Germany and France to accelerate the construction of clouds in the EU (German)
Posted by Fritja@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 181 comments
Posted by Fritja@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 181 comments
skat_in_the_hat@reddit
Germany and France are about to learn how hard running a cloud actually is.
Fritja@reddit (OP)
No, because the whole point of having their own cloud is so that American companies won't ride roughshod over their digital privacy laws.
skat_in_the_hat@reddit
Right, and if AWS/Azure/GCP made some kind of legal off shoot of their company based out of those countries, they would have no legal obligation to the US.
bwainfweeze@reddit
Yeah because the EU has been so happy with the other work Amazon, Microsoft and Google have been up to.
There are other options they could pursue from the second tier, but you know damn well none of the big three were brought up as anything other than humor.
TraditionalAd2179@reddit
Time for ESC on ECS, er, ECS on ESC!
EnUnLugarDeLaMancha@reddit
I am a bit confused, because USA companies (Amazon, Microsoft, Google...) have already built plenty of cloud infrastructure in Europe. So this is apparently about European companies building cloud infrastructure, with a government attempt to create a competitor to DARPA thrown in the middle (which is not strictly related to the cloud)
Fearless_Entry_2626@reddit
The leadership is slowly waking up to the fact that having the US run shit is a serious security risk. They don't respect the privacy of their own citizens and don't even pretend to care when it comes to foreign nationals. With the Palantir surveillance state initiative, it is best to move as much of European internet infrastructure away from American hands as possible. I am aware that I am on an American platform right now, but they already probably know me better than I do myself. Maybe the kids get better privacy, though. There was a lot of drama around Huawei, but frankly, it seems google, Meta, and microsoft are less concerned with privacy and people's well being.
Darkendone@reddit
Lol. Europeans amaze me. You lost out on the dot com revolution. You lost out on the electric car revolution. You are no where to be found in AI. Europe has practically no large tech companies. Of course your main concern is privacy and regulation.
Fearless_Entry_2626@reddit
All those revolutions, and all that money floating around, and the average yank is poorer now than before them... yeah, I think that's a pass. To borrow a yankee metaphor: Americans were born on third base and thought they hit a triple. Turns out that any economic policy works when all the rivals are in ruins after a war. Europe has tried emulating the American strategy for the last 3-4 decades, but without the headstart, that sort of capitalist decadence hasn't worked too well. I would rather look to China. At least their standards of living have been rising as they've grown to become the leading science nation. They're not afraid of regulations either.
griffin1987@reddit
USA company built cloud infrastructure is theoretically unusable for most stuff you want to do in the EU due to GDPR. Even if e.g. Microsoft states they are GDPR compliant, they can never be, as any time the NSA or the orange man could order them to hand out all their data and they would have to comply, which would be against the GDPR.
Ckarles@reddit
I'd be surprised if this was related to gdpr. Afaik the GDPR contract (and CCPA, and others that I'm not aware of) has to be fulfilled for European citizens/resident. So it doesn't matter if the service is hosted in the US or Germany, they have to respect GDPR anyway if they have European users.
Regarding the orange man and the NSA, countries in the EU have different deals regarding the US in the sharing of intelligence.
kitanokikori@reddit
The US Cloud Act basically makes any EU data privacy law unenforceable - at any point a US company could be ordered to hand over EU data, even if hosted outside the US
jorshhh@reddit
Americans can understand that they don't want to be sending their information to chinese servers because they have an authoritarian government that might demand the data but can't imagine that other countries feel exactly the same about american vendors.
kitanokikori@reddit
"no but we're the good guys" - the country with a 250 year history of doing some of the worst things to ever have been done to humanity
TrixieMisa@reddit
Germany? Belgium? France? Italy?
kitanokikori@reddit
America
TrixieMisa@reddit
Leopold II entered the chat.
kitanokikori@reddit
That's solid but America still has them beat imo. Ask a Cambodian about it.
TrixieMisa@reddit
Cambodia did worse things to Cambodia than the rest of the world combined in all of history.
andrewsmd87@reddit
This is correct. If you are a citizen of a country in the EU, it does not matter where you are in the world or what service you are using, you are still protected by GDPR.
griffin1987@reddit
No, it's not. If the NSA would say "hand over the personal data of EU citizen andrewsmd87", the USA companies would comply with that and thus break the GDPR. And the NSA isn't the only entity able to do that. See "US Cloud Act" for example, or look into the history regarding "EU US privacy shield"
Ckarles@reddit
I think you're missing the point. GDPR is about removing your user's data. If you are a user of a service and you ask them to delete your personal data, they have X weeks to comply.
If they don't, they are in breach of GDPR.
If they do, the NSA can't possibly access your data considering it's been deleted.
rollingForInitiative@reddit
It's about more than that. You're not allowed to process more personal data than required, you're only allowed to process it in specific ways, you're not allowed to sell or hand it over to 3rd parties (like another government) without permission, etc. Transferring data from the EU to the US without permission would be a violation of GDPR, for instance.
griffin1987@reddit
" they have to respect GDPR"
In theory, yes, but in practice they won't be able to, see US Cloud Act for example, or the history of the EU US privacy shield, which basically makes the GDPR impossible for any US company.
hbarSquared@reddit
I work in European health tech and all the US cloud vendors are off limits. We can use them for dev environments and other non-sensitive tasks, but the moment patient data enters the chat it's 100% local cloud.
