EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US
politico.eu
politico.eu
My intuition is that once again the money will be grabbed by existing big companies that proved unable to innovate, but are the best at capturing public fundings.
EDIT : and i should add, helping politicians look good. All in all it will only help everybody pretend they're doing something, while letting the ship sink even more.
In Italy a startup took over the job for 1/50 of the price and with at least as good or better job.
Is the above play a problem for Germany? No. Do you they even understand an problem? I don't think so.
The current app is a nightmare. It shows that i had already 2 low risk encounters - but it doesn't show me when and where! I NEED this info to adapt my behavior! very bad app.
people die. the economy is suffering. millions lose jobs. still, some guys making 140k in their it engineering jobs working from home and relaxing are telling me sth about "data privacy as priority". i disagree. people disagree.
Taiwan did a FANTASTIC job leveraging data.
we are either not capable of that or just fanatic.... maybe both.
Please, mate, this is just populism what you are doing there.
There's a difference between what you share willingly and stuff being collected on you, especially in private matters.
But it doesn't matter where they happened since I already know that I am carefully avoiding risky areas. I am sitting next to my window when working and people walk past that window within 2 meters. That alone could set off exposure notifications. Or maybe someone across the aisle in the supermarket?
Would I not go to the supermarket if I know it happened there? Would I not go for a walk if I knew someone 8 meters away from me on some bench was later diagnosed with COVID?
It barely serves any purpose at all outside of curiosity. The app already tells you everything you need to know.
The when and where of individual encounters, especially at low levels of infected population, are pretty irrelevant. At this point you should really be aware of how you can change your behaviour to minimise risk, that really hasn't changed in the past few months.
So when the app tells you to quarantine, you quarantine? Or it is important enough to share everyone's location data, but not for people to more radically adjust their behaviour rather than just avoid a particular location?
Show the evidence. Wanting data privacy is far from the fringe minority sentiment you imply it to be, otherwise GDPR wouldn't be so popular.
Literally everyone who knows anything calls the German app a huge success, especially compared with similar efforts.
Half the population downloaded it in the first days and it works great. It's completely privacy-focused and the UX is great for both individuals as well as the government.
Is the German tracking solution really 400 times as complex? Based on either citizens' adoption or UX, is it anywhere near as successful?
Built by a small, Agile company, although not by a startup by any classification.
Do you have any source for that?
If true that is indeed impressive, but I am sceptical, given that your claim that "Half the population downloaded it" seems to be extremely exaggerated (https://qz.com/1898960/whats-behind-finlands-contact-tracing...)
One way in which the German app was clearly superior is that it was released a full month and a half earlier.
Share of population that downloaded it - Your article only talk about the first 24 hours. See for instance this article that says 1.8 milloin a month and a half ago: https://mobiili.fi/2020/09/08/koronavilkun-lataukset-yli-18-...
That's beginning to be half of the relevant population in a country of 6 million, when you take out kids and people in old folks' homes.
Which tells me that the claim "They ended up building it for 150k, with 250k more to operate it until the end of next year." is complete bullshit as a comparison for the German numbers, because it is only for the app itself without any backend or supporting infrastructure. Especially because you made it sound as if the rest of the 6 Million budget was not even used.
In reality, on top of the app development they spend 400k on planning, specification and coordination, 3.2 Million on other software (backend and admin, I suppose), 1.4 Million for deployment(?) and communications, and further maintenance and operations is not in fact accounted for yet.
> hat's beginning to be half of the relevant population in a country of 6 million, when you take out kids and people in old folks' homes.
Ah, nice moving goalposts there.
Yes, it's a very successful project and everyone involved deserves praise. Yes, Finland spent less than Germany for very similar results.
But they didn't spend 400k (let alone 150k) compared to 60 Million. They spent 4 Million compared to 20 Million, which is the overall development costs in Germany, with most of the rest going to the operation of a support call center (and that scales with population size, so legitimately more than 10 times higher in Germany than in Finland).
So why the 5 times higher development costs in Germany? Because they didn't do a public bid like Finland did. They threw money at some big companies they assumed could do it. And for that they got an app 6 weeks earlier than Finland. It turns out that those 6 weeks happened to be a time of low case numbers so that they didn't really matter. But that couldn't be known at the time the whole thing was planned, and if the pandemic had developed differently, those 16 million could have saved thousands of lives.
In Canada, Shopify and Blackberry donated some engineering time:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID_Alert
Can't find anything on the back-end costs.
That's irrelevant when it comes to spending. The cost of something is always proportional to how much the customer(here the German government, read the taxpayer) is willing to spend not how complex the project is. While it might not be more complicated to implement than in Finland, the German government has more money than the Finish government so it was billed(read fleeced) accordingly.
It's like asking "Are SV engineer really 400x times better coders than Europeans?". Maybe not, but they can charge 400x more because their market conditions allow them to. Simple.
If the app is useful, this is another topic, but it was not the point of this thread.
This is what I noticed in Germany as well. The government keeps tooting their own horn on how in every statistic they're the best in Europe and the media parrots that while the younger generations just takes it for granted and doesn't bother questioning the poor decisions the government makes while they spend the public tax money like drunken sailors because hey, "we're Europe's no. 1, what could our government ever do wrong?"
Maybe vote the corrupt leeches out?
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannesmann-Prozess
with the golden handshake/parachute, however you may call it.
It's great that it worked nice in Italy, but giving the contract to a random startup is more of a gamble I think.
They are a rather small company by headcount but with great success in the app consumer market and with a lot of experience in the sector.
Not everything need to be huge to be good and successfully, especially in technology.
Upd: I previously wrote, that Italian app shares the source code with German one, which was probably not correct. In fact, Italy collaborated with Germany on developing a contact tracing solution before, but the apps were developed independently with different requirements. I’m sorry.
Can you share your source?
It's a lot less than that in terms of total personnel costs ($100K is a modest salary-only for a software engineer, it's extremely low as a full cost of employment.)
Sure. But it's probably nowhere close to your salary + benefits + overhead cost to your employer.
1) 30 top notch engineers to build the MVP and then iterate.
2) 300 engineers - the first 100 to step all over each other trying to build an app and the remaining 200 engineers fixing the bugs from the first 100.
On top of whatever your direct employer charges to the government agency hiring them to cover profit and other costs (management overhead, contracting overhead) associated with your employment, there's also contract management overhead for the government agency. For contractors, the total cost is usually a greater multiple of salary + benefits than it is for direct employees (though if the benefits suck enough, maybe still a smaller multiple of bare salary.)
UK has spent 11 billion on a healthcare IT system and got nothing to show for it.
https://independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/hea...
It's the public sector commissioning the private sector in matters that it often doesn't understand. This will fail far more often than it will succeed.
Meanwhile in Canada Shopify and Blackberry got together and helped the federal Canadian Digital Service in coding up an app, with the code available on GitHub:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID_Alert
* https://github.com/CovidShield
No money exchanged hands AFAICT.
So they just come across as greedy, corrupt bastard - which probably has the positive side of being very much closer to the truth.
Any spending that would make the pandemic become a fraction less severe is probably a net win. So if you have to chose between 60m EUR offer and a 95% chance of success of all features and in time delivery and another offer of 10m EUR and 90%, what should you choose? Why be thrifty at this point?
My question is rather why didn't they went out to spend more? So many more things that could have been added: public places check-ins (e.g. When visiting restaurants), more interfaces for laboratory to upload data, manual meeting log, collaborations with other countries...
[1] https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2020-10/coronavirus-...
They always have a way around and have enough influence to make sure there is anway around it.
EU investments like these always go to the same pockets. It is a broken system but it makes the insiders lots of money.
Lots of companies exist for the sole reason to get EU money and have absolutely zero interest in making any real products.
And not the least, startups are shots to the Moon with the expectation that most will fail; you cannot do that in this case, if you guarantee the money there will be no motivation, if you don't guarantee any money there will be no funding. Investing is different in Europe, that's why there is no SV here.
The EU is populist in trying to blame tech companies for all of society's ills.
Who wants to invest in what will be scapegoat for law makers to cry at?
What I don't like as an EU citizen is that our network infra is ridden with Huawei equipment. I'd much rather have US equipment and services if domestic companies aren't capable delivering it rather than One Belt, One Road. Just take a look at Kyrgyzstan and how it's going to become a Chinese colony.
You can kill ~300 people and noone goes to jail. You can launder money for druglords and just get a fine.
What does a corporation have to do to actually suffer serious consequences, like jailtime or breaking up a company? Something that's not just 'cost of doing business'?
First of all, none of the GAFA were actually started as Cloud infrastructure providers. So the question is not why isn't Europe creating big Cloud Infrastructure companies, one could argue that the biggest "pure-player" in Cloud is OVH which is European.
If anything it's the (insanely lax and pro-monopoly) American regulatory environment that has the biggest impact on the creation of big Cloud providers outside of the U.S. The only country that manage tyo do that are China & Russia to a lesser extent because they have active protection against AWS/GCP/MS.
As to why Europe doesn't create big GAFA-like companies in other sectors, one reason is that the E.U is not a single market from the perspective of these companies. Yes the regulatory environment is stable & simple enough for companies to operate in all E.U countries, but that's not all that makes a market.
The fact that europeans speak 27 different languages for instance makes building a european sized company much harder than a U.S sized one, for roughly the same market in terms of $$$.
EDIT: I don't think creating GAFA-style companies is a goal any state should pursue. The U.S needs to get their head out of their ass and split AMZN & Google ASAP, & fix Facebook.
> why is that? Is it the regulatory environment?
fcantournet:
> If anything it's the (insanely lax and pro-monopoly) American regulatory environment that has the biggest impact on the creation of big Cloud providers outside of the U.S.
I don't think you can say the problem there is America's lack of regulation preventing European cloud providers (which was what the question was about) from starting.
It seems like the problem there is one of the European regulations being too strict.
Stifling regulation is not a force of nature, it is a lever that can be adjusted.
Whereas China and Russia have stricter rules about what foreign corporations can do, so there that allows for the creation of homegrown solutions like Baidu - would Baidu exist today if Google was able to run their services without interference in China since the start?
You will never get a Ronaldo/Jordan caliber player without exposing them to the best players from an early stage.
Protectionism works well until they face a real challenger and then wonder why their usual tactics and products all seem to fall short.
edited: reworded to "close to impossible"
I know plenty who did. You should rather say something like it's hard for the average European worker to move to the US.
The one who went the furthest worked remotely for a very well known company from France for 2 years. Even with the company sponsoring the visa, he had to wait more than 1 year to have a shot, the lottery only happening once a year. He didn't get selected and eventually the company gave up on having any hope to ever bring him.
Also, this egalitarianism and promoting of mediocracy you speak of makes no sense in regards to people who want to attain personal growth. Not to mention having a system like the US comes at a massive cost in regards to the wellbeing and welfare of the general population.
Innovating isn't just about money. Not to mention a ton of innovators exists in the EU, they are just not the same scale as amazon/google etc.
The task of a business is to make profit. So yes, in that sense, the money is the ultimate goal and profit is the one and only kpi to look at.
This is a model that worked extremely well in Japan in the latter half of the 20ths century, and was mostly responsible for its economic miracle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu
In the cloud sector this would mean small companies that did everything from running electrical transformers in Berlin to data center management to running blob storage (on S3 protocol) to running machine learning SAASes or elastic compute services. All companies would work together to form a cohesive whole. Each company would own shares in related companies to insulate each other from stock market fluctuations and takeover attempts.
The hard part is building something resembling a cohesive service out of all of this where smaller companies can plug in to the network easily and end customers can use every service they want and still have one bill to pay.
If they can use the 10 billion euros for that - to minimize fragmentation - then the market will take care of the rest.
Of course, it could just be handed over to SAP to build "SAP cloud" as a direct competitor to Amazon. In which case, yeah, we'll get a pile of shit.
So in the end, objective comparison would have to go much deeper, than median household income.
On the other hand, my spending on Apple Stands in the last years was very similar to your personal spending on Russian nuclear fuel as used in US nuclear plants. That being $0. Turnips leads this one :).
A second hand thinkpad could do the job if money is tight.
It requires a set of small, interlocking companies, (many of which own pieces of each other and have very tight knit relationships) that form part of a greater supply chain. It requires trust and human relationships.
The set of companies in Shenzhen responsible for the "pearl river delta electronics manufacturing miracle" might be the closest analog we have today.
It is perhaps easier in manufacturing because standardization on interlocking components is easier, but it's by no means impossible in software, and with cloud computing we do have an emerging set of interaction standards (e.g. the S3 protocol).
I don't think that the EU actually will follow this path, because it requires pretty deep technical and economic understanding to follow through and policymakers who are resistant to lobbying from, e.g. SAP, but they certainly could, and the EU has surprised me before with smart policymaking where they clearly listened to experts (e.g. with GDPR).
A bigger issue IMO, is that the EU can't grow business that grow a cloud business and instead thinks it can just will this into being.
I think I know what they want to do, define the economic relationships between companies and standardise them in RDF and other semantic web standards. Dunno maybe even set internal prices for memory, processing and network utilisation sort of like LIBOR does for intra-bank lending.
Oh, wait. That already happens over here!
But that is something different that taking all the funds by incumbents.
The US didn’t shoot for “building a cloud” with the DARPA investments. The goal of those investments were for very specific projects that assisted the military (short and long term) and the Internet and SV were a side effect.
Trying to build a “Rival Cloud” immediately sets off red flags for me because of how vague it is. What are the concrete goals? To replicate AWS? How much would you want to replicate? Which services? Which features in the services? Why would customers choose this over AWS? How could this organization be run (somewhat) profitably while being useful?
They already have Hetzner. Seems like the EU government could work with them to fund the new services they think are important. Maybe open source the components that they build so other EU companies could build similar services if Hetzner went bust.
The point of EU programs is not to build anything, that's just an excuse. The objective is to funnel tax payer's money to politically well-connected.
It's the opposite in the EU, big companies get funding to develop something. Startups have no chance, unless someone knows someone.
However, my argument to parent was, that DARPA was also top-down, and it was a success.
I watched a talk by David Graeber, author of On Bullsh*t Jobs. He observes that actual service sector jobs, where someone does something for someone else, have made up a pretty constant 20% of the economy. According to wikipedia, 74.7% of Europe's economy is services [0]. It's going to be a rude awakening when the curtains are pulled back on a 55% bullshit economy.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union#...
You can apply even as a single person, just need to know your ways through the bureaucracy, how to formulate your application, business plan, etc. Not easy, but doable.
