But how to get to that European cloud?
175 comments
·March 17, 2025omnimus
p_v_doom
Also 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.
dataking
I 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-dis...
sam_lowry_
Unfortunately Gaia-X has been set up and run by the wrong kind of people.
Look at this recent job ad for a Senior Software Developer / Tech Lead: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4181090679
AFAIU it's written by the CTO and see this gem:
" Innovation Mindset: Willingness to explore new technologies – especially related to trust frameworks and associated standards –, staying ahead (no kidding!) of main-stream industry trends (This is a real requirement, not ChatGPT – just look into our GitLab repos!)."
I checked their public GitLab and it's puny. Moreover, I suspect based on the use of bold and bullet points that the job description itself went through ChatGPT.
ofrzeta
It's more or less covert subsidies for the usual suspects. In Germany that means the like of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Atos, Bosch, Deutsche Telekom, SAP, BMW and Siemens get some millions (and by "some" I mean around 200 million euro). If there's no outcome, like in the GAIA-X case, it's just bad luck for the taxpayer.
cadamsdotcom
Disagreements 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
At 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.
grumpy-de-sre
Without protection, a EU hyperscaler will never emerge. It's not that any hypothetical future EU hyperscaler would be an inherently less competitive. It's just plain old first mover advantage. Cloud computing is a VERY sticky good, and once folks got on AWS/Azure no matter how good your product is there's no way larger customers are going to migrate off to some "risky" startup (thus keeping scale small).
Source: I worked on a sovereign cloud PaaS in Germany. Admittedly the project was a disaster, hiring talent in the infrastructure space here is really tough. Probably mostly due to a lack of opportunities to acquire experience domestically and noncompetitive wages limiting migration of those with experience.
Gaia-X is a total dumpster fire though, perfect example of what's wrong with the EU. All the money was spent paying bureaucrats, consults, and standards committee folks to architecture astronaut and design by committee sovereign cloud "standards" bullshit bingo. None of the money went to the engineers.
We should really copy the Chinese approach here, straight out clone a subset of the best/most popular parts of AWS/Azure/GCP. I'm open to contracting opportunities in this space BTW (email in profile).
realusername
I'm expecting that to happen. Realistically, the US tech companies are the very first target in line in a market war.
They are paying very low taxes in the EU, contributing enormously on the US economy and are close to the president. That has to be the biggest target.
And the US can't even use the EU defense card anymore to defend them as Trump wasted it with his Russian appeasement.
I'd rate this probability at 50% at least.
Aeolun
If 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 :)
kichimi
This is not their last, there is another one with funding thats building off the learned lessons of Gaia-X.
DeathArrow
I 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.
Wilder7977
Policies are often used to create markets or - like in this case is propose - to create that demand. The article makes the argument that free market failed to deliver in this sector in Europe. One of the explanations is that once you lag behind competitors, if policies don't force to value specific parameters that can be fulfilled only by other competitors, no competitors will join the market because nobody is going to choose them. So the author argues for example to impose regulation for public tenders such as "must be subject to only EU laws". This creates a demand, which is not currently matching any offer in the market and creates market incentives for new players to compete. So regulations can absolutely work where "free" market fails (quotes because even the big 3 are/were pumped full of money by government/defense contracts).
threeseed
> 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
>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.
eesmith
> 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.
scarby2
Because 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
Free markets like to make money for capital holders, and tend towards a monopoly or oligopoly as that maximizes profit extraction.
Name a free market where there is an economy of scale and network effect, which does not tend towards monopoly or oligopoly.
More fundamentally, if (say) Germany wants to move all of its government operations off of US-based IT, should it wait until the market has provided a solution? Or should it do like all governments have always done, and change the marketplace?
Nor is this unique to governments. Some of my clients require me to agree to their ethical practices, like "no child labor." They are using their purchasing power to change the marketplace.
Why do the countries with higher taxes and government regulations and policies over health care have better overall health outcomes than those with lower taxes and regulations?
There is a demand for clean beaches. Where is the free market for pollution control?
mike_hearn
The topic we're discussing would seem to undermine your claim, as cloud is neither a monopoly nor an oligopoly despite having scale and network effects.
eesmith
Could you explain then how so many European governments ended up one of a handful of US clouds (Amazon, Microsoft and Google)?
Almost reason I can think of comes down to scaling or network effects.
I say "almost" because I've thought of a couple more:
- it's already a Microsoft shop and it's hard to change? Lock-in effect.
- you never get fired for choosing IBM, err, AWS? I don't have a name for this effect, though it seems related to scaling.
