It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company.
Qwant[1], launched as "The French Google" with a focus on privacy, serves 10 million searches a day (a ridiculously small number). No one has heard of it, no one uses it, and it's another project with a dream of restoring France to its old glory by an old guard convinced that somehow their country is so exceptional that it can just launch any product and that people will switch to it.
The story is more sinister when it comes to cloud platforms. A government project to free its companies from American domination over this sector will typically involve a bidding process in which established and well-connected companies with a history of costly, slow, outdated tech will win the contracts through their political connections with no consideration for their capacity to deliver or innovate. MPs will make sure their buddies get the contracts. The kind of buddies that lead companies that have so little understanding of cloud technologies that they went with OpenStack[2] to build this new world leader in computing.
It's always the same thing. Old, well-connected companies like Bull that have zero ability to innovate and not a clue about the domain will rake in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money and deliver some garbage platform that no one will use except other government-funded moonshot companies. Always behind, always getting paid, never actually doing anything remotely useful.
Source: I am French. I know how this works, I've seen these ridiculous projects get political support and fail miserably due to corruption and ineptitude. This is more of the same.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant [2] https://gigaom.com/2013/11/18/a-guide-to-the-french-national...
The problem with European software plays is a monetary problem. EU capital is much more expensive than US capital (ultimately due to the latter's status as the 'world reserve' currency due to the enforced petro-dollar regime).
This is why Europe's IT sector is much more focused on B2B servuces/bespoke developments (low risk business models) and hardware/infrastructure (historic manufacturing/telecoms legacy).
in terms of software products/B2C/SaaS high risk/hit businessmodels the US can relax and cherrypick from the European R&D knowing they can buy out any local player due to cheaper money.
The EU has in the past always declared IT and the Knowledge Economy as 'strategic', but has never protected the sector from US appropriation.
American internet companies can address a large, relatively homogeneous market of 300 million people that all speak the same language. This alone is a big competitive advantage over any European company.
This is great because it will be so easy to spin up instances- just provide your VAT registration, detailed plan for GPDR, mechanism for 'right to be forgotten', cookie policy, application for any protected region of origin usages, and pandemic mitigation policy and after a short series of review and revisions you will be put in the queue for the no-bid government IT contractor to reject your request because they phased out the instance type you requested.
Usual suspects, SAP and Deutsche Telekom, which shows the corruption of our elites.
I see a lot of hate in this thread regarding a disruption to US hegemony. I guess that's why we need projects like Gaia-X.
I wholeheartedly hope it will succeed, and given the companies that are involved in it, I'm pretty confident about it.
I get the sentiment, but why not invest in companies like https://www.scaleway.com/en/ a bit more?
Europe has to start from somewhere in a market currently dominated by the US and the Chinese... This project may look like a joke for people in the Silicon Valley but everything we do in Europe looks like a joke for Americans. They laugh at the EU, at our spaceship program, at our industry, at our techs... Whatever we do they say we are old and finished. OK have good times laughing. Meanwhile we go on progressing. Discretly, maybe ridiculously, but we do.
Perhaps an out of topic comment.
I've been working for one of these CORDIS European projects : https://cordis.europa.eu/projects/en
The project was politically driven while most of the slides were selling dreams. As usual in this kind of project
- there was a schedule carved in stone
- the Conway's law gets a beautiful practical example
so the research becomes quickly a joke.
Some people:
- worked on out of topic subjects. At least no harm.
- criticized because of external/past/personal/out of topic reasons.
- criticized the work of others while doing literally nothing. My boss knew it, but since they are well known to wrote nice documents to get the fund for many years.
- worked very hard while being criticized through hidden communication.
- were here because of the data.
- were here to get the technology if by luck it ends up to be working project.
The usual burdens, I guess, but it basically kills the motivation (it is my experience in one specific project). In the end, people went to the different meetings to see Europe.
It seems some other projects are driven in the same way according to what I have heard.
It is only a sum up of experience. YMMV.
I sincerely hope that Gaia-X will be managed in better way.
AWS/AZURE/GCP aren't exactly beloved by their customers, product quality is sporadic, domiciling things with the US is more questionable than ever before, and their margins are high. This seems like a great time for solid international (ie non-US) competition.