Or use one of the many services which support you in doing that. There seems to be a service industry around that nowadays, which wasn't the case when I did a few years ago, or been to scroogy and stubborn because I can speak and write fucking AMTSDEUTSCH if I have to :)
I have a British friend who would work with me on this idea of an appliance reuse/recycling factory in NRW (because it's the closest state to the best suppliers from FR/DE/BE/NL). We've done the research, there's little competition and we could be profitable within a year.
To summarize the idea: take broken/used/returned electronics like washers, fridges, dishwashers, dryers, TVs, laptops, smartphones. Fix whatever can be fixed and sell as refurbished, break down the rest and sell for parts and scrap.
Seems simple? That's because it is, at least the basic idea. The hard parts are securing suppliers and selling everything for a profit. But we believe it can be done, because there's a huge market for refurbs, and especially spare parts.
There's a myriad of small repair shops all over EU that are starved for parts. I used to get them for cheap from my previous employer and sell them at a profit. I never had enough parts to satisfy the demand.
The UK has several big companies and a whole lot of small ones. Mainland EU is lacking, there's a few big recyclers in the Netherlands, everywhere else it's just small companies that don't seem to aim for scale.
I could publish the business plan if anyone's interested. At this point, I don't care if it's me or anyone else who does it. But it has to aim for scale, it's a must have for the environment.
Of course common sense would say refurbishing is better for the environment, but common sense? EU?
Anyways, I wish you luck/success.
Refurbished home appliances like washers/fridges/dryers/dishwashers/ovens are a good product to sell, there are lots of small shops that buy dozens or hundreds of them for resale, and of course, lots of individuals furnishing their own place.
Energy efficiency for them is not going up anytime soon, they've been stuck in the same ratings for more than a decade. They're simply as efficient as possible already.
Liability and warranty would be handled by the resellers, and if agreed, by us. Mostly by return and replacement, but it could be feasible to create an on-site repair service. We can provide the necessary parts, too.
The thing is, a properly fixed appliance will last just as long as a new one. In fact, the failure rate on used electronics can often be lower - newer models that use a new internal design fail more than older, "proven" appliances. The saving grace for them are the warranty and return policies.
Customers will still give 4-5 stars even if their first purchase was a dud, but it was swiftly replaced with another one. That always surprises me, btw. It's like, "oh my new Indesit fridge was DOA, but they replaced it the next day. 5 stars."
Anyway, a big downside is that transportation costs are rather high. And they can only be loaded by forklifts with special attachments, or several people at the same time.
However, the more thoroughly they're checked, repaired and cleaned, the fewer returns, the less money spent on transportation.
Which I btw. got for free from the streetside, it was just standing there with other stuff, probably houshold clearing. Saw it on my way home, checked it out, was clean. Looked OK. Went home, got my foldable sack barrow and a few rubber straps from my bicycle, went back there and had a nice upgrade to my even older, but much smaller and louder fridge. Which I then rolled to the communal recycling center a block away :)
STRIKE!
Honestly speaking, it is hard for them to compete with cheap chinese white goods, their used goods are just a tad cheaper than brand new chinese goods.
Check out https://www.envie.org/
Just my own opinion, used white goods that were once high end will last longer than the cheap new stuff.
They just have more thought put into the design, there is no corner cutting like missing components and thinner metal, they're just better built. And they have features that are missing even on the newest cheap models.
Haier washers, for example, are a nightmare. They fail catastrophically very often, even the cheapest Bosch will last more. And the parts are simply not available, not new, not refurbished.
With enough policy tools and barrier, EU cloud will happen.
It works well for the average citizen, but not so great for innovative and ambitious people.
That question is particularly pertinent if you consider that GAFA-sized can mean "big enough to influence legislation".
The only problem is that investors like the idea of cornering markets, which, due to regulation, is harder in the EU.
What leads you to believe that europe's problem is the investor climate?
I mean, this policy is clearly devoted to ensure that europe is able to control and manage critical cloud infrastructure, instead of handing everything in a silver platter to the US or, even worse, China. What leads you cto believe that a change in europe's investor climate would have an impact on this?
The world, at least the western world, desperately needs viable mature competition not based in the US.
I would go so far as to say not having it is a real problem for democracy and maybe even go as far as it being an issue of national security.
With the close ties between intelligence services and social media in the US, it is a problem for the US, but certaily more outside. However it is a challenge to avoid 5 eyes.
Less conspiracies, two rich and powerful persons in the US can decide what information is permissible in an election and what is not.
This would not matter much, if there were at least 10 different healthy competitors with at least a few million users.
Hopefully being more distributed also internationally, it would be unlikely that each leader would make the same decisions.
Like newspapers, they can suppress a story, but another newspaper might go with it.
Sadly in the US, the mass death of newspapers often means that a region / city /state might only have one newspaper in a monopoly situation.
I do not know if the state injecting billions can get to where we need to be.
I think it’s a simple confluence of the US having many English speaking people with lots of money, plus English is spoken worldwide, plus labor is readily available in the US.
There exists buyers, labor supply, and the inherent ability for software to scale with very low marginal costs means targeting the US market results in a higher probability of success.
