France, Germany Back European Cloud Computing 'Moonshot' (reuters.com) 78
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: France and Germany threw their weight on Thursday behind plans to create a cloud computing ecosystem that seeks to reduce Europe's dependence on Silicon Valley giants Amazon, Microsoft and Google. The project, dubbed Gaia-X, will establish common standards for storing and processing data on servers that are sited locally and comply with the European Union's strict laws on data privacy. 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. "We are not China, we are not the United States, we are European countries with our own values and with our own economic interest that we want to defend," his French counterpart Bruno Le Maire said in Paris in a joint video news conference.
In an initial step, 22 French and German companies will set up a non-profit foundation to run Gaia-X, which is not conceived as a direct rival to the "hyperscale" U.S. cloud providers but would instead referee a common set of European rules. "Building a European-based alternative is possible only if we play collectively," said Michel Paulin, CEO of independent French cloud service provider OVHcloud. One important concept underpinning Gaia-X is "reversibility," a principle that would allow users to easily switch providers. First services are due to be offered in 2021.
In an initial step, 22 French and German companies will set up a non-profit foundation to run Gaia-X, which is not conceived as a direct rival to the "hyperscale" U.S. cloud providers but would instead referee a common set of European rules. "Building a European-based alternative is possible only if we play collectively," said Michel Paulin, CEO of independent French cloud service provider OVHcloud. One important concept underpinning Gaia-X is "reversibility," a principle that would allow users to easily switch providers. First services are due to be offered in 2021.
Re:Oh thanks! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Likely, the reason they are doing this is to keep European data out of the hands of the US authorities.
Except European governments have less restrictions on government ransacking through people's papers than the US government does. That's why the article focuses on not being dependent on other nations, and privacy-from-corporations laws, and not what you said.
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i can only applaud this, but considering the bureaucracy i can only see this go down by 2250 and probably pass 20k checks on how to
Re: Oh thanks! (Score:1)
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Yes. *Europe* turned out to be the laughing stock of the world in 2020. Not, say, the US.
I'd say they have plenty of reasons not to want to rely on an autoritarian regime like, I would have said China 10 years ago, but you can lob in the US now as well.
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The 4th Reich's utter failure to help Italy and Spain at the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak is probably going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back and brