But how to get to that European cloud?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

This is not their last, there is another one with funding thats building off the learned lessons of Gaia-X.

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).

> 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.

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?

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?

Why would people need to bend over backwards to build good things?

Touché. This is usually the problem with the "lack of skilled workforce" on the old continent.

This. As someone who works for a US company from Europe, there are no financial alternatives. I need to get my kids through college.

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.

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.

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.

The fire they had didn't help their reputation:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/13/ovh_sbg5_opens/

From the same author about this very subject: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-european-cloud-ladder/

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.

OVH and Hertzner sell lumber, people want furniture.

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.

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 ^

> 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.

> 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.

Even China has an Azure cloud though. I know because I work in it sometimes.

Or subsidies or funding R&D?

Tariffs are a trade disabler, so in general a loose-loose proposition.

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.

There’s plenty of R&D funding in the EU. How would that help get a European cloud?

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.

>But you are fundamentally "fighting the last battle"

In your opinion, what is the current/future battle, then?

You 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.