Note that "monopoly" does not mean there is only a single provider. "De Beers controlled 80% to 85% of rough diamond distribution and was considered a monopoly" during the 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers
This is because I'm using the legal definition of monopoly, not the economics one. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
> In economics, a monopoly is a single seller. In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises.
redrove
The 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.
poisonborz
This misunderstanding about EU/US salaries is so baffling to me, how this opinion can come up still in every EU conversation. Do people really just look at $$$ without a second of thought of how governments/taxation works and what they get for that salary/taxes?
terhechte
People end up thinking this, but they're just looking at tech roles. However, the difference becomes clear when you compare other jobs. In tech, the US pays way more than Europe, for other jobs, they don't. Take teachers, for example:
- Median Salary in USA: $~58k [1]
- Median Salary in Berlin: 35k EUR [2]
So while there is a difference, it is by far not as huge a gap as in tech where Europe pays ~60-70k (very and some countries, e.g. Spain or Portugal way less) and in the US 200k-300k are not unusual.
The difference is that US companies understand the huge value creation potential of tech jobs (especially over the past 2 decades) whereas most european companies think value creation comes from having middle aged balding managers.
[1]: https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/public-scho... [2]: https://worldsalaries.com/average-teacher-salary-in-berlin/g...
rahkiin
It is unclear to me if that salary includes pension, employer taxes, etc. Comparing raw values also does not put job value into view: you cannot be fired on the spot. Healthcare cost almost nothing compared to the US due to some of those taxes. You can have sick-leave thay is paid for multiple years or parental leave for a year (in Germany). All of that while your employer keeps paying. This pushes salary down as risk for employers goes up, but life quality and happiness can also increase across the workforce.
All-in-all super hard to compare salaries, even though having a 200k salary in the Netherlands I would not say no to of course
menaerus
There are 44 countries in Europe. What makes you think that your experience of getting the most of your government/taxation whatever you want to call it matches the experience of any other European country government/system?
poisonborz
If you do a comparison of EU/US I guess everyone naturally thinks of something like San Francisco/Berlin and not Bucharest.
The base logic does match though. The execution is very country-dependent.
rcarmo
The gap is _huge_ and goes way beyond having different government taxation.
CorrectHorseBat
Why would people need to bend over backwards to build good things?
redrove
Because anyone that ever built anything worthwhile in this field knows you have to give it your all, when starting out especially.
Nobody gives their all for 5k/mo.
CorrectHorseBat
I kinda disagree on both accounts. Many many people give their all for less than that. More money will get you better (foreign) talent, but the correlation between pay and effort is much lower.
I work in the EU for an American company. The consensus here is Americans work more, but not harder. We deliver better work in less time.
The edge Americans have is a can do attitude and not being afraid of failure.
ithkuil
Especially if more than half of that goes into taxes
yread
give it your all is good way to a burnout. If you want to build a "cloud" it's gonna be 5+ yrs, a marathon not a sprint, you need to work sustainably
odiroot
Touché. This is usually the problem with the "lack of skilled workforce" on the old continent.
rcarmo
This. As someone who works for a US company from Europe, there are no financial alternatives. I need to get my kids through college.
omnimus
I wonder how other europeans get their kids through collage? Hmm maybe because its super cheap compared to US?
Please do work for US company from Europe thats great. Just lets not put it on college and your kids.
pm3003
They just glue them together I guess.
poisonborz
Which EU country has comparable tuition fees to the US? Do yor kids go to some UK private university?
menaerus
Who's in the better position? Me completing a Masters degree in the EU, spending anywhere between 10k and 20k EUR, and landing a job that pays 30k EUR/year and living a pipe dream of getting myself salaried with 100k EUR, and only perhaps after 10-15 years of continous effort (and luck). Or is it someone in the States who needs to spend as much as 5x more for the same level of degree (but not education and opportunities!) - but in the very first year of employment gets 100k per year and has a vast more opportunities to build their careers up?
rcarmo
Do you think that is just about tuition?
apexalpha
I don't know why they don't just hire the people who built Azure / AWS / GCP etc...
If you offer these people a good salary, tax cut and a EU passport after 4 years I suspect many will be open to move to London / Paris / Amsterdam for a few years.
Subsidise the high speed train between all these cities for 5 years, offer crosscountry startup cash and investment and you might just end up with a functioning IT sector in Europe.
The triangle London / Paris / Randstad really isn't much further apart than many Sillicon Valley HQs.
redrove
The assumption that those are the only people that are able to build something like that is simply false.
There's plenty of talent around, it just needs capital.
menaerus
It's not false. Those are the people who have already proven that they have the necessary experience to build those products so the rate of success is simply much higher rather than seeking the talent elsewhere. Startups and US companies apply this strategy all the time - you want success, poach the good people from competing companies.
I think people outside the domain often underestimate the complexity of Internet-scale infrastructure software and hardware. You don't find such challenges very easily elsewhere so simply paying more money to random engineer doesn't stand more chance than paying the same money to already established engineer in that domain.
apexalpha
Why reinvent the wheel?
