decade(s) long funding run to create a company to compete directly with US tech supremacy. This is what was (for very unclear reasons) rejected in the section before. There currently is zero actual competition with these US companies. EU companies each compete in very small niches (just like EU companies competed as suppliers for Boeing). Unless you create an actual competitor, there is no solution. The belief that you just need standards and many small, decentralized operators is what is making US Tech so dominant. They are dominant because you can go to these US companies and get most of what you need from a single source, this greatly reduces complexity overhead and the need for competent staff. Dealing with myriad of small service providers and their individual differences and compatibility issues is not effective, efficient or competitive. Europe needs an actual competitor, who can actually replace US tech companies. Insisting on the fantasy of decentralization is what is making US dominance certain.
fvdessen 1y ago
I think we should use the airbus model and copy 1 to 1 the AWS platform. Exact same apis, same control panels, same everything, just copy. Start with the most important functions. At least it would be clear what the end goal is and only a matter of funding and execution. It would also make it much easier for existing businesses to migrate away from real aws to euws.
- constantcrying 1y ago
  Airbus did not 1 to 1 copy Boeing. It was a completely new plane and with the Airbus A320 they introduced actually innovative things, like fly by wire. Airbus was also not created from thin air, it was a merger of many aerospace companies.
sam_lowry_ 1y ago
Euro-stack.eu which is referenced in the first paragraph runs on Wordpress.com (Automattic) and is "protected" by Cloudflare. Both are US companies. Moreover, their Letter to EU Commission is written in Microsoft Word and converted to PDF using Adobe software. For every step, they preferred US products. Nothing surprising, the text author is a random young lady from UK, if we trust the document properties. How pathetic (
PeterStuer 1y ago
In the "Coherent Strategy" I miss a point 12 that says: European Digital Service companies should be stimulated and anchored in the EU. If deemed strategic, regulation should prevent non-EU ownership participation. As the past has shown, it's too easy for the printers of the 'world reserve currency' to just scoop up any emerging company with what is basically infinite monopoly money.
pabs3 1y ago
Self-hosted open hardware and open source software seems like a better option than the other people's hardware/software in a cloud.

45 points by TechTechTech 1y ago

Economic development is too complex to be micromanaged from the top down. It also suffers from the kind of trade barriers this plan advocates. Most importantly, all economic development initiatives face an uphill challenge if the underlying macro conditions aren't right. The solution for the UK, the EU and Canada is simple but politically anathema: cut taxes A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in corporate taxes causes even larger declines. The study is quite rigorous too: https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/tax-cuts-and-innovation https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/tax-cuts-and...

nottorp 1y ago
This is about software. Companies patent software just to have legal ammunition to fight other companies that patent software. # of patents in software is not a measure of innovation but of how litigious the business environment is. > Helicopter money by supplying large amounts of funds How about "helicopter money" for any EU cloud provider that develops tools to migrate data out of the big US providers? After all, no matter which US cloud provider you choose, you're locked in even wrt to other US cloud providers.
- raxxorraxor 1y ago
  Patens aren't a good indicator for software, but it can be a metric for the ability to innovate. And this probably can be applied to software, not the patents themselves. Capital collected by the state is just so much less effective.
TFYS 1y ago
Does this innovation in the form of patents increase the quality of life in the country? Not everything is fixed by "numbers go up", it matters where those numbers end up. If they end up in the hands of the wealthy, the quality of life for the average person will most likely decrease or stagnate at best. Taxation is at the moment the only realistic way (stronger unions might work as well) to make sure that not all of the gains from innovation go to the already wealthy. The average person in many parts of Europe is more satisfied with their life than the average person in the US and other more business friendly countries, even if the numbers are lower on paper. So even if cutting taxes would help create the kind of innovation the EU needs, it might not be worth the cost. We need to come up with ways to encourage innovation that don't involve giving more wealth and power to those who already have the most.

sam_lowry_ 1y ago

I really don't understand the obsession with AWS-like EU clouds. The EU cloud may win only by shifting the paradigm. Take Microsoft Office as an 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 and they either failed or stuck in their small niche... 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, enables so much sought properties of distributed file systems in an efficient and commercially viable way. Back to EU clouds. Scaleway tried replicating AWS, but they are and will always be a worse AWS than AWS itself. That Microsoft and Google could force their way through is more of a marketing win and just proves my point.

