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Europe signs off on €1.2B for homegrown cloud project (www.theregister.com)
submitted 11 months ago by Sagan@eslemmy.es to c/europe@feddit.de
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.cafe/post/1679861

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I do wish EC pulls this off. It would great having an actual home-grown competitor to cloud providers. EU does data protection better than anyone else, this would very much be a symbiotic relationship.

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[-] anteaters@feddit.de 46 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

19 companies are involved, including SAP and Orange in the Cloud-Edge Capabilities workstream and Deutsche Telecom in the Cloud-Edge Continuum Infrastructure workstream.

Yeah those names really don't inspire confidence. On the other hand, SAP and Telekom did successfully and quickly implement the corona warn app in Germany back in 2020 as FOSS - so this might result in something eventually.

I'd recommend to just throw the €1.2B at Hetzner with Nextcloud and be done with the European solution.

[-] lichtmetzger@feddit.de 17 points 11 months ago

While Hetzner has done a lot to make Nextcloud convenient to use and stable, it's still an overbloated mess of a software with tons of bugs.

Perfect for an EU-wide project!

[-] twei@feddit.de 2 points 11 months ago

aren't they working on rewriting the thing in go?

[-] nachtigall@feddit.de 3 points 11 months ago

That's owncloud, from which Nextcloud was forked.

[-] Anekdoteles@feddit.de 13 points 11 months ago

God, whenever I hear SAP I think of disaster and cringe. SAP has the sexappeal of satellite telephones.

[-] Send_me_nude_girls@feddit.de 3 points 11 months ago

But they pay good lobby money.

[-] Anekdoteles@feddit.de 1 points 11 months ago

Exactly. The sucessful lobbying of the German automobile industry is a good analogy why SAP sucks.

[-] Sagan@eslemmy.es 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

€1.2B at Hetzner with Nextcloud and be done with the European solution.

That would be nice, Hetzner has been providing good service for a while

[-] vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 11 months ago

I’m trying to imagine what you’d have to do to have OVH bill you 1.2 billion.

[-] anteaters@feddit.de 10 points 11 months ago

Accidentially click on "Buy the company"

[-] gencha@feddit.de 2 points 11 months ago

They wasted millions on the development of an app that is a trivial joke and they still needed several cycles to reach stability. Hetzner+Nextcloud is a cute toy, but has nothing to do with actual cloud infrastructure. 1B is a joke investment when your competitors are Amazon and Microsoft. This money is going to be wasted entirely and there will be zero useful products coming out of it. Exactly like the COVID app

[-] taladar@feddit.de 2 points 11 months ago

The Hetzner Cloud Server API would actually make a pretty good start for what you call "actual cloud infrastructure", certainly closer to that than NextCloud.

[-] Havald@lemmy.world 12 points 11 months ago

Hell yeah! It's about time we bust big atmosphere's monopoly on cloud generation!

[-] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 1 points 11 months ago

spraying silver fog from planes to seed clouds comes to mind... (checkout geo-engineering)

[-] tal@lemmy.today 10 points 11 months ago

Europe does not have the best of track records when it comes to cloud and IT projects. Gaia-X, a project to provide a federated and secure infrastructure, was proposed in 2019. As of 2023, it remains a work in progress.

Yeah, when I saw the title, I thought that this announcement was about Gaia-X, which sounded similar.

[-] taladar@feddit.de 4 points 11 months ago

proposed in 2019. As of 2023, it remains a work in progress.

This actually doesn't sound so bad for a large project but I am fairly certain it was proposed earlier than 2019.

[-] Anekdoteles@feddit.de 2 points 11 months ago

Gaia-X was such a typical conservative project it's even funny: deny reality and put the responsibility of policy makers on businesses.

If it would have been a good idea, private entities would have already started doing it. European tech didn't need ideological inspiration by politics, but funding. Money. They need money.

[-] Sigmatics@lemmy.ca 9 points 11 months ago

Sounds like a huge subsidy for existing big business to me...

[-] sexy_peach@feddit.de 5 points 11 months ago

It's going to go to venture capitalists and startups, isn't it?

[-] tal@lemmy.today 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Well, it doesn't say, but it sounded kinda similar to Gaia-X to me. If it is, that involved a lot of large companies that had been around for a long time, so I'd be inclined to guess not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia-X

The founding members on the German side[10] included:

  • Beckhoff Automation
  • BMW
  • Bosch
  • DE-CIX
  • Deutsche Telekom
  • German Edge Cloud
  • PlusServer
  • SAP
  • Siemens

The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, the International Data Spaces Association, and the European cloud provider association CISPE were co-founders of the Gaia-X Association.

On the French side, founding members included:

  • Amadeus
  • Atos
  • Docaposte
  • Électricité de France (EDF)
  • Institut Mines-Télécom (IMT)
  • Orange
  • Outscale
  • OVHcloud
  • Safran
  • Scaleway

At least some of the above Gaia-X member companies are listed in the article as also being part of this new cloud project:

The research, development, and deployment phases are expected to run from 2023 to 2031, and 19 companies are involved, including SAP and Orange in the Cloud-Edge Capabilities workstream and Deutsche Telecom in the Cloud-Edge Continuum Infrastructure workstream.

[-] autotldr@lemmings.world 1 points 11 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Both pots of money are to be used to promote local interests in a regional computing sector controlled by US giants.

The public funding - from taxpayers in seven European member states including Germany, France, Hungary, the Netherland, Italy, Poland and Spain - comes as AWS, Microsoft and Google continue to dominate the provision of cloud services in Europe.

Stats from Synergy Research published a year ago showed the trio had a local market share of 72 percent.

One thousand jobs are expected to be created in AI, cybersecurity, data, cloud, and software engineering.

The cash will cushion the blow from market failures, but companies developing open source software are expected to grant permissive, non-restrictive licenses to any interested party.

And if things go really well, a claw-back mechanism is in place to force companies to return part of the state aid.

The original article contains 500 words, the summary contains 142 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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