When US companies chase a competitor they always just poach people directly.
No one is saying those are the only people who could do it.
But they have experience and hiring the senior people directly would greatly speed up the process in Europe I think.
yieldcrv
The 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
Perhaps 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
No 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
redrove
Well, I'm of the opinion that one of the other blockers of major EU growth is the lack of a singular financial market; instead of one market like the USA, we have 27 markets. Twenty seven different sets regulations that all need to go out the window; exchanges in the double digits, most of which should shut down.
This balkanization will never lead to a growth-oriented modern financial system.
Europe needs to centralize capital.
robert_dipaolo
Is OVH not a European cloud provider? There are also smaller players like Hetzner.
sam_lowry_
Hetzner is not small, I would say it's several times bigger than OVH in turnover, but this is just a guess based on their perceived markets and market share in those markets.
The cloud offered by Hetzner is the perfect sweet spot for me, but the vast majority of IT crowd and non-IT decision makers in EU want AWS-like.
But all EU alternatives that mimick AWS will be worse than the alternative.
Pretty much like wvery MS Word copycat was worse... until Google Docs shifted the paradygm.
TiredOfLife
OVH is larger. They occasionally burn down a datacenter or two and are still going.
paulccci
Hetzner had revenues of €470m in 2022 (last available). It was €866m for OVH over the same period.
Source: S&P CapitalIQ
pabs3
The fire they had didn't help their reputation:
invaliduser
OVH (french) is very well known and I like them a lot. Used them for domains a lot, because they are very cheap and their management is nice. I also like very much ScaleWay (french also) for price and quality of service, have used them for years on my startup, can highly recommend. Also heard a lot of good things about Infomaniak (swiss), but never used them myself.
Would love to hear about european cloud providers with comments from users.
apexalpha
OVH and Hertzner sell lumber, people want furniture.
Vinnl
From the same author about this very subject: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-european-cloud-ladder/
Vinnl
Ah actually, more from today: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/dear-hosting-providers-you...
realusername
They 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
I wouldn’t describe Google nor Microsofts products as ”polished”. Humongous maybe?
blablabla123
Yes, 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
Meanwhile AWS' popularity was largely driven by EC2 servers which are VPS.
Also they are literally called OVHcloud...
everfrustrated
Calling 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.
rsynnott
> The cloud side isn't polished enough to pretend to be a cloud provider.
I mean, see Azure and Google Cloud a few years back. For quite a while the market was AWS, and also some joke services which nobody who wasn't required to used (notoriously, in 2012 Azure was substantially entirely down for _over a day_ due to a leap day).
jimbohn
China 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.
BlackFly
If 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.
rsynnott
See https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/aws/aws-plans-to-invest-7-8-...
Of course, the question is very much how the courts will see ^
mike_hearn
> They could apply Chinese policy and require foreign cloud corporations to have locally owned partners that will own the technology produced locally.
This feels like a misunderstanding of the situation. China used that tactic in cases where the Chinese people didn't know how to how to build or do a thing, and it would have taken a long time to rediscover. Saudi Arabia uses the same tactic for the same reasons.
Europe is full of people who know how to build a big cloud. It's not easy, and there's certainly learning-by-doing required, but as the author observes many of the people who work on the US clouds are from Europe or India or still live there. The knowledge transfer has been happening continuously since the start and in both directions.
The reason Europe hasn't produced a competitor on the scale of AWS is simply because that business model is the exclusive preserve of already large tech companies. AWS, Azure, GCP and Oracle Cloud are all the products of huge firms that already had tens of thousands of software engineers and (with the exception of AWS) pre-existing very profitable businesses. They could afford to sink vast sums of treasure into buildouts well ahead of demand, and subsidize their clouds using the other businesses until they had been able to catch up with Amazon. In addition, they all had large pre-existing tech ecosystems to leverage.
European countries have failed to produce tech companies on that scale for all sorts of well analyzed reasons. Moaning about cloud specifically is of no use, it's just a symptom not a cause. The causes meanwhile are the usual grab bag of uncompetitive compensation (a symptom of being poor, it's a feedback loop), bad laws that retard innovation and yet which never get fixed (due to the prevalence of governments that are explicitly suspicious of companies being successful), and finally the culture of US firms which is very globalist, collaborative and internally open, making them pleasant places to work for the people in Europe who have the right skills.
Look at it this way - would a skilled engineer rather work on AWS, having global impact under a global brand selling to every kind of customer imaginable and justifying its existence through technical innovation, or on an explicitly parochial "Eurocloud" whose highest dream is merely cloning what AWS was ten years ago, and which exists for no better reason than some domestic politicians being unwilling to resolve their differences with one specific US administration?