rightbyte 1y ago
> I really don't understand the obsession I think it is some strange way to try to push for some sort of pan-european jingoism and/or profit from it.
benterix 1y ago
Actually S3 is a good example - it became the new de-facto standard for object storage management, and is used both by open source projects like minio and other clouds alike. This benefits the users/customers as switching from AWS S3 to another solution is a bit less painful. What Amazon did with AWS, offering access to compute, storage and other services, was a good thing, and many EU cloud providers are implementing a small subset of their core services already. It's a good thing, there are no downsides really.
- bot403 1y ago
  The gem of a point here is that a solid set of core services can go a very long way. You don't need to emulate beanstalk, sagemaker, lightsail, appsync and the like. What you need is CloudFront,vpc, ec2, albs, RDS, S3, ecs, and other base services and many businesses can build a lot of great things.

raxxorraxor 1y ago

Plain and simple, I don't want EU hosted services because the EU isn't a good proprietor. It offers less privacy or speech guarantees than alternative locations. I am an EU citicen but believe the EU is a lobby group with its proponents often idealists in the best or fanatics in the worst case. Both don't allow any criticism and cannot hold this mostly purely executive behemoth to account. It is fundamentally unbalanced construct that needs strong restrictions. And therefore it would also not be the best place to host anything.

benterix 1y ago
Good, so go host your stuff wherever you want, it's a free world. We're talking about those people/organizations that made the decision to host in the EU.
- raxxorraxor 1y ago
  Well, I do host in the EU because of proximity. But it isn't any dream wonderland hosting place compared to other countries. I have zero EU hosting patrionism. Instead, this might be in my country in particular though, it tends to promote bad lawyers to serve notices to people that forgot something in their impressum and similar tiny mistakes. Usually a clear abuse of rights but being right and getting justice are two separate things and that is true for the EU as well. In the near future it will demand age vertification for online content. It just is that paternalistic. Sure, it sucks less than the current UK, an even worse place to host. But maybe just make hosting attractive?
hyperman1 1y ago
What's your alternative? The same thing holds for the US services, except we don't have any control. We're basically begging the USA to take our money and fuck us over. Meanwhile, airbus works, GSM works, so Europe is capable of doing this if it wants to. Yes, it has been asleep at the wheel since 2000 or so, but Trump is busy kicking them back awake.
airpoint 1y ago
The EU has some of the strongest data protection laws in the world, most notably the GDPR which enforces strict rules on how personal data is collected, stored, and used, with significant penalties for violatiions. Independent watchdogs in each country enforce these rules. Freedom of expression is protected under Article 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. While the EU allows limited restrictions (like hate speech, incitement to violence, etc), so do most democratic jurisdictions, including the US and UK.

hyperman1 1y ago

While I like what he says, I wonder how serious I should take him. Is he part of an always ignored fringe group, or can he push his ideas forward? He sounds progressive, and all over Europe the politics shift to conservatism. Also, I've never heard about him on the news, only here on HN. Politics is unfortunately more about who is talking than what is said.

sam_lowry_ 1y ago
There is aversion and even outright hatred of techies among EU bureaucrats, so his influence is probably minimal, but Bert is the most influential Software Engineer in EU circles.
PeterStuer 1y ago
Believe it or not, Europe is finally taking sovereignty at least a little bit more serious. It is weird that it took 'Trump' instead of Echelon, Kosovo, Snowden or NordStream just to name a few, but better late than never I guess? The real question is what the EU will do if and when their neo-con buddies are back in the Whitehouse. Will they finally have learned the lesson? As it stands, it seems there's still a non negligible contingent of EU administrators that would be very comfortable with things just getting back to where they were.

delbronski 1y ago

I'd focus on building a modern product that is easier to use, has more transparent pricing and better support, and makes transitioning from AWS/Azure/GCP a breeze. Start simple, and keep iterating. Start with a platform where I can easily deploy my favorite popular web framework and hook it up to a popular SQL database. Most companies just have a web application with a database. Make it super simple to get off App Engine/Elastic, Cloud SQL/RSD GCP/AWS Storage. Get small and midsize customers to switch, and then keep iterating up to big companies. They'll come if the tech and service is solid. It is not that hard to beat the big American cloud providers at this. Their services are bloated, difficult to understand, have poor service, and terrible pricing models. The reason most EU companies don't want to switch now is because alternatives suck even more and it cost too much time and effort.