Darkendone@reddit
Don't worry, we still have the golden keys. I can guarantee you the device you’re running on right now is one minor forced update from giving the US complete control of all of your data.
Darkendone@reddit
You really take Microsoft employees in the EU are going to go to jail in order to satisfy corporate. Remember the worst thing the corporate can fire you. But you break the law and you’ll go to jail.
joaonmatos@reddit
Up until recently, the infrastructure built by US cloud providers in the EU was not isolated, technically and legally/operationally, from US employees. This means that the US government could force them to transfer sensitive data out of the EU and hand it over to US authorities.
What's changing now is that the hyperscalers now have strategies in place to put some of their EU cloud infrastructure under control of EU-based subsidiaries, and inaccessible to the US-based parent company, at least directly. This means that they will have to formally request any data they want to access, and these subsidiaries will be forced by EU law to refuse to comply with any illegal data transfer request.
Own_Back_2038@reddit
I don’t think there is an equivalent to all the US government cloud variants of those services
NenAlienGeenKonijn@reddit
Yes, because the US currently is able of shutting down a lot of European infrastructure by simply pulling the plug.
We never considered this a realistic event until orange man came in power.
forsgren123@reddit
AWS just today announced that AWS European Sovereign Cloud (ESC) released later in 2025 will be completely built, operated, controlled and secured in Europe:
https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/aws/built-operated-controlled-and-secured-in-europe-aws-unveils-new-sovereign-controls-and-governance-structure-for-the-aws-european-sovereign-cloud
snipeytje@reddit
which doesn't guarantee much as long as amazon still has to comply with US law
forsgren123@reddit
In the post it's mentioned that a German company will control the whole ESC.
griffin1987@reddit
"control" != "own"
Due to e.g. US Cloud Act, it still won't be able to fulfill the GDPR.
joaonmatos@reddit
This is not correct. ESC is a separate partition from the rest of AWS, which means that it is built and operated as a completely different cloud. The ESC operator will be a separate, EU-based subsidiary, which means that they are just as subject to EU law, which forbids them from sharing data with an US company, as AWS is to US law, which requires them to provide that information if requested.
In the event of AWS being forced by the US to request ESC data, the operator would be forced by the EU to not comply with the request, which would lead to one of two outcomes:
ZelphirKalt@reddit
It doesn't really matter how many layers of organizational abstraction you put between Amazon in the US and something a remote subsidiary of Amazon in the EU is doing. If it is still Amazon in any way, it will be affected by US law, which is overreaching beyond national borders. There is always a risk of Amazon central getting some orders from the US side of things, that they are obliged to follow, even when they are overreaching. They in turn will then turn to the subsidiary, where they have spineless managers following orders and giving up data and secrets that they shouldn't.
As a consequence of US law, companies adhering to GDPR properly cannot make use of such services. If US law changes to be no longer overreaching, then businesses could consider it. But who would want to change their chosen cloud infra, on a whim of the taco man.
Of course, there are very few law abiding businesses in the EU, so they will still rent Amazon shit, even if it violates GDPR.
Darkendone@reddit
That is not how this works. If you are an Amazon employee in the EU and you get an order from corporate that you know breaks the law what are you gonna do? If you disobey corporate the worst that will happen if you’ll lose your job. Break the law then you will go to jail and most certainly lose your job in the process.
All companies operating in a restriction must comply with the laws and regulations of that jurisdiction. Failure to do so will result in fines for the company and possibly jail time for employees.
If for any reason Amazon cannot comply with EU regulations due to some conflicting law or regulation in the US than Amazon must sell off it's EU business. There are many countries in the world where that is the case and for that reason companies like Amazon are not able to operate there.
ZelphirKalt@reddit
Lots of people are very attached to their job, especially IT people at Amazon. IT people are coaxed into working with the employer in breaking the law all the time, at many employers. Some data gathering here, some personal identifiable info there, some setting cookies before consent ... You realize someone is writing all that code, yes?
Darkendone@reddit
You do realize that the average turnover rate at Amazon is about two years for tech employees right. Tech employees are absolutely not attached to their job. There are no unions. No pensions. No expectation that you’re going to possess the job for a long period of time. These companies perform regular layoffs just to kick out poor performers.
Instead IT and tech people are attached to their profession; not any particular job. They fully expect to leave in a couple of years. Companies like Amazon conduct background checks because of the sensitive data that their employees are exposed to. If they see that you have serious convictions, they will not hire you. You become unemployable.
ZelphirKalt@reddit
A high turnover rate doesn't necessarily mean, that people are not attached to a good paycheck though.
And the point that someone is writing all that code that implements illegal activity under GDPR also still stands. The managers are not writing that code. It is the engineers that do. This is a counterargument against the point you made earlier:
As far as I can see this is not the case. Employees are shielded. It is not like one visits a website that violates GDPR and then goes on a hunt to find out who that web dev is, who made the website. In fact, most businesses violating GDPR never get into any trouble about it ever.
joaonmatos@reddit
I can tell you is that an US-based executive will not even be able to access the networks where sensitive information will be stored.