If they want Competition to "HyperScalers" then why not just use OVH?
Generally speaking, I dont think any of the Europeans have technical problems, I think they have a Product Placement, Marketing and Sales problem. And I think it is more or a cultural issue. ( Not saying it is a bad thing )
This once again ignores what are probably more profound issues.
Europe has tech companies and independent cloud providers. Yet they seem to never grow large or fast enough to become leaders globally or even in Europe.
SAP is mentioned, which is a giant. But it is 50 years old. This is not the type of company that is going to challenge the status quo and come up with disrupting technology.
I think countries like France and Germany should really look at their tech and business environments, including universities, finance, tax, labour law, etc.
> That is already far too late, according to analysts at Gartner, who forecast that the global market for public cloud services will grow by 17% to $228 billion this year. “The leading cloud providers have already moved quickly to build up this market,” said Gartner analyst Rene Buest.
Person not poised to make exorbitant money off venture thinks venture a waste of time. Alternatively, person who might lose money if venture goes ahead thinks venture a waste of time.
Does anybody have any technical details to share about Gaia-X? I mean service discovery, interchangeable services/interfaces, etc. has been around since the SOAP days (~ 2003) at least. Cloud can mean many things. Does there exist anything at all or is it just talk at the political level atm? Do they intend to fund new research into bringing these things, or will they pick existing tech?
I don’t see how a government bureaucracy can compete with Azure, AWS, and GCP.
I wonder how much they will be paying their software developers. Right now, a senior developer that really understands cloud and distributed computing can make more than $500,000/yr at Amazon, Azure, or Microsoft. If they want to attract the talent to build this, they are going to have to pay a lot more than they are used to paying for software engineers.
I hope Gaia-X will be built as an Open source project. Because of economics of scale closed source companies usually cannot compete with Open source projects. Meaning that open source projects can attract more developers from different companies and backgrounds than closed source. Plus if its open source everyone in the world benefits not just Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale https://opensource.com/article/18/9/awesome-economics-open-s... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_economics
Interesting that Lidl only recently made news about moves into the cloud computing area.
Reading the article "German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier, speaking in Berlin, described Gaia-X as a “moonshot” that would help reassert Europe’s technological sovereignty, and invited other countries and companies to join." It's not clear if this is limited to European based countries and companies only and if not, kinda moots the statement a bit.
Be interesting how this progresses and competition is good and some standards would also work well. Though I do fear that the usual company suspects will pile into this pie just because they have a European satellite office, like Amazon, Google, Microsoft.....
I hope this is an EU wide initiative and not just another FraGer based one for many reasons.
So many questions and could just be a tool to bash the Tech giants into opening up more.
Further reading upon this: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/legal-entity-gaia...
https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Publikationen/Digitale-Welt...
The article seems to conflate cloud services with merely storing data. Of course that's part of any cloud stack, but to the average HN reader it is evident that cloud services are much more than that, such as running software and transforming data.
I think this might be a reflection of a misunderstanding that also happens on a higher level in European politics. Cloud services are much more than just "computers that store data" and the political implications of data sovereignty or what have you.
Cloud services are insanely complex systems built on the latest advances in areas like operating systems, networking, hardware, etc.
You don't get there with political statements of good-will, even when they're backed by what looks like a non-committal, lukewarm coalition of private companies. You don't stumble upon it by just saying "Ha! We need a Europe response to cloud services!"
You get there by being obssessive and single-minded about the problem, employing all your energy and focus on the task at hand, most likely fueled by the ambition of a lucrative or economically strategic incentive.
It saddens me as a European that the latter is what Europe seems to lack sometimes, and this initiative doesn't give me any hope for a change of course.
The description of Gaia-X and that of old world culture sounds like a standard government/enterprise project with all the same problems. The US model comes from venture funding, where you seed 10 firms solving the same type of problem, and the most desirable result prevails. The institutional model of increasing stakeholders to produce something that satisfies all of them is what makes enterprise development such a farce. The mentality is captured in the criticism that something is, "underfunded," which is the expression of a worldview that "funding," comes from some welfare oriented source, and not earned as compensation for providing value. The strategies to "get funding," vs. the ones that earn revenue are largely orthogonal, and people with the funding mentality have in effect the opposite of the "growth mindset," that is necessary to build things others want.
These development cultures build lots of things, just very few things that anyone uses willingly. It's just more solutions to govern, not tools people need.
I'm from Germany and just last week I saw a building with a sign.
OVH - Biggest Hoster in Europe
I never heard of this company in my life.
I looked at their offering and they were basically selling 20 year old technology. Nothing compared to AWS, Azure, or Google.
Germany is so far behind in IT, it's crazy.
I also stopped reading German IT news 10 years ago, because they are always weeks or month late.
All good IT people I knew sooner or later moved to the US.
>One important concept underpinning Gaia-X is “reversibility”, a principle that would allow users to easily switch providers.
Switching providers would imply some new tech or standard, no? A bit like docker is portable. Except for all parts of the cloud. So are they thinking a FAAS standard, a load balancer standard?
Bit confused about where they're going with this
This might sound terrible ... but this will come from Scandinavia/Finland or not at all. Possibly in the form of one or a few, very well thought out startups and/or standards that the rest of Europe can buy into.
This is not about size, it's about 'getting it right' - and then having the system follow along one way or another.
I think the title of this article sums it up quite well: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/german-economy-mi...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23423921 was earlier on the same topic but since this article has a lot more information, perhaps we'll merge those comments hither.
They are competing with Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Those are not normal companies.
I also think that people underestimate that this space will get very low margin eventually and become even more commoditized. Most companies totally overpaid for IT enterprise solutions the last decades, they are sales driven and live off lock in effects of their hardware to milk their customers.
Now we got rid of physical hardware then it will take companies another 10 years to figure out that they also don't need 90% of all the cloud solutions they got sold on. The rest you can run everywhere cloud neutral with kubernetes or something else.
Will those three companies earn a trillion dollars during that process? Sure.
"repository of existing services and resources that are available in the ecosystem, including the capability to search this repository"
Yeah I totally want to spend my time digging around in there for "which random company can I get a crappy version of AWS Lambda from?"
I'm no fan of monocultures and US/Chinese influence but if they want it to actually work they could say "here's a terraform provider that figures it out for you". That would be nice. So far it sounds like this is just "we'll make a list of cloud providers and some of their services"
So, instead of working with well established EU companies like OVH or Lease Web, they, once again, build-to-fail a sovereing solution.
They will not be able to hire the necessary talent, don't benefit from decades of expertise, have to build trust with multiple communities plus a client portfolio and have to pay for building infrastructures.
As @heipei said, Europe mentality is already years late when it's about tech. And while I do think we desparatly need our own alternative to the US GAFAM and clouds, this is, once again, a doomed attempt that will mostly enrich a few well connected people.
From the article "The companies will inject an annual €1.5 million combined in the underlying association, with plans to double the sum later." 1.5 million ... I hope this is a typo.
This project is still born because they are missing a federated accounting and payment service at the heart of the platform.
Why? Because it's damn near impossible to deliver such feature for dynamically orchestrated services from a federation of providers.
Sovereignity, interoperability, compliance is a nice sales pitch. But it seems that when it comes to getting paid or paying you are on your own. Imagine trying to pay for hundreds of services from companies spread across dozens of countries...
Alas, looks like a PR move to cobble something together from existing components by consultants for EUR1.5m a year (from the article, unless I misread what that is for).
I've been developing backend distributed systems for a while, and kinda want to have a gig in Europe, so the title got me too excited I guess.
But, my dreams of reinventing the wheel in Europe for a (relatively) high paycheck aside; what could possibly go wrong? :)
Competition is good.
I wish them good luck. I think that right now the US and China really have a lock on cloud and AI.
Europe has lead the world in user privacy and rights, so I hope they can leverage that and bake human rights into their systems. Hetzner is a very good cloud provider. I would use them exclusively if it were not for the tiny latency lag between the SouthWest USA (where I live) and Germany.