Once you can grab the rich US market, you now have the momentum to grab other markets, and being first is more important than being better where network effects are in play.
it’s a very hard to solve this problem, considering the current climate when there are a lot of multi billion (and trillion) dollars companies.
ICT/IT is a very broad term, and usually used for anything technological in my experience.
If I hear you work in IT, it makes it sound like you work in corporate IT, e.g. the help desk, corporate networking, etc.
"We have never done this in the past, we are not doing this now, we won't do it."
I just send a pitch to a European VC fund with a new, totally disruptive technology. Their answer: "This is a crowded, very competitive market, hence we are not interested." I mean, really? First, this shows that the market is there. Second, such a device does not exists in the market and would disrupt the market. I don't get it.
I am a dual citizen so if we don't find money in the EU we just go to the US.
Throw more money at the current system, which has gotten bloated and complacent and clearly doesn't really work. The taxpayers pay for it.
Does anyone know much are European businesses paying for US and Chinese cloud services per year? If we can pay 10B€ in order to move 20B€ of spending back into the EU then I'm all for it, no matter if we innovate or just subsidize existing providers.
I've never raised capital or founded a startup in Europe, but from what I've been told by Europeans there are several challenges that the continent should try tackling
- Talent and Pay gap with the US
- Risk averse investors
- Over-regulated markets
I don't see how this plan will solve any of the above.
The only thing that's going to happen is that those big and old companies will get their hands on that funding while fulfilling exactly zero of their promises.
In France if you want to run an open WiFi you need a license from the national comms authority for instance.
But it won't happen. Too much bureaucracy. It's in the European mindset.
Out of high-tech domain, I was thinking that my grandma could sell the jam she makes - but she can't sell it legally if it's produced in her own house - no matter how low is the production. Maybe just at some kind of farmers market, but that is iffy.
If I want to invoice some custom development for software, I can not do it as an individual. I either need a BS in Compute Science or setup a SRL.
The romantic view of starting out in the garage is quite illegal in these parts.
You need to spend a lot just to test a business idea. And what yous spend is not actually investing in the business, but just wasting time and resources with the bureaucracy.
You have to be a cripple or not worked for like a year or two in order to be eligible for some very minimal sum a month, and even that is taken away from you if you don't actively look for work and haven't found it in 6 to 18 months.
The whole thing is crafted in a way that unless you are living in shanty towns and rely on your relatives stealing food and clothes for you, then you will not want to descend that low on the social ladder just to get something like 200 EUR or so. And that implicit and indirect discouragement works really well; people just don't bother pursuing social help because it's meaningless and 99% of the time you won't get it anyway. Only the gypsies are persistent in it.
It's every man for himself here in EE. I am not complaining by the way; I've never known any other state of things so I don't actually care about social safety nets at all. But when we here in EE heard about the "Corona stimulus packages" (basically you get money because of the pandemic even if you didn't lose a job) then a lot of us couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of the idea that something like that would ever happen here.
There's only the social safety tax which you get clubbed if you don't pay. Other than that you are on your own and will pay out of pocket for whatever thing you imagine the safety net should have provided.
And once you have a business set up then the fun starts. For extra sadism, try winding down your business!
I wonder if Europeans know US companies of much bigger dimensions are capable of keeping their own accounting and the sky is not falling. But in Romania, every month the accountant must get the paperwork, do the magical incantations (that nobody! reads). The Annual report even costs extra since it's more stuffy and it gets uploaded to the Finance Ministry so they get a chance to do nothing with it.
Sorry for the rant, I'm also traumatised by living here and knowing it could be different.
Doesn't matter the private sector is crippled by endless regulations if more and more jobs are created!
The only country where these are not dominant is simply the one where they prevent these winners from entering, that would be China, they have their own cloud, search, retail etc.
Your first year in business should not be spent on lawyers and accountants, but in Germany, it's unavoidable. It's a serious barrier to small entrepreneurship.
I run a simple website, and keeping it online takes a surprising amount of time. The law is damn hard to follow, even with the best of intentions. I don't even want to think about hiring people.
Simplifying immigration would also help. I need to renew my freelance visa. I can't get an appointment. Nobody can. I have to go to a government office at 6 AM and queue until 10 AM to get an appointment. It takes 2-3 months to get a visa in general. If you don't speak German, you'd need an interpreter.
There are a few other steps I didn't have to go through, but they're not easier. Everything involves fighting for an appointment 2-4 weeks in the future, then trying to figure out your position in an opaque system. If you're in trouble, good luck emailing or phoning anyone. The immigration authority answers in 3-4 weeks, if at all.
The list goes on and on. I can't imagine building a disruptive business in such an environment. Running a blog is already a pain in the ass.
It works well, and the pricing is very appealing. But it's not even remotely in the same league as AWS/GC/Azure.
All you get is DNS, private networks, load balancers VMs and storage volumes. That's it.
Sure, you can self-host Kubernetes, and they even have a CSI driver for mounting volumes and an official Terraform provider. Which is great.
But you miss out on the incredibly rich service offerings you get from the others.
It's a great start though, and I hope they keep expanding their offerings.