Look, I get it, you don't trust that some middle manager won't just email the data to the US anyway. In that case you really need to use an European-owned service. But you should consider that most of AWS's European employees will prefer not going to jail (and keep in mind that if the parent company tries to fire them, they will drag them to EU courts and win).
YsoL8@reddit
Fellow worker for a large company. No one doing the actual work much cares about the opinions or justifications of the national management, much less the drips in the global headquarters. Especially as the penalties for this sort of thing tend to be severe.
Maybe they can find a useful idiot to bypass it but thats then very much the end of the road for that international and will lead to dramatically stricter controls for everyone else.
daedalus_structure@reddit
The problem with legal protections is that they must seek remedy once damage has been done.
That does not help once state secrets are exfiltrated because an executive at Amazon overrides legal and orders they comply with US law.
Nobody should trust US based companies any more than they trust the US government in this moment.
joaonmatos@reddit
I get your lack of trust. But have you considered that an EU-based employee could be fined or jailed for complying, and that they cannot be fired if they refuse to comply?
daedalus_structure@reddit
Have you considered that fining or jailing one EU citizen is not a consolation prize for state secrets being exfiltrated to a hostile nation?
griffin1987@reddit
Let's just assume that you're right - and that's a very big if, and very theoretical thing, as factually someone from AWS could just ask someone of the european subsidiary via mail and it would probably go unnoticed - then I'd still argue to have a look at the history of privacy shield which basically fell from one day to another. Or Safe Harbour, which was also ruled to be invalid basically from one day to another.
And then you got people like the orange man, who just uses his power to do whatever he wants. And he's definitely not the only person.
Also, "operated as a completely different cloud" will most likely still mean that they'll use the existing high speed interconnects and have special networks for data transfer between those "completely different clouds", so most likely will have some kind of special access.
At the end, I doubt there's anyone who really knows how it will go, until it goes wrong, as history has shown again, and again, and again. So if you decide to trust an US company with your data, feel free to do that. But then don't wonder when one day you'll end up in front of the european court.
If you'd like to discuss this further, you might have a better bet with people like Max Schrems and Jacob Appelbaum. I've been in close contact with both around 10 years ago when they started taking Facebook to the court, and these two are REALLY deep into the matter and really know what they're talking about.
At the end, I'm not even a lawyer, much less one specialized on international privacy and data protection laws (and all the dozens of other things which might potentially be involved), so at this point let me send you the best wishes from Austria, EU.
CheeseNuke@reddit
he is 100% right, your assumptions are completely wrong
joaonmatos@reddit
I can't get into too much detail, but you are not correct about how these separate clouds are architected. I work at AWS in Germany and my team will be deploying our services to the new ESC partition. I am not a lawyer nor do I make leadership decisions.
We call each of these clouds a partition. They are not on the same domains, networks, IAM namespace. Getting data in and out of each partition is a pain in the ass. Some of them are completely airgapped and we don't have access to the direct systems. Even for AWS China and ESC, which are connected to the internet, you can't easily transfer data from one partition to the other.
Are there systems transfering data between the partitions? Yes, but they are for specific types of data, often in one way flows. For example, you transfer software from US to the EU to deploy it. You transfer alarm states from the EU to the US to page the oncall. You transfer prices from the US to the EU to run billing workflows locally. You transfer aggregated revenue sums from the EU to the US for financial reporting. And there is no generic service to make these transfers - for internet-connected partitions you will have to maintain and rotate persistent credentials and make S3 calls over the internet, and for airgapped partitions you will have to register a schema for the data you're transferring, and a transfer service will judiciously check the data you're transferring to prevent exfiltration.
Regarding the operation, serious measures are in place. AWS operates airgapped partitions for the US gov and my team has services deployed there. With the exception of knowing which version is deployed there, having replicas of some metrics (Errors, Faults, Latency) and alarms, we don't have access to the state of our system there. There are teams of US citizens with security clearances that are operating those regions on our behalf, from a SCIF in the US. We give them SOPs, and they operate. They only give us information on a need-to-know basis.
A similar thing is gonna happen for the ESC. Only EU resident employees will be allowed to access the networks and authentication systems of this partition. There are ops teams being put in place to operate systems owned by teams based in the US or elsewhere outside the EU. And because we are all residing in the EU and working for an EU company (legally, I work for AWS Development Center Germany GmbH), we will not share protected data with US teams. It doesn't matter if we get a letter from Andy Jassy himself. If I do it I am breaking German law and I, and most my colleagues, are not risking jail time.
Trust really is hard to gain and easy to lose, and I don't judge you for being skeptical, but we are really taking all the possible technical and legal steps we can to make it work.
CheeseNuke@reddit
yep, it's the same with Azure/Microsoft with their Bleu and Delos clouds. they will be fully owned and operated by French/German operators. Microsoft will have no agency within these clouds except in secure, escorted sessions. the whole plan has to go through dozens of EU regulatory bodies.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/04/30/european-digital-commitments/
clvx@reddit
Is the ESC going to be developed differently which overtime let to diverge from the other partitions?. If no, there's nothing that won't stop the US government to introduce architecture safety nets to ensure the Cloud Act can be performed. Even if you built independently, that doesn't mean the software sources would be independent from US reach if they are being done by a US subsidiary.
whoscheckingin@reddit
Totally second the above comment. Network partition is just that, no egress is allowed out of the partition. Even if someone "sneaks" in code to do that it's not possible as the network is completely isolated on egress. Anything out of the partition needs to be vetted and authorized. But yeah, if a court of law says something and requests a copy that will be that - will have to go through the process to get them. IANAL but at that point it will be a battle between the courts and foreign policies.
joaonmatos@reddit
It's not, we will be CDing mainline code from our normal pipelines. Your concern is valid, even if that scenario is a bit overblown.
ZelphirKalt@reddit
If only that would happen way more often ... GDPR is still pursued way to lax. In most cases businesses don't get much more than a slap on their fingers.
HighOptical@reddit
You can just read the post, it literally tells you they will own it. Reddit's so odd... a whole article right in front of you, amazon investing who knows how much money to fulfill GDPR and having countless lawyers combing through the details to make sure it's done right and a redditor disagrees completely because another redittor said one word instead of another and the fact they heard the name of a law they feel will be in the way...
versaceblues@reddit
Isn't this the same strategy Amazon has used in China, and it seems to fulfill their government requirements.
snipeytje@reddit
The problem isn't EU law, the problem is that when forced to chose between complying with US law or EU law amazon will side with the US.
And if we're trying to be more independent of US infrastructure and lessen big techs influence, it's better to go all the way than a halfway solution like this
DmitriRussian@reddit
Agree! We have good companies in the EU already, like: https://www.hetzner.com/
versaceblues@reddit
bad name though.
ZelphirKalt@reddit
What is bad about it?
versaceblues@reddit
Naming a company as just your last name, makes you sound like a small time plumbing business. Maybe a car repair shop.
They might be succesful as a small time host, but they are never really going to achieve mass scale with a name like that.
It also signals the founder cares more about himself, rather than about an idea or vision. Easier to rally people around an idea.
gmmxle@reddit
Is that right? I guess no successful future for
?
versaceblues@reddit
Lol non of these are operating on the scale of American tech companies.
HomoAndAlsoSapiens@reddit
That may be because none of them are primarily tech companies. Maybe your problem is called US-centrism.
rexxar@reddit
Small American companies ? * Ford Motor * Dell * Walmart * Procter & Gamble * Johnson & Johnson * Merck * Pfizer * Goldman Sachs
versaceblues@reddit
None of these are tech companies formed in the past 20 years.
versaceblues@reddit
If the holding company they create is located in the EU then this wouldn't be a problem right?
MachKeinDramaLlama@reddit
Which is exactly why they are doing that.
m_adduci@reddit
I was more expecting that German and French companies will build EU cloud services, not that US Big Tech comes here and build services in Europe.
This is just gaslighting
Silly-Freak@reddit
If it's any consolation, the article (even though vague) doesn't seem to talk about US subsidiaries but actual European projects. I hope that most European companies don't fall for it, but given the past decades' willingness to believe all security and privacy claims coming from the US, I'll need convincing...
Mognakor@reddit
For some obscure reasons it will also include Australia
Fungled@reddit
This is only about winning back business because of GDPR
Amgadoz@reddit
I like this eve though I'm not American or European; competition is good. We now have cloud providers from the US and China already but a duopoloy is possible.
Junior-Ad2207@reddit
You assume that in the future US cloud providers can legally operate in the EU at all.
Darkendone@reddit
The real question is can any cloud provider legally and profitably operate in the EU at all. With sky high energy costs and the most hellish regulatory regime in the world. It’s not looking good.
Junior-Ad2207@reddit
Yes, they can. Otherwise they wouldn't operate in the EU today.
Why do you comment in things you know nothing about? You shouldn't do that.
Darkendone@reddit
Actually I know a fair amount about this since I work in the field. There are good reasons why Europe is not known for its tech companies and cloud infrastructure. There are of course some data centers there because regulations force it, but you don't see tech companies training their latest LLMs there. Basically, if you have a choice, you don’t do computing or storage in Europe.
Junior-Ad2207@reddit
There are data centers because they are profitable. Otherwise there wouldn't be any data centers.
You may "work in the field" but which field is that? You seem to not understand the issue. Business in europe needs data centers. So they will be profitable.
shevy-java@reddit
Europe is slow, but at the last Germany and France understand the full problem domain of Mr. Trump now. There are WAY too many indicators; the close buddy status between Trump and Putin can not be denied anymore, even aside from the agent Krasnov theory. Trump is changing the USA towards more authoritarianism (we all see that) but also towards more corporate-control - this can be seen if you look at "if the EU punishes US corporations with e. g. digital tax and other taxes, we will retaliate". This of course is integrated into the "America first" strategy by Trump, but it also means that Europeans suffer. Canadians also undergo this. It is time to unite with like-minded countries (all true democracies) and stop being abused by bigger countries, be it USA, Russia or China. These ALWAYS put their own interests first and foremost. Smaller countries stand no chance against big bullies. This includes the nuclear arsenal too, but this is a separate issue; "cloud" as means to proxy-control from Washington is indeed inacceptable and the EU, slow like a snail, finally wakes up. I mean, how hard can it be to see the problem when russian missiles kill ukrainians daily? You can see the big countries leverage military power to control sphere of interests, in a very selfish and brutal way. Everyone can see this.