bananapub 1y ago
> I'd focus on building a modern product that is easier to use, has more transparent pricing and better support, and makes transitioning from AWS/Azure/GCP a breeze. Start simple lol AWS or GCP is person-millenia of work, and they aren't even "a breeze" to transition between them.
- constantcrying 1y ago
  >AWS or GCP is person-millenia of work So is designing and building a passenger aircraft.
- delbronski 1y ago
  We understand cloud solutions a lot better these days. You would not have to start where they started. Think about all the tooling available today versus what was available in 2006 when AWS launched.

acivitillo 1y ago

I wonder if a managed K8S approach wouldn’t be better? Most Enterprises I know will anyway need to deploy legacy software, so the need for something like K8S never really goes away. The question is if EU Enterprises really need stuff like AWS Sagemaker rather than just spinning up Jupyter Hub on K8S…

sam_lowry_ 1y ago
It was a wonder to observe Kubernetes take over the server room infrastructure by storm while morphing from being exactly the wrong tool to manage legacy software to the default option for lift-and-shift cloud migrations. I still wonder how much K8S is a the right platform to deploy database software or weblogic clusters. But people do it on a massive scale.
raffael_de 1y ago
> if EU Enterprises really need stuff like AWS Sagemaker The author already makes it clear that replicating for example AWS is not desirable. AWS Sagemaker is basically an app running on EC2 (for Notebooks, training, inference) and S3 for the data. And that's what needs to be set up first: EC2 and S3 (and incidentally also IAM, VPC and SQS). Unsurprisingly those have been also the first services that AWS released.
sebazzz 1y ago
> legacy software, so the need for something like K8S never really goes away TIL software running in Docker containers is legacy. What cloud kool-aid are you drinking?

Havoc 1y ago

The various cloud primitives like s3 and cloud functions are making good progress but don’t see anything with the breadth and integration of US clouds appearing any time soon. Then again anyone building on that sort of integration is likely locked in on a provider level never mind country

constantcrying 1y ago

No. There is no relevant strategy which does not answer "who is going to build it". The 11 Points are irrelevant unless you can actually create a real product and create real corporations providing these services. Point 6 "following the Airbus model", would mean a decade(s) long funding run to create a company to compete directly with US tech supremacy. This is what was (for very unclear reasons) rejected in the section before. There currently is zero actual competition with these US companies. EU companies each compete in very small niches (just like EU companies competed as suppliers for Boeing). Unless you create an actual competitor, there is no solution. The belief that you just need standards and many small, decentralized operators is what is making US Tech so dominant. They are dominant because you can go to these US companies and get most of what you need from a single source, this greatly reduces complexity overhead and the need for competent staff. Dealing with myriad of small service providers and their individual differences and compatibility issues is not effective, efficient or competitive. Europe needs an actual competitor, who can actually replace US tech companies. Insisting on the fantasy of decentralization is what is making US dominance certain.

fvdessen 1y ago

I think we should use the airbus model and copy 1 to 1 the AWS platform. Exact same apis, same control panels, same everything, just copy. Start with the most important functions. At least it would be clear what the end goal is and only a matter of funding and execution. It would also make it much easier for existing businesses to migrate away from real aws to euws.

constantcrying 1y ago
Airbus did not 1 to 1 copy Boeing. It was a completely new plane and with the Airbus A320 they introduced actually innovative things, like fly by wire. Airbus was also not created from thin air, it was a merger of many aerospace companies.

sam_lowry_ 1y ago

Euro-stack.eu which is referenced in the first paragraph runs on Wordpress.com (Automattic) and is "protected" by Cloudflare. Both are US companies. Moreover, their Letter to EU Commission is written in Microsoft Word and converted to PDF using Adobe software. For every step, they preferred US products. Nothing surprising, the text author is a random young lady from UK, if we trust the document properties. How pathetic (

PeterStuer 1y ago

In the "Coherent Strategy" I miss a point 12 that says: European Digital Service companies should be stimulated and anchored in the EU. If deemed strategic, regulation should prevent non-EU ownership participation. As the past has shown, it's too easy for the printers of the 'world reserve currency' to just scoop up any emerging company with what is basically infinite monopoly money.

pabs3 1y ago

Self-hosted open hardware and open source software seems like a better option than the other people's hardware/software in a cloud.