IMHO Hetzner is far above AWS/GC/Azure in price and simplicity.
The only drawback I see in Hetzner is that they don't have a lot of data centers with a relevant geographic dispersion, but that's only relevant for a Unicorn-level scale, or applications that require TP99.99 latency in the lower-end of the double-digit scale uniformly throughout the globe.
How can a serious company using a relational database get by without paying for database expertise in some way or another?
But is "companies of scale" what "modern devs" refer to? What is a "serious" company?
There is a lots of parameters that goes into the choice of self-hosted DB / managed DB, not just if the devs are "modern", or the company is "serious".
There are other companies, though, that have great cloud-managed DB offerings. Herzer (I'm not previously familiar with it so don't know if they already do this) would do better to just partner with one of these companies in a "marketplace" like arrangement.
I was extremely close to switching to Aiven-managed postgres until GCP finally supported point-in-time-recovery on postgres.
They compete primarily with companies like DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, OVH, Scaleway and traditional co-location and dedicated hosts.
Look at the software offerings from Hetzner, they're barely existent. AWS and Hetzner are very clearly not in the same business. AWS makes its money primarily off of software services, Hetzner makes money primarily off of primitive (basic) hosting. The AWS software side of the business has enormous margins compared to the primitive hosting side. You'll find that Hetzner barely has any margin, as with all the others in their segment. Meanwhile AWS is a half a trillion dollar global juggernaut, funded by its software margins.
This assertion makes no sense at all. I mean, if you're in the business of getting an online business up and running, it seems to me that both do provide the infrastructure that allows you to achieve your goals.
Arguably, AWS and GCP have more data centers spread throughout the world, but beyond unicorn-scale companies you'd be hard pressed to find any business that does need that sort of infrastructure. Yet, when you're at that scale you're far better off running your own infrastructure, both in terms of cost but also reliability.
Could you elaborate on this? Whose infra are they selling? Could I get it directly from them?
I think you don't talk about hetzner.
Scaleway looked closer to an AWS competitor but I haven't used it enough to know how good it is.
I've tried out Scaleway a while ago , and unfortunately they double-charged my CC just because. I'm not sure how widespread is that behavior, but to me it was enough to remain a OVH/Hetzner client.
Maybe we could create EU cloud catalog website for people to find all the providers that actually already exist (in Sweden the company Glesys is a similar provider).
Only gripe is that they only have servers in Europe, wish they had at least North/South American + Asian centers too.
Now if only they would start offering managed K8s and enable us to switch from $US-BASED provider.
Tried to use it earlier this year. Opened an account to host a new project.
Went to login the next week to create the instances and launch the projects. Couldn't login because the Hetzner console was broken for 2 days. Yes you heard right, everything was broken and unusable for 2 days. Imagine the AWS console down for 2 days for comparison, that doesn't happen.
Few days later when the service was restored. I found out the account was banned. It seems they ban new accounts automatically because they're afraid of bitcoin miners or something. It's not uncommon among cloud providers to ask for an ID or something to verify the account, only problem, Hetzner banned the account but didn't ask for anything.
Couldn't raise a ticket to have the account unlocked because the only way to raise a ticket is to open the account and raise a ticket, that's not possible with the account locked.
Tried to contact support through the provided support email on their site. They never replied. Tried to contact again. They never replied.
At that point the project launch was 2 weeks late. Had to have horrific meetings to explain why everything was late with my reputation on the line, all the fault of Hetzner. Will never use again.
> So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.
> His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
> All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
> Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
> There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
> It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
> All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
> Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.
Emphasis mine. Good luck trying that in europe. Full rant: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
1. In Europe salaries are not worth personal sacrifices
2. No compay aims for IPO, few are public
Maybe, if you'd hire only desperate people from Spain, Italy, Poland, Greece, and Romania, AND they all had a mortgage... then squeeze like this would work.
That's exactly it!!
Refusing to do what you're told will in fact get you fired in most European companies as well. I actually witnessed that happening not too long ago. So what's even the argument here?
The scheme is not sustainable but at least it prevents social upheaval
It will be the most expensive and unreliable "cloud services" with arrogant customer service and 24 months contracts.
Hehe, the most expansive one is the direct copper to vm (DCtV) with unlimited Volume ;))
[1] after exceeding 3GB of storage the IO operations are limited to 32kbit/s
Does not sound like lot when compared to the annual invest of even just one of the IaaS giants.
I can see it could make sense as a solution to some particular problems though – European regulations often forbid banks from processing/storing customer data in other countries, so even though the tech is provided by the American tech giants, having everything hosted locally makes it possible for local financial services to finally move away from hosting everything on premises.
China is successful in that sphere compared to India because they closed the market and developed sustainable and partially better alternatives to American products.
Europe must so the same - tax and limit American products. Let the home market copy and adapt then innovate. This is THE ONLY way.
i do not like American products at all. i would love to see alternatives that actually work and are competitive.