Darkendone@reddit
it’s hilarious how you say that after decades of building dependency on Russia, which was blatantly an authoritarian state.
codescapes@reddit
European leaders have evidently been huffing AI hype and then realised "shit, we barely have the compute infrastructure to run independent of foreign corporations".
The fact is they're 10 years behind the curve and trying to play catch-up. Talking about adopting a more robust building strategy in 2025? Where was this in bloody 2010? There's simply no excuse for how much of a laggard Europe is on tech compared to the US or Asia.
lppedd@reddit
Better be late than never tho. We can build over years of expertise and research, while also focusing on data privacy instead of profit maximization.
Darkendone@reddit
being the regulation capital of the world does not lead to a thriving tech industry.
pier4r@reddit
Indeed, as some say: the best time to plant a chip was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.
griffin1987@reddit
Regarding your "chip X will go to US first", let me throw in just 4 letters: ASML.
pier4r@reddit
I know them, they are across the street. But we are talking about "we need the chip X [that is already in production] en masse now". Thus the ASML machine and contracts (and maintenance and what not) are already delivered and work. For the next generation of chips, then one can negotiate, but for the current generation it is too late. Especially if then ASML and Zeiss (it is not only ASML) are either copied or are forced to build operations in other countries.
Straight-Village-710@reddit
You can just say China.
Most of Asia, except China, is also years behind the US corporations for now.
fried_green_baloney@reddit
Angela Merkel complained about the EU paying less attention to issues like this and worrying more about whether the bike paths were the same width in Denmark and Portugal.
gimpwiz@reddit
It is very good that the richer countries in europe have effectively solved all their problems and their most pressing needs on a country-wide and even inter-country basis are bike path widths, and Angela Merkel and you should both be celebrating that. :)
IanAKemp@reddit
On the contrary, the EU did the smart thing by building software while letting the USA worry about infra. That's exactly what you want and should expect in a globalised world: certain partners do certain things well enough that other partners don't have to, which benefits both.
Then Trump came along and essentially destroyed all ties between the USA and the EU, and here we are. I'd agree with you that starting EU-native cloud projects now is extremely late, because they should've begun back in 2016, but unfortunately EU states are grappling with a lot of things that take a lot of money and their politicians were hoping that Trump would be a one-term aberration... unfortunately those same politicians failed to understand the history of bigotry in the USA, and here we are.
misbug@reddit
Are these software in this room with you right now? Which significant piece of software that was made in europ and stayed in euroe?
IanAKemp@reddit
I don't understand the question's relevance.
Familiar-Level-261@reddit
You said EU has software and uses USA hardware
You were asked about what software that is
Then you said it isn't relevant
You are a fucking moron
IanAKemp@reddit
Ah, perhaps my phrasing was unclear. What I meant was, because USA companies spent a portion of their (relatively far larger than the EU) revenue on building out cloud infra, EU companies didn't have to pay those costs - instead they could just spend their (relatively far smaller) resources on writing software to run on the USA cloud. In terms of the resource disparity between the two sides it absolutely made sense, and again this sort of resource disparity is something that globalism helps with.
gimpwiz@reddit
Do you know who pays the costs of physical hardware and engineering cost for both the hardware and software that all collectively runs "the cloud?"
It's the customers.
And the customers pay enough not just to cover their bare cost, but also for the cloud provider's future R&D investment and for their profit.
Of course when the people writing 'relatively far smaller' software can't get something they want, instead of innovating or creating their own underlying software and hardware infrastructure, they turn to the EU politicians to regulate the companies building the real underlying tech in order to force them to do stuff.
Familiar-Level-261@reddit
"didn't have to pay those costs", no that's not how any of that works.
Cloud is selling resources at significant premium compared to "normal" hosting/co-location, they are earning money on top of that.
EU didn't gain anything off it compared to US, if anything they spent money offshore that could be spent locally to build the competition.
It's very similar to china situation - US spent a ton of money there to get stuff cheaper and get an edge, temporarily, but what they essentially did is to build chinese infrastructure while keeping themselves stagnant manufacturing wise.
EU would be far better off tech wise longterm if the spending were being kept to EU hosting companies rather than essentially fund furthering US dominance here.
Serious-Regular@reddit
the question stands: what software has been written that is of note?
do you think the hard part of cloud is racks of servers..........? newsflash it's the "software" that connects the servers, which has also been written by US devs/companies (remind me who owns k8s).
IanAKemp@reddit
All the millions of line-of-business apps that make money for companies around the world.
Sure, and the EU didn't have to pay the cost of writing that software either, but that's not the type of software that the majority of businesses write.
Serious-Regular@reddit
my guy the question is very simple: name a single EU company that's well-known. here i'll do you a favor to get you started: SAP.
some people are so thick they forget how they ended up where they are: your claim was that EU's resignation of cloud infra to the US was a purposeful/intentional/wise decision because instead of spending money on "cloud infra" they wrote the code that runs on the cloud. but you can't name a single company that actually wrote such code (you just keep alluding) and you fail to understand that cloud infra is code.
kaoD@reddit
Well if it's not relevant why did you mention it in the first place?
yourfriendlyreminder@reddit
Indeed, that's why nobody in Europe uses Microsoft 365 cause they use European alternatives instead like >!/s!<.
xmBQWugdxjaA@reddit
There's still the issue of expensive electricity hitting data centres though.
Shutting down nuclear power and embracing degrowth has been a disaster.
codescapes@reddit
Downvoted but the basic reality is that if energy is brutally expensive you cannot profitably run high energy industries. European countries have among the highest energy costs on the planet.
Server farms do not run on hopes and dreams. They want electricity and lots of it for as little money as possible.
Jaggedmallard26@reddit
Degrowth is a Reddit sacred cow. Pointing out that committing to reducing the size of your economy has negative effects like preventing economic growth is verboten.
gimpwiz@reddit
Degrowth is only a sacred cow among the over-educated under-intelligent reddit loudmouths who are either living off their parents' largesse and feel unaffected by a shrinking economy, or are so spiteful they want to ruin things for everyone else.
Own_Back_2038@reddit
“Reducing the size of your economy prevents economic growth” is a tautology
Sir_Lith@reddit
Late adoption means someone made the early mistakes before us.
I hope you don't think it'll take another 10 years to catch up. It won't.
KallistiTMP@reddit
This is highly dependent on whether they need to build the power plants first.
gimpwiz@reddit
Any day now they'll be able to use cheap Russian natural gas again, right? Gosh, if only someone mentioned that building one's industry from raw materials shipped by a geopolitical enemy is a bad idea.
gimpwiz@reddit
Late adoption can mean letting other people figure out the pain points and then copying what they did rather than innovating new solutions, which lets you catch up pretty quickly to where people were a few years ago. But late adoption can also mean absolutely no willingness to build anything or design anything, which means ten years from now they might be even more behind.
Are we betting on which strategy the EU is taking? Careful assessment and reduced expense in cloning existing solutions? Or just general tech-arena malaise?
Jehab_0309@reddit
We’ll see how that goes with disaster recovery and when countries are forced to comply to either GDPR or their own intelligence services, or when Belgium turns into a Hungary or somethingz
Patriarchy-4-Life@reddit
Of they are as dedicated and swift as Americans they could catch up fast. It is a matter of will. I very much doubt they are going to get serious and catch up soon.
nnomae@reddit
Indeed. There's also the advantage that with the way compute power is scaling you're never really that far behind. A company that's been on the cutting edge for decades and one that starts today, assuming equal new capacity is added are basically going to be equal in terms of compute a few years down the line.
griffin1987@reddit
Tell that to the Austrian (EU) government. Keeps adopting what Germany already had failing on them 10 years ago. And I'm pretty sure there's other countries in the EU doing similar things.
ShinyHappyREM@reddit
Right? Innovators / early adopters can be stuck with a suboptimal solution, like Windows with UTF-16.
gimpwiz@reddit
I laughed at this as well. A day late and a dollar short, guys. You've ceded essentially the entire tech market fifteen-plus years ago and now you're like "oh jeez maybe we should build some server farms and some infrastructure to make them easy to use?" Now? I mean yeah, better now than ten years later, but come on. What the hell have you been doing?
tdatas@reddit
Best time to do something important is yesterday. Second best time is today.
Dom1252@reddit
I laugh at finance institututions sometimes... You offloaded some workload from your on premise mainframe in Germany or France or Austria... For distributed system where some stuff runs in one country, some in other, but now relies on things outside of EU (like UK) because you can't force your cloud provider to do it properly... And then you cry when there's an azure outage in a different country that shouldn't matter to you but because your cloud provider connects something through it, you can't connect yourself... And it costs you more than it used to... In the name of "security" you require going through a cloud provider to connect to your own servers in datacenter you rent and you cry because you can't connect to them...
bwainfweeze@reddit
“A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.”
0x53r3n17y@reddit
The U.S. is a nation, the E.U. is a federation of sovereign nations. Asia? That's an entire continent.
Each of them is an entirely different economic and political context within which things move around. Not to even mention the impact of wildly cultural differences on how these contexts evolve.
Back in 2010 the notion of a global liberal market and free trade based on multilateralism and mutual trust meant there was way less of a reason to argue for being less dependency. Economically, back then, it was the smart move to move towards cheap services built abroad. Everyone did it, it was almost gospel as on-prem rapidly became yesteryears way of doing things.
Back in 2010, Facebook wasn't the behemoth its now, YouTube was barely out of its diapers, Twitter was dealing with the famous fail whale, streaming wasn't a thing, and Instagram just got started that year on a 500k funding round. Android? Not even 2 years old at the time. I remember buying a HTC Hero with a wopping 512 Megabytes of storage.
The Internet, tech and the world were a wildly different place back then.
It's crazy how much has changed in a mere 15 years time, yet here we are. Back then I couldn't even fathom A.I. becoming a thing the way it did over the past 4 years.
