89 replies
1d1h
Gaia-X is a disaster. The article misrepresents it. Gaia-X is not a framework for what a European cloud should look like. This would be useful.
In beautiful EU bureaucratic style It's a framework for how to talk about how a European Cloud could look like.
It's not about technical standards. It's about how we can talk about how we can think of maybe eventually deciding on how we can come up with standards that might one day lead to talk about implementations.
It represents to me everything that is wrong with the EU today. A bureaucratic monster that can't decide how to talk about things or come to any form of alignment.
Wow, 5 years later and what have they actually accomplished? Look at the milestones section: https://gaia-x.eu/what-is-gaia-x/about-gaia-x/
This is too funny.
What's to stop an American cloud hyperscaler from creating a "properly patriated" subsidiary that it simply licenses the tech to? Wouldn't that side step the "sovereign" protectionism?
An American company would run circles around this mess.
That's exactly what is going on nowadays, anyway. In Poland we have Chmura Krajowa (national cloud), aimed at public, non profit and finance companies. It's basically more controlled local Azure and GPC region.
In Polish people don't use Cloud but Chmura?
It depends. If we’re talking about e.g. GCP we use “cloud”, but Chmura Krajowa is a Polish product and it has a Polish name, so we use “chmura”. We basically use the original name in this context.
Interesting. In Germany government uses the word cloud . Not Wolke. TIL something new.
Both, but chmura is a non-controvertial and easy translation.
In Hungarian the people I know use felhő and not cloud. I don’t know what they say in actual IT circles but to my ears “cloud” sounds very awkward if stuck in a Hungarian sentence.
https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felh%C5%91alap%C3%BA_sz%C3%A1m...
Deutsche Telekom hosted Microsoft Office 365 for some years in Germany as a German cloud offering.
I think this was the press release: https://www.telekom.com/de/medien/medieninformationen/detail...
This was a Microsoft 365 cloud hosted and operated by Deutsche Telekom in Germany. It was more expensive than the global version and had less features. It often took some years till new features were introduced.
They stopped this offering some years ago, I think they did not get as many customers as they expected, most of the German customers used the global version.
Open Telekom Cloud is a whitelabeled AWS, so they are still doing this, but with other technologies.
I’ve used it, it’s a rebranded openstack, not aws.
They built it on OpenStack as a clone of AWS offerings
And it’s not actually too far off; couple rough edges, managed k8s is shit but everything mostly works (rds, ec2, s3, iam, ebs etc)
This press release from 2020 says Open Telekom Cloud is from Software and Hardware from Huawei.
https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sich...
Do you have any source that they switched to AWS?
Google is doing this. German and French companies are building a datacenter to GCP standards, will license the code and run essentially whitelabel GCP under full jurisdiction of the EU company. Google can only push updates with their approval and has no visibility into the operations.
https://cloud.google.com/t-systems-sovereign-cloud?hl=en
Isn't this how all the hyperscalers already run in China?
Yes. Though they increasingly own management as well.
At this point Azure in China and AWS in China is a reskin around Tencent Cloud.
This is actually quite funny. A sovereign cloud that they have no f-ing clue how to maintain without the mothership.
They get documentation and playbooks (which are pretty good), source code access, and of course direct channel to the "mothership" engineers for support.
I'm sure early days will be painful but there is no reason for this not to work.
They might if there was a market for it. But who wants to pay a premium to be free of US influence? America hasn’t gone full-on Gilead yet.
"Gilead" ?
Republic of Gilead - fictional future fundamentalist theocracy version of the USofA
https://the-handmaids-tale.fandom.com/wiki/Republic_of_Gilea...
Unfortunately, every democracy is one election away from Gilead.
But then they'd have to obey laws and pay taxes and who wants that.
The americans are already on this path https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-european-s....
Nothing. Amazon already does that in China, their subsidiary licenses the tech and support services from the US company.
Or just plain old buy out any EU company that threathens to become successful with free reserve currency monopoly money.