This would lead to a local tech scene, actually REALLY localised products (where you dont have to wait till google decides to roll out features in Germany after 7 years) and best of all: JOBS. This would lead to millions of jobs. It would make Europe super interesting for high skilled labor and bring a nice twist into the migration problem we are facing now.
Yes, this would hurt America, but yeah... who cares? They are not paying taxes anyway.
And look at China. Look at their amazing apps and services they have there. We have NOTHING here. It is time to do the right thing and to say bye to American companies. We can make our own companies.
Calling the ban or taxing of uber "internet censorship" is too funny... lol
I want a future where the "foundational" internet services (like chat, broadcast social, payments, etc) are decentralised/federated. And it seems like that's the end result of increased internet-service protectionism.
This won't be possible with all internet services, but it seems plausible for several of the large, stabilised ones. Though I'm not sure whether we're quite ready for it yet.
The European telecommunication companies could have built another search engine. Via DNS, the telecom companies had all the server contact knowledge that Microsoft is prying from users' memory with their data collecting.
There was Cliqz, a European search engine, that got dismantled due to Covid, without anybody offering some emergency funding to keep it going.
If a EU firewall is installed, millions of jobs will be created because everything will be done manually again. European companies had the opportunity to create competitive companies, but they didn't. Why should they create a good-enough Google if Google is banned? More likely, they will create a worse Altavista, and they are cut off of all the innovation that builds on Google.
The next unicorns, they don't rely on Google's blessing. Everybody can build them, even a company in Europe. Using their developers to copy Google would be a waste of talent and opportunities. China has to do it to control their news, but why should Europe?
After all, there are no American companies demanding the shutdown of Google just so that they can create the next innovative products. They just create them. If American companies can innovate despite Google, why can't European companies do the same?
The reason for I(C)T to exist is to optimize until all those are gone! Otherwise you can go back to FAX, Phone, Post and paper files, and would probably more 'efficient' because of less friction between cybernetic fiction and factory floor.
Why?
No doubt you'd be the first to howl should an American say "I do not like European (tech) products at all". (Well, if there were any to dislike.)
>i would love to see alternatives that actually work and are competitive.
Why not ask for the moon and the stars while you're at it? You make it sound like all that is needed to develop (as tachyonbeam pointed out) European equivalents to "Google, Duckduckgo, YouTube, Uber, Facebook, Dropbox, Amazon, Netflix, etc" is to shut down access from anywhere in Europe to and from these companies. Do this today and tomorrow EUGoogle and EuroFacebook will appear as if out of nowhere! Why didn't Brussels (or Paris, or Berlin) think of this already?
This isn’t far fetched - it’s a well understood result of Chinas Great Firewall. With American companies banned in China, Chinese companies were free to copy American firms and capture the value of the Chinese market. Protectionism has work, and even India is considering it
In Russia Yandex (search engine) and VKontakte (social network) were and still are quite successful (Google and Facebook were never banned, unlike China). And they were not created to control and/or suppress free speech (at least originally: Putin didn't care what happens in the Internet until around 2014, and it was free from censorship).
For reference I'm a 23 year old from the US. Nothing I have is made in Europe and I don't deal with any EU companies. Even my bike computer was made by a US company and built in China.
What EU tech companies should I check out? What ones are on your radar?
Also note that the EU is not always trying to push for global regulations - it's trying to push for EU-wide regulations which, by virtue of being strictest and a superset of global regulations, often end up as global regulations.
Then again, I could also see that being an advantage. For example, TakeAway.com was one of a number of European companies able to quickly capture their local market. They could independently gain a foothold, and only then did consolidation start. In a more homogenous market, a big player might be able to quickly drown out stronger players with more unfortunate timing.
Sure, but don't forget about B2B markets. Consumer tech does not make up the entire tech industry. There have been some successful B2B tech companies from Europe like SAP and, more recently, Celonis:
https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/21/celonis-a-leader-in-big-da...
There is a lot of faded glory. Nokia and Ericsson really kicked off the cell phone revolution and are still big in infrastructure. Skype. Linux of course was started in Europe, CERN started the www too.
You know what every single Modern ( Not just leading edge ) manufacture have as bottle neck? EUV / TwinScan from ASML in Netherland. ( Or you could include the Trio ASM, ASML, and BESI )
You know 60%+ of Fortune Global 2000 will be using the same ( dreaded ) thing for their Supply Chain Management ( And possibly ERP and CRM ). Its called SAP. I remember a year ago someone on HN said they never heard of SAP, well if you are only working in Software Tech side of things you wont heard of it. But just like Excel it is pretty much everywhere in non tech, large size enterprise.
Spotify
If you count Qualcomm as tech, then every mobile network in the world would have either ( or Both ) Nokia and Ericsson behind them.
Those are just few on top of my head. I am sure there are plenty more.
Alibaba wants to spend $30B just to compete:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/20/alibaba-to-invest-28-billion...
If the EU wants to win, it would have to spend an order of magnitude more, and even then, there is a risk that such a top down endeavor wont work. That’s probably why it was scaled back to 10B, because it would be more amenable.
They should try to move to where the ball is going.