So, yeah, I would give the EU some credit for not having invested when it could. And arguing it really did miss a chance carries a lot of hindsight bias.
Amuro_Ray@reddit
Busy tightening the belt during the eurozone crisis.
KalaiProvenheim@reddit
Gotta love radical austerity
Familiar-Level-261@reddit
The tech push has mostly been by companies not govt.
And companies didn't wanted to invest in EU as much coz they have worker rights
FullPoet@reddit
10 years? I think 10 years for more of the tech savy countries in the North.
For Germany? At least 25 years behind - look at their near complete lack of digitistion.
How can they talk about the cloud when you still need to physically fill out forms and snail mail them?
ThreeLeggedChimp@reddit
It's hilarious how there's already people replying with excuses.
Just like how they make excuses for Europe paying Russia to invade Ukraine.
HighSpeedLowCraft@reddit
Don't they already have Hetzner?
forgottenHedgehog@reddit
Hetzner is pure IaaS, but even without basics like decent virtual networks or RBAC. They are cheap for a reason. No sane enterprise will build on top of it without putting in a ton of work to get that sorted, and by that point you might as well go for another solution.
breezy_farts@reddit
I honestly think you're wrong. Hetzner is better than pretty much every other provider I've tried. Granted, we just want a Linux server and then set them up ourselves, but to that end, nobody beats them. It's not even close.
forgottenHedgehog@reddit
Enterprises don't just want linux servers. They want to control the network between those severs. Have policies preventing idiots deploying vulnerable things. Out of the box upgrades. Safe management methods. Managed services so that every other team doesn't come up with their own way of hosting databases.
Nobody wants to build it from scratch.
breezy_farts@reddit
What is "out of the box upgrades"?
midoBB@reddit
I'm going to be honest S3 is only good at AWS S3. They guarentee the highest uptime of all concurrents. Yes it's expensive but imo it's worth. None of the eu alternatives came up looking good in 2023 when I did a study for the company I was working on. Black blaze is a choice if you're interested in cost cutting. None of the eu offers compare.
yourfriendlyreminder@reddit
Their market share in the European cloud market is in the single digits, so clearly even Europeans don't think they're very good.
breezy_farts@reddit
Well, then they're idiots. Hetzner is top tier.
DHermit@reddit
And Ionos, Strato and some others.
TenshiS@reddit
We wanted to use Ionos in our product recently, even their registration process is broken.
ZelphirKalt@reddit
Choosing Ionos though, you can just as well bury your head in the sand. Costs 10 times as much as Hetzner and has absolutely nothing to show for it, except buggy OS images, broken APIs for provisioning, and atrocious web UI. It is basically not a competitor to anyone, so bad is it.
Freyr90@reddit
Nebius also
chucker23n@reddit
Also (large enterprise only) T-Systems.
And, as far as France goes, OVH.
opsmanager@reddit
and Scaleway (France)
Double_A_92@reddit
*Lidl Cloud intensifies*
ITafiir@reddit
Lidl cloud is so good, I had to leave my stuff at the register and go to an ATM because their entire infrastructure was down and no one could pay by card two weeks ago.
Fs0i@reddit
Might not be lidl cloud but sth else. Also, if the card readers are down (that happens), they often hang huge signs everywhere so this exactly doesn't happen.
Anyway, it's not like AWS never went down, ever. It's a thing that happens, and it'll happen less and less.
ITafiir@reddit
I talked to the cashiers, they said their (Lidl‘s) infrastructure went down. There were no signs, they didn’t even close self checkout, I do have sympathy for that tho, they were struggling to keep up with the swathes of angry customers.
Ya I know, this wasn’t supposed to be a serious argument against Lidl cloud, just a little venting. Didn’t know people were this invested in Lidl cloud. It’s not like it’s our only cloud provider.
Fs0i@reddit
I just want some more European alterantives. I'm not a fan of the Schwarz family (owners of Lidl) - not at all. However, at this point, more competition on the cloud market is great.
Compared to other alternatives, like Hetzner, AWS is unfathomably expensive. Compare S3 prices to Hetzner cloud prices, especially regard egress
qilir@reddit
Isn’t egress free nowadays?
Fs0i@reddit
For eu-central-1
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
20TB egress on S3, with that: $0.09 * 10 * 1000 + $0.085 * 10 * 1000 = $1750
Let's say the average request is 5 megabytes, so we get: 20TB = 20,000GB = 20,000,000MB, with 5MB/request, we have 2000000 requests, which add $0.0054 per 1000 requests, which adds another $10. Note that if you have 500kb files, this gets more expensive.
So, for requests + data, we're paying $1750 at AWS with 20TB traffic. At Hetzner, you pay $1.20 per TB, no per-request cost. So we're paying $1.20 * 20 = $24
If you have a high egress use-case, Hetzner is affordable. S3 is completely insane.
Note: I've had previous startups reach 200TB+ in a weekend, which makes this a no-brainer. I haven't however tested how much bandwidth Hetzner has in practice (i.e. can this be used as a CDN?), but even for normal file storage (e.g. Dropbox competitor) the difference is insane.