Maybe you are misunderstanding the gravity of this problem. Thanks to US Cloud Act and the Patriot Act and similar acts, there is no way any US citizen or any US company may EVER be involved in such projects. It's completely legal for the US to rely on extraterritorial jurisdiction leveraging any US companies and US citizens they have access to. But on the other hand, everyone else on out there will want to avoid that, so the only way to achieve that is to avoid involving any US citizens or companies for such sovereign projects. Google will not be able to solve it via subsidiaries, and no nice promises from Amazon, MS etc. will ever change it. Data sovereignity means all this. This will probably escalate a lot more, it might involve the financial infrastructure used (SWIFT) or even currency used in the process.
They produced a few fluffy documents in 2022 and then nothing happened.
They repurposed the word milestone to mean agenda. It's just a list of events they're organizing. Because they have no actual milestones or goals.
I've joined some large EU efforts in the past, and it's always like this. Lots of different parties involved focused on producing tons of absurd documents, and nothing else. Some have good intentions, but it doesn't matter. There's a great thread on X now discussing the same topic:
"25 years ago each major US company had a German and/or French equivalent. Today equivalents of US tech giants are in China and Europe is on its way to become an open-air museum. What happened?" https://x.com/MichaelAArouet/status/1827588190342979934
Some of the top replies:
"Bureaucracy, Regulation, Aversion to Innovation, Green myth of degrowth etc happened"
[...] Europe’s challenges are significant, but not insurmountable. To regain its edge, Europe will need to foster a more dynamic business environment, streamline regulations, and encourage risk-taking in its startup culture. Without these changes, Europe may continue to fall behind, watching as the U.S. and China shape the future of technology.
The EU has a lot of talent, but it lacks good leadership and good priorities.
Doesn’t feel like that looking at Airbus and Boeing .
Only if you ignore the A380 debacle, or the bloat that A400 is. And then there is this - [0]
Boeing makes the comparison easy for Airbus.
[0]- https://spacenews.com/airbus-takes-a-charge-of-nearly-1-bill...
OP is EU has become an open air museum and all the good companies are now either American or Chinese.
What else to compare against this claim ?
Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry. It is not just aerospace, even auto is still über competitive, European manufactures are on par or perhaps better than anything Ford and GM have to offer. I am sure Europeans can come with good examples for every bad one.
The point it is easy to paint a narrative however reality is lot more complex and doesn't match with sweeping generalization .
IMHO, Airbus is a good counterexample of how EU could do things better.
It's not perfect, but it's competitive and successful. Lots of countries contributed to its success, leaving (most) political issues aside.
Tech companies are getting insanely large valuations (I work in tech, and I think they're absurd). Europe doesn't have many large public tech companies, therefore Europe looks bad in terms of the "industries of the future"
Plus a bunch of angry USians really irritated by the anti-trust stuff the EU has been doing (DMA etc).
In a finite resources world, with unsustainable levels of pollution and soon of climate change, I don’t understand why much more of EU regulation and enforcement resources are not spent towards mandatory hardware re-use. All computer vendors know 90% of IT users never even scratch the surface of computational power and functionalities.
As for Gaia-X itself, governments are always on the hunt for programs to justify their spending of tax and debt money. Favorable outcome is the spending itself as a mean to subsidize this and that group.
Beliefs like these are common in Europe and I absolutely despise them. Inefficiencies in IT exist for boring reasons like requirements that are way too complex or that keep changing, internal politics, and inexperience. If you add more regulations that don't move the needle you just get more politics, more middle men that seek to profit from the regulatory capture (advisors, consultants, resellers), and you distract industry from focusing on those things that matter most.
Complexity is the enemy of progress. IT systems fail when they attempt to codify contradictory bureaucratic processes that make no sense. The solution is to simplify. Businesses that refuse to simplify get eaten by hungry startups, and deservedly so. What do you think will happen to a continent that refuses to simplify?
Here is what happened: fear. Fear of patriotism getting us a second Hitler. Fear of war.
This is IMO the root cause of why most public services are going down the drain in most Western Europe: people are there to work for themselves, not for their country. And the higher people are, the worst it is. Keep the status quo, embezzle if you can and shut your eyes to not see we're in economic and cultural wars against the rest of the world.
It takes time to shape and convince people and form frameworks to move forward.
It looks like an example of perfect being the enemy of good. So afraid to make any mistake that they end up saying and doing nothing.
When there is actual value in forming frameworks then the key stakeholders don't need to be convinced. They just get to work on writing and building.
As I get older and a little lazier, sometimes I think I might want to find a way to get a completely pointless job that gives me a paycheck where all I have to do is write documents that nobody ever reads.
Then I look at something like this Gaia-X "milestones" list and think "Meh, this is probably not the job for me..."
[raises hand]
It's not so bad. Looooong lunches.
Any suggestions on how to land such a role? I've had the last 48 hours off work, which I think is the longest stretch in the last month, but I'll be working this evening, and tomorrow, and tomorrow evening, and Tuesday, and Tuesday evening, and...
Work for government.
Look for companies that are funded as part of long, multi-year projects. I have been funded by institutions like the NSF, NIH, and a bunch of smaller philanthropic foundations. After leaving SaaS-world, I just went to LinkedIn and looked for a non-profit doing work I can stand behind.
The thing that makes it so chill is that we work on very long time scales, based on the length of whatever NIH (or similar) grant we're on. If you're used to building things in the private sector, the comparison I make is that what took us 3 months at my previous YC startup would take us 3 years at the non-profit where I work now. A lot of that is because there are many moving pieces to coordinate, and because you have to be careful when dealing with sensitive data and research ethics. Blah blah blah, at least part of it is also because the breakneck pace of VC-funded software hasn't got its fingers into this pie, at least not yet.
Downside: pay cut. I make $18k less than I did 4 years ago, despite having gotten promoted in this new spot. Also, it can be frustrating trying to actually produce software at a company with no culture for it. You find out that software delivery practices are something people have to learn, and at places that aren't software-oriented, they don't know about them.
I was involved in an EU funded software research project related to air quality [1] around ~2008. The bureaucracy was very real, we had to produce a boatload of paperwork (including a literal, on paper, printout of the source code, for some reason?). But aside from the weird paperwork overhead, we were fairly free in how we approached the project, and we got a lot of shit done. This was software R&D in the true sense. I don't know what happened to the project after I left, but I suspect the universities involved benefited from the research and some of it was probably spun off.
That is to say: it's not all just paperwork and paychecks, it can be greatly rewarding work.
[1] Strangely enough I was just talking about another aspect of air quality in another HN thread. Never noticed this was a theme in my life before.
"Right now it's only a goal, but I think I can get the money to make it into an intention, and later turn it into an outcome." -- European Woody Allen
While most Western governments have gotten increasingly good at communicating with their citizens (i.e. making their web sites and forms accessible in human language, rather than bureaucrat language), and often even go so far as to offer versions in "Simple English" or local-language equivalents, the EU seems to be going the opposite way.
I'd consider myself reasonably accustomed to and able to deal with bureaucracy and formal language, and still find every interaction with official EU sites massively off-putting. Now imagine someone who isn't a native speaker in any of the EU's languages, mentally impaired, or generally quickly feels overwhelmed by bureaucracy.
Because the EU is not a national government. It issues no passports. It has no citizens. It levies no taxes. It has no army. It's an organisation that coordinates sovereign states. Often it doesn't even set the law directly but establishes a framework that allows it to specify some requirements that national legislative bodies then have to turn into actual legislation. Frameworks for how to talk about things is very apropos for what the EU is and for how it came about.
I am not defending this state of affairs. Simply pointing out that it's a category error to compare it to national governments. I think it would be good if we had more of an EU state. It seemed to be heading there 25ish years ago. But the nation states do have little appetite to cede authority to the central institutions, so that's probably not on the table. And it's also undeniable that as a coordination mechanism the EU has been spectacularly successful. The fact that people treat it as a national government is proof of that.
It's amazing the EU has lasted this long really. The USA tried something somewhat similar back in 1781, and it was a complete failure: they organized a bunch of sovereign states (formerly colonies, but they became sovereign states after the Revolutionary War just before) into a confederation, where the central government had no real power at all. The resulting country couldn't even defend itself against pirates. They finally got sick of it in 1789 and threw out this form of government in favor of a constitutional republic with a much stronger federalized government. Over 235 years later, that form of government still persists, though it's really showing its warts and the Constitution really needs a rewrite IMO, but despite its enormous flaws in the modern age it's still a lot better than the decentralized mess that is the EU. If you want real economic power in the face of competing superpowers, you need centralized policy and authority, not a bunch of semi-sovereign states all squabbling with each other and no one able to make a decision.