Had seen https://medium.com/@Regulatory/gaia-x-5-reasons-why-the-euro... on this topic. Few of the points made sense.
this european cloud computing champion already exists: OVH. maybe policies should help him to grow
> " a platform joining up cloud-hosting services from dozens of companies, allowing business to move their data freely"
This is practically dead before it's created. The other platforms (AWS, GCP etc.) are hyperscale due to their useful integrated nature of building blocks. You're not going to get that with a bunch of random vendors. It's hard enough as it is for a large company to create a somewhat homogenous environment, and existing projects that are supposed to be multi-vendor like OpenStack (and CloudStack) are just not on par.
Say you have a few vendors, one runs VMWare, one runs Hyper-V, and you need a workload with scalable counts of CPUs, and the datacenter of the VMWare guys is full and you now need to use some of the CPUs in the other datacenter. Are you going to have a single API (and perhaps console) where you say: I want a machine with specs X, image Y and parameters Z to do that and have the lower layers resolve it? Probably not.
France was able to build world-class high speed rail and a very low carbon electricity grid. They emerged from the government.
Why can't we build alternatives to the big US tech services ? Is it just a matter of momentum ?
In terms of geopolitics this is a good move, a superpower should have its own tech infrastructure.
Governement Productions (TM), this is gonna end up like CDC's productions during the pandemic
On one hand, the tech is well enough understood that making a clone is doable.
On the other hand, 2012 called.
didn't some search engine Cliq shut down, because they had no support in Europe ? would love to hear their response to those officials
Thats really the only thing the Europeans can put together these days...more policies :(
How about just getting your hands dirty and start building great stuff?
(Former european here)
There is a really interesting discussion to be had here about if and what the EUs past policy failing was. Is the issue that they were insufficiently capitalist and drove all their innovators to the US? Is the issue that they let their markets too open, and should have copied the Chinese approach? Is the issue that they shouldn't be concentrating on tech at all and should be leaving it to people better at it than Europeans?
There is a real litmus test of something in the EU and their technology situation.
If China wants tech sovereignty, I don't see why Europe shouldn't. I don't understand the negative comments here.
The core problem isn't really the innovation, the economics, or europe's ability to compete with american giants, it's rather geopolitics, privacy, GDPR, surveillance, industrial espionage, tax havens.
I they are smart they will create an open app store with GMS, etc. compliant services.
And use EU competition rules to mandate the the most popular apps must be in there.
I have sadly no faith in europe to get this right. While capitalism is under fire right now it does one thing better than anything we know right now. Innovate. I don't see a government competition with a group of smart, capable people, who would reap all the money from said effort.
Most of old Europe saw China succeed in its "Copy a successful American thing" manner and decided to try the same. Except they don't have the competence overall as orgs.
> but would instead referee a common set of European rules.
That sounds less like innovation and more like regulation to hinder foreign companies. The US should retaliate economically if that becomes the case.
This is so sad. As a European I would love to see some Internet giants created. Everybody says it's because we don't have homogenous market and so on. But my hunch is it is something different: Existing European companies are much more protected than their US counterparts, or even their UK counterparts. Think ThomasCook - would have been definitely been "saved" like TUI in Germany. That doesn't happen that much in the US I believe. Instead new comers are generated at a higher rate creating completely new markets, think Tesla, Facebook, amazon etc. That entire life cycle of companies dying and being newly born seems somewhat skewed over here.
As a German who's been exclusively working in the US tech space for the past few years, there's so many anecdotes that come to mind to highlight how far behind the old world is, both in tech as in spirit:
- Article about Gaia-X in major German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales", from your home!
- When I tried to read or watch reviews about SaaS solutions for invoicing / bookkeeping for German companies, the first half of the review is usually spent trying to convince people that moving off paper-based invoices and folders to all-digital is a good idea in the first place.
- University-educated people in my social circle are often woefully unaware of economic trends that have swept the US, be it the gig economy, X-as-a-service, the nature of Venture Capital, the idea of scaling a company aggressively, the value of information, mobility of labor and paying market rate for experts, the high profit margins of offering a software product vs. (for example) doing one-off consulting for a German industrial company, etc. None of these things bode well for the best talent in Europe working on anything remotely resembling an innovative European tech company. Not even saying we're worse off for it, but the reality is that any European who truly grasps the pace of the US tech industry would rather go there directly than work for a Franco-German government moonshot and hope to be paid maybe a 10% premium over their regular European salary.