Invest the money in decentralized resource management. Incentivize citizens to install software that contributes computational power to something bigger than itself that is useful for everyone.
- close the market - limits or ban American products. there is no reason why Amazon or Google cannot be copied and made better.
2 main objectives i see there:
- protectionism and ban of American stuff speaks against our "transatlanic"""friendship""" and our "common" values meme - we have a terrible fragmented market. chinese have a 1.4bn people population, Americans do have almost 400m. Try to make an app here in Europe for 20 languages, 20 law systems. it's a nightmare.
The EU has caused this for themselves. It is nearly impossible to start a small tech company in the EU, due to the vaugeness of the GDPR (Yes, I know people will claim it helps privacy but people are not willing to pay for online content so it will be unprofitable in the EU).
Not even going into the future plans of the EU to "regelate" tech that make it literally impossible to start the next Google or Youtube.
The US would of course immediately respond in kind. The EU's actions would essentially eliminate the WTO and any pretense that there is a system of functional global trade or globalism; it would amplify the notion that we've entered a new era of hyper nationalism.
The EU bet would be: the US benefits a lot more from its tech dominance in Europe, than the EU benefits from having the US tech companies in the EU. That's a correct bet.
The more serious problem is, the only proper and fair response is to ban all EU products across the board from the US market so as to match the scale of the economic limitation (given the US dominance in tech is so outsized). Just banning EU tech from the US wouldn't be nearly enough.
Since it would be declaring a new era of overt nationalism, the US should also then pull all troops and military gear from EU member nations, revoke all military alliances with EU members, void NATO, and tell Russia to have as much fun as it wants to with Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Scandinavia, Moldova, Romania and the Baltics. Declare that the US no longer has any interest in Europe's security, the US will not interfere; declare annexation season open. Russia will almost immediately begin taking territory from its neighbors (in all sorts of contrived ways). In net this will massively increase the cost of defense for all EU members, will weaken the EU as a value proposition (Russia will offer a security blanket if you join their side, which some will go for), and will severely burden their economies. This will de facto destroy the EU dream, gradually splitting Europe backward into West and East.
Unfortunately what would also happen next, is the US would perceive the EU as a hostile competing power. To the hawks in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the US system, that would put toppling weaker governments in Europe back on the table as a reasonable exercise (as in the immediate post WW2 decades), to attempt to install governments more favorable to the US. This would cause severe chaos and instability all over Europe and also new European wars inevitably.
(And innovations in the conventional definition, meaning incremental refinements of technological solutions, pretty much trickle out every time you pay r&d to work on something)
I'm betting this will (among other things) result in open source work on stuff like CEPH, OpenStack, etc.
When US companies come to EU to buy companies, they are literally buying innovation.
What? No they're not.
They're buying everything: customers, IP, tech, you name it. And you can see that by a simple Google search.
However unfortunately there is a far more realistic chance that most of that money will get lost in management spheres which have never seen a single line of code.
The estimates for 2020 so far by the IMF have the US at $20.8 trillion, China at $15.2 trillion, and the EU at $14.9 trillion (this will be the first year since the EU's inception that China will have a larger economy than the EU).
EU should simply make the conditions of selling to US to be less favorable than growing it in EU. Heavy taxation on these aggressive takeovers, and tax benefits to continue to do business in EU, would be a great incentive.
For one, the EU is not an authoritarian state with absolute power over every facet of life. Also, it is not legally the owner of all assets in it's territory.
In no way comparable.
Let’s face it - our politicians are bought and paid for and local tech companies want to skim from the gravy train.
It's pathetic that people in Germany and other countries have to pay 50% taxes for BS like this.
Well, "this BS" is an insignificant part of what those taxes cover. Germany pays about 1/3 of the EU budget, so its share of these 10 Billion is less than a tenth of this year's federal coronavirus relief budget.
I'm not talking about progression and the brackets, as it doesn't help comparing to other countries.
42% is the marginal tax rate (and 45% above 250k). The effective tax rate only exceeds 30% above ca. 71k EUR.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycos_Europe
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christoph_Mohn
I don't remember the amount of money anymore, but it was huge, and dead for me from the moment of announcement of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertelsmann involvement.
Does anyone know examples of EU-wide mega-engineering projects like this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project
One thing is certain - they are bloody expensive.
Some European BigCos are gonna grab big bucks and show barely anything for it. Smaller fish are going to massively milk the program for grants that vaguely have something to do with the cloud. All the while the eurocrats are going to gather political points.
These EU folks can't take a step back to see what could be removed to get there?
In an era of cheap money, when investors don't know where to put their money the EU believes tech needs state funding? Really?
#Bureaucracy
The form of this article exemplifies a common problem: Money is only part of the equation. What, in practice, is the money going into? What's supposed to come out?
* e.g. aerospace not withstanding companies like SpaceX.
This leads to issues for everyone who is then limited to EU cloud providers.
General speaking, perhaps its good enough for base load of small companies but you do not want to develop on a telekom based cloud platform.
They are much slower and basically non innvative.