Having lived and worked in the US for a decade, as a German, and having had time to think about many things:
I think a key difference between how the US works and how Europe works lies in the private sector and the people. When you build a new company in the US, you have a lot of private infrastructure and people to be active in all of the states. In Europe, this does not exist in that form. Here, all the investors are focused on their own country. Sure we have plenty of firms active in many EU countries, but the level of support especially for new firms is orders of magnitude lower than in the US. From languages to social issues to attitude and expectations of common people, the EU is much more compartmentalized and it is significantly harder to have EU scale.
So there are two issues, and the side of the government is only one. The private sector and the investors have to do their job too and provide their own side of the EU wide infrastructure.
We also don't have EU-wide media that needs to support the development of a shared EU identity, and many other things that unite the US population as one people. Much of that has to come from the private sector, from the rich, from investors. But apparently they don't think big enough here in the EU?
Perhaps, but I wonder how much having so many different languages contributes to that. In the US, most people all speak English (though there's a growing Spanish-speaking population, but even here most younger ones probably end up being bilingual), so there's not that much to do for your company to do business in all 50 states, depending on just how much interaction with state governments you require. And state laws are all pretty similar usually. Not so in the EU.
Glass half full. No civil war was needed to keep the EU together. It lost a member without any bloodshed. It's exactly the kind of imperfection we admire when we compare democracies to China - less effective than central control but more free.
I agree that a stronger central EU government, more like a federal state would be highly desirable and more efficient in many ways today.
But you are ignoring a ton of stuff here, too. The EU comprises territories that are far more different than the territories of the US. The EU has 24 languages spoken, and its poorest member state has a GDP that is a factor of 9 lower than its richest (excluding Luxembourg). While it would be nice to have strong decision-making, how do you make sure that the decisions are also perceived as fair and democratically justified? Imagine a president who doesn't even speak the native language of the vast majority of people in the country. Would that person be seen as legitimately representing the people? How do you even begin to organize public political discussions in a situation where most people can't read the same newspaper/watch the same content? It's far from obvious that any of this is achievable. It's easy to fantasize about a competent, legitimate central government. But how do you construct it from the pieces given?
The political analogue of the EU might be India rather than the US.
Historically, the EU also comprises the territories that for more than half the time period since the inception of the USA provided all the globally dominant economic and military superpowers, expanding the areas they ruled to the peak of colonialism in 1914 [1]. So the squabbling mess of European powers, barely coordinating under a balance of power system at home, was dramatically successful militarily and economically (at an even more dramatic human cost). Contrast the Quing dynasty, that had a central government. At least some historians I've read argue that maintaining the central government consumed so many resources that it was a major reason for the widening gulf in economic and military might between European power and China during the 19th century.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/graphics/1914-co...
I get you like the EU, but "spectacularly sucessful" isn't something many people would use. See covid response, and Ukraine war response. I would describe EU's mechanisms as moderately successful, i.e. somewhat better if states did everything on their own and bilaterally.
People with triste knowledge of how EU works do that. I do not think having most people in dark about how EU works is "spectacularly successful".
It all depends on what (or when) you’re comparing coordination between European nations to. Having a less than ideal response to COVID or the war in Ukraine is vastly different than the openly hostile relations between European nations experienced prior to the foundation of the CoE/EEC/EU.
I used to work for a company that gets Gaia-X money. I will not mention concrete names, so you'll have to believe this anonymous source, me, choosing to remain vague to not be identified.
All we did for Gaia-X was the paperwork to get the money. It had zero impact on anything we actually did. Somebody I know who knew what other firms receiving Gaia-X funds did told me the others did even less than us. We certainly did not take it very seriously, apart from it being a great source of free money, and I say that as someone who reported quite a few developer hours for Gaia-X.
I think at most this project is about sending some money to some European firms, with little regard for actual outcomes, kind of as a concealed subsidy. I'm not sure if those who started the project actually wanted that outcome in the first place? A lot of these things are just ways to use the current system to achieve goals that the system does not directly allow. It could just be incompetence, but it could also be the case that somebody knows exactly what they created with Gaia-X and is perfectly okay with the outcome.