ITafiir@reddit
I also would love more competition, and yes fuck the Schwarz group. Maybe strato will at some point get their act together lol.
SurlyPoe@reddit
As Europeans we need our own Google Meta X etc. There is no reason to let the Americans dominate a completely virtualised set of services. Hostile purchases of EU start ups that would dislocate them should be band.
Our current set of cloud services are soooooooooooooo much a security issue. It needs to be sorted out.
UXUIDD@reddit
one line for you .. once line for me ... sniiIIIiiIiifffFff....... ahhhhhh .. .
moxyte@reddit
But why? There already are plenty of existing cloud providers within the EU. Oh wait, can't sink billions of taxpayer money into their buddies pockets without some excuse, that's why. Why not some new planned economy commie cloud, why not, good excuse as any. I really feel bad for the Europeans.
bwainfweeze@reddit
The one I know best caught on fire. Maybe the new ones won’t be tinderboxes with shite fire suppression systems.
moxyte@reddit
lol which one?
midoBB@reddit
OVH the biggest french provider had a massive fire in one of their data centers which brought down a lot of systems.
bwainfweeze@reddit
There was a data center in California that went down a number of years before that, and the reason it did so was that three separate diesel generators failed to start. They had for server rooms, a generator for each, a backup for each pair, and backup for the backups.
I can understand that one. But catching on fire is just fucking embarrassing, shirt if arson or fuel leak, neither of which happened.
MilesYoungblood@reddit
lol I didn’t read the sub name so I was like clouds ☁️☁️?????
Fritja@reddit (OP)
looollloollllll
BenchOk2878@reddit
where jobs?
kaeshiwaza@reddit
In the sky like all promises !
lppedd@reddit
Yeah. We need to detach ourselves from the Third Reich misery the rest of the world is becoming.
ThreeLeggedChimp@reddit
It's always hilarious when someone from an axis country acts like this.
ImAStupidFace@reddit
didn't know we were still living in 1942
ThreeLeggedChimp@reddit
Then why did you bring up the third Reich?
ImAStupidFace@reddit
I did?
Coding-Kitten@reddit
Very ironic coming from a country that has never outlawed slavery to criticize others for their past ignoring their own.
punkbert@reddit
European Opensource Mobile OS next, please.
coder111@reddit
So, should EU push to open source Sailfish OS or promote Postmarket OS?
Superb_Garlic@reddit
This comment couldn't be more ironic even if it tried. I already buy/use EU first, but let's be a little more real, please.
mantasm_lt@reddit
Just wait for yet another chat law
DoubleOwl7777@reddit
downvoted for spitting the truth...
bobsbitchtitz@reddit
The best way for them to do this is to steal talent from American companies but at the end of the day the pay isn't even close to the same so I doubt they'll have as robust feature set.
That's not even getting into the networking data center infra that cost billions to build globally.
I think we're at least 10+ years away from the cloud tech american cos provide.
yourfriendlyreminder@reddit
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Literally nothing you said is wrong.
przemo_li@reddit
Hahaha. Nope.
Datacenters are multi-year projects due to sheer backlog of orders for specialized hardware. Nobody can accelerate anything.
(Though EU could invest in bottlenecks but that is separate story to cloud/ai/datacenter investment)
bwainfweeze@reddit
If Germany discovered they should be in the computer manufacturing business that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Though it’s probably OEMs that are the bottleneck as well.
Kalium@reddit
There's a small single digit number of companies that are capable of designing, building, and operating a cutting-edge fab. It's not a thing even one of the world's most advanced economies can easily spin up quickly. The hardware is cripplingly expensive and takes years to get, the skillset rare and thus expensive, and demanding in water and energy.
We haven't even touched on how much Taiwanese law streamlines the construction of fabs versus the rest of the rich world.
I would expect that any sane German business would take one look at the financial prospects of trying to compete with Samsung and TSMC and light money on fire as a faster way of getting to the same destination.
bwainfweeze@reddit
TSM’s fabs don’t function without Dutch hardware that’s doing the lithography work.
But I meant computer manufacturing as in Dell or Lenovo, not as in Intel and AMD. They aren’t as far as I know creating their own servers.
andrewsmd87@reddit
I'm not arguing that a US company wouldn't do that but the law written the way it is still stands. You are required to protect EU citizens regardless of where you are or they are, if you're allowing them to use your product(s). It would definitely get tricky from a legal standpoint though
joaonmatos@reddit
This will probably work, as long as we (I work at AWS) design the systems to be directly unaccessible to US employees, which we are. I am an EU citizen, residing in the EU and working for an EU-based subsidiary, so if I get an illegal data transfer request, I am forced by EU (German) law to deny it.
deadbeef1a4@reddit
I didn’t notice the subreddit name at first and wondered how they’d do that
bwainfweeze@reddit
First you build a snowman, then you set it on fire.
mixxituk@reddit
EU based FAAS would be great
Maybe even do MiniO for s3 too
All things OVH do i guess already...
captain_obvious_here@reddit
How many projects have been launched and thrown hundreds of millions at in the last 15 years, only to be shut down because of Google's, Amazon's and Microsoft's lobbying?
ejectoid@reddit
Let it rain