It's just a fundamentally unappealing proposition even if pay was good, therefore, it won't happen.
mongol
> have locally owned partners that will own the technology produced locally
This may be the way to go. It seems common in countries like China, India, Brazil, ME / Gulf countries.
locusofself
Even China has an Azure cloud though. I know because I work in it sometimes.
fifilura
Or subsidies or funding R&D?
Tariffs are a trade disabler, so in general a loose-loose proposition.
menaerus
Even if you manage to build the product (R&D) now you have to incentivize the private sector and governments to switch to the EU product. There's only few options of making this happen and tariffs could be one of them. Natural transition won't happen for many reasons.
wqaatwt
Tariffs 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
> 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.
DrNosferatu
Think further: we need a European DARPA.
woodson
There’s plenty of R&D funding in the EU. How would that help get a European cloud?
DrNosferatu
There’s nothing in the EU quite like DARPA: oriented to long term, fundamental, high risk, high reward projects.
Furthermore, this European DARPA would be an organization with its own physical structure - its own labs. Say, with each different discipline in a different EU country.
woodson
Ok, so very different from DARPA (the original) then.
Look into EU HORIZON programs.
menaerus
The 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.
jononor
You 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?
rapsey
The 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.
DrFalkyn
Cloud 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
Cloud 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.
Aeolun
I 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.
sunshine-o
I 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-...
sam_lowry_
You have a French perspective, but EU is big and varied.
Here in Belgium we do have our own Government Cloud which, while hosted using Broadcom (VMWare) and IBM (RedHat Openshift) software is locally owned and controlled.
Now, this "cloud" is a misnomer. It is not as automated as AWS. I would rather call it a government hosting provider, but it's doing its job.
sunshine-o
> Now, this "cloud" is a misnomer
Absolutely.
I have seen a lot and usually the smaller the better.
I remember the Flemish gov (7M people so quite small) was doing great in this domain. France where everything needs to be centralised, big and controlled is doing terrible I guess.
This is why starting the discussion with the concept of "EU" and "Cloud" is wrong. We do not need an aircraft carrier, we need a lot of drones.
sam_lowry_
> we need a lot of drones.
I agree but for a slightly different reason. EU cloud is not about chasing AWS or GCP or Azure scale and complexity. It's about hosting our businesses and most importantly governments locally.
Thus, "cloud" is not an objective but a means to a goal.
kristiandupont
>But you are fundamentally "fighting the last battle"
In your opinion, what is the current/future battle, then?
sunshine-o
It seems we are pushed into major conflicts and disruptions so we have to decentralise it as much as possible.
The current model is very awkward, we have been pushed into those very centralised, hyperscale solution that most businesses and individual do not really need. Most businesses do not really need much to do their job.
We are probably gonna have major connectivity disruptions on of those days or what happened when your Hertzner or Orange/Huawei datacenter is down? And I know they have "better security" but if we are attacked they are gonna be taken down anyway.
We do not wanna look at what a major cyber disruption would do to our societies. I believe just the consequences on the electricity grid and hospitals would make us wave the white flags in a few weeks.
You wanna own your hardware because if there are disruptions it is gonna be hard to get your hand on some because of supply, logistics or just monetary disruptions.
How hard is it technically to setup something like Ubuntu Microcloud [0] for your own use or local businesses you provide that service for?
From my experience the biggest risk and headache is all those EU regulations like the EU Cyper resilience Act and in some cases energy costs.
So when Ursula tell you Europe needs to prepare for war and authorise/push your country to go into even more debt so her friends can build expensive tanks that will never see a battle it is ridiculous.
They should focus on removing all the obstacle to resilience they setup themselves, find a way to reduce energy costs (pretty hard now...) and maybe encourage moving out of those big tech cloud (starting by doing it themselves).
kristiandupont
>It seems we are pushed into major conflicts
>so her friends can build expensive tanks that will never see a battle
I am not sure how you consolidate the two statements. It seems to me that there is a very real risk of armed conflict in Europe over the next decade.
sam_lowry_
I 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.
throwawayFanta
This 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... [1] https://aws.amazon.com/federal/top-secret-cloud/
zoul
The 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
An 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.
brabel
> An EU sovereign cloud by Amazon though would be built in the EU and staffed by EU employees though.
At that point, why is Amazon needed? Don't we really have the expertise and capital to do this in Europe without Amazon (or Google, MSFT)? I somehow doubt that very much.
cheeseface
All proprietary software that runs in the cloud would vanish.
jajko
Make all tech knowledge available, spin it into another completely separate company with 0 ties to the parent and then we can actually start talking. Rest is fluff and PR.
grumpy-de-sre
Did you know alibaba cloud has a GDPR compliant datacenter in frankfurt [1].
1. https://www.alibabacloud.com/en/press-room/alibaba-cloud-lau...
kortilla
> top secret (lol) cloud [1]
Not sure what the “lol” is for there. They aren’t saying the cloud is top secret. It’s qualified to work with top secret data.
The 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.