I’ve acquaintances who have done similar things.
The wastefulness of EU is the real reason people want their countries out of it.
There seem to be zero journalists covering EU shenanigans so everyone just get the news from people in the trenches. While our local politicians gets fired for buying chocolate on the wrong account (true story).
Unless such wastefulness is directed towards your own country!
By the way, the only ones who actually voted to quit were those idiot Brexiteers who were not even aware of the EU funds invested in the UK.
You have a pretty big mouth, calling the majority of the United Kingdom voters idiots. But I am sure you know better than them what is good for them.
It's not great, but this is far from abnormal. I worked for a company (not my current employer) that got R&D grants or tax breaks (I'm not sure which) from a government. The engineers were asked to come up with defined projects that could be justified as R&D in the way the government wanted. We did, and we actually did the projects, but might have done them anyway.
Governments want to grow areas of their economies that they think could be beneficial. It's not acceptable to just hand out cash, and that can be trivially abused, so they put a little work around it to make sure the right companies are applying, and they tie it to token artifacts to make it seem more specific. Some companies commit outright fraud, but they're likely the minority and it's just a cost of the program, some put in a ton of effort and do it properly, and that's fine, and the majority just carry on doing the work they were already doing that the government was trying to encourage, and they'll hopefully be just a bit more successful as a result of the extra cash.
It's all a bit silly, but I don't think it's malicious or actually that bad if you assume that the government isn't trying to achieve a specific outcome beyond growing a sector, despite what they say.
The Australian government R&DTI operates this way. Nearly every job I've had I've had to fill out specific timesheets and project descriptions to fit the gov's reqs to get the tax incentive.
As others here have pointed out, Gaia-X successfully funnels money to EU cloud companies and maybe this is what it's supposed to do. The deal is: company agrees to write some bs on how it contributes to this project and they get the money. The point is to get local cloud tech sector to grow here in the EU and maybe it's too difficult politically or otherwise to just give money to the companies directly.
This also blows my mind, instead of adding more berucracy to apply for funding to review funding to give funding.
just give tax credits based on innovation / investment criteria, to both companies and employees, Europe needs digitalization so badly, yet they find more complex ways to enable it.
Tax credits make sense for companies already with a steady profit margin. Cloud in particular is a capex heavy business so for a new company that is not very useful for at least the first few years.
that's why you give credit to investors not just compnaies.
Just give it to the companies. That still incentivises equity investment (it lowers risk and raises the potential upside of profitability). It also make underwriting standard loans easier too.
EU: 440 million people, 60,000 EU bureaucrats. US: 330 million people, 2 MILLION+ US federal employees. Maybe what they need is more bureaucrats, so we don't get half-assed programs like this.
If you were not being sarcastic, it's not a fair comparison. Those 66k EU bureaucrats only deal with some of the stuff. You'll have to add some of the public administration employees from each of the countries that deal with things that in US would be considered "federal".
The flip side is a lot of governance in US which is typically centralized is distributed to states and yet there are 2M federal employees.
Also only country with comparable language complexity to EU is India, so many languages adds enormous amount of paperwork and bureaucracy, US does not simply have to deal with it.
1.4M of those are defense, VA, or homeland security. It's not much of a secret that the US has a large military, and it dominates employment numbers. The highest federal employment total was 4.4M at the end of WW2. It decreased to 2M after the war ended, with clear bumps for the Korean, Vietnam, Cold, and Middle Eastern wars.
The core feature of Gaia-X is that it makes it easy for small EU software companies to get up to €200k in "de minimis" tax gifts.
It also funnels money into open source office software and "European data spaces", which is (very loosely) tools to replace US clouds with open source. I would say it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, making it easier for EU companies to ditch US cloud services.
And didn't exactly that happen here?
4 years ago, the "Schwarz IT KG" company was a day-1 member of Gaia-X. And now they have billions in revenue from AWS-like cloud services.
Need a third party citation on that. I'm highly skeptical by the press releases they bring out and seem to be taken over verbatim with very little due diligence.
Given the fact they don't even allow public signups outside of DACH im highly skeptical of their claim they're doing billions of revenue in public cloud. It wouldn't surprise me if there is some interesting bookkeeping going on to boost the numbers.
The current status quo is that people in this thread want to try this but fail to figure out how to even sign up.
Also could you explain what part of being part of Gaia-X contributed to their success?
Cloud&Heat receives GaiaX funding: https://www.cloudandheat.com/news-press/gaia-x-summit-2020/
Teams up with Schwarz group to create StackIT cloud: https://www.handelsblatt.com/technik/it-internet/schwarz-gru...
As for the revenue, I would trust a multi-billion international company that if they say billions in revenue, that'll be halfway accurate. Or else, that would be massive securities fraud. Here's their (independently audited) tax filling showing 1.2 billion € in revenue 2 years ago: https://www.unternehmensregister.de/ureg/result.html;jsessio...
Unfortunately, those links expire after a while. To everyone else: Go to unternehmensregister.de and search for "Schwarz IT KG" (located in Neckarsulm, registered at Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRA 730995) and open the document "Jahresabschluss zum Geschäftsjahr vom 01.03.2022 bis zum 28.02.2023".
I have worked with Deutsche Telekom in the past and I'm convinced that every project that involves them will never get enough traction to beat US companies.
The entitlement and refusal to listen to other people outside their direct org is mindboggling, its like if everyone at that company still thinks they are the hottest shit and they know everything better. Sadly, they are a gatekeeper. Super frustrating partner to work with
+1 on that. Same with the owner of the CSP mentioned in the article above.
It's weird because it was always only German companies that gave truly unreasonable feature requests AND were extremely pushy, despite not spending much compared to other customers.
T-Mobile is much easier to deal with, but they are also walking with their tail between their legs...
I am not sure the job of the EU should even be to make technical standards in this case. The point is to develop strategy and to convince an endless amount of non-technical stakeholders on value, and that is something the EU usually does well.
The EU is a bureaucratic body so the production of bureaucracy counts as success
That sounds like an EU success story - the bureaucrats aren't getting the way so Lidl is free to set up an AWS competitor. The EU isn't supposed to be a tech company, the point of companies is that they should be doing the part where services get provided. The US government was not a direct player in setting up AWS.
The danger would be if Gaia-X were kicking goals and laying down the law ... and had banned Lidl from setting up their own cloud until all the paperwork was signed off by 13 major committees, 666 undersecretaries of The Cloud and the High Bureaucrat was satisfied that there was a genuine market need for a new AWS competitor.
The EU has a lot of clever and motivated people. If the legal situation wasn't blocking success I expect they would succeed.
Yup https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/gaia-x-is-an-expensive-dis...
But Gaia-X is not the article's main focus, is it? I think it is about Schwarz Digits, which is a daughter company of Lidl.
Gaia-X is a place where the hasbeens of the yesteryear can poison any reasonable developent made by saying "We have always done it this way".
A lot of busy-work for a lot of highly overpaid bureaucrats.
I think that the EU can very well find a consensus when it wants to, going so far to push for legislature that will be clearly thrown out by the ECJ or HUDOC (see Chat Control for great example).
It's just that we also have a lot of "token projects" which serve for virtual signaling for topics where there is a lack of domestic competence. Gaia-X is one of these things, the idea of a "european cloud" as laughable to begin with, due to dependence on foreign technologies to facilitate it.
Can be shown by how everyone who actually produces cloud services of value quit Gaia-X very quickly
Scaleway published an entire blog post on why they quit: https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/full-steam-ahead-towards-a-...
Living in the EU, and having by and large a meaningless job in a meaningless division of a quasi-government org... while reading the news coming from the East, I keep imagining how a war with EU will upend this little paradise of parasites and laziness, and it gives me nightmares :) Also, EU will probably kick me out before things will start getting more serious, I struggle to imagine any other sort of motivation less drastic than that to get things going in the "right direction" :(
To come to a decision is dangerous for a career in a bureaucratic monster. Its all about creating the most impractical swiss-knife of all trades with as little personal responsibility as possible. If the whole apparatus fails, that does not result in the whole apparatus being fired. Thats the crux.
Another nice example, resulting in horrible deformed APIs: https://www.ibm.com/topics/what-is-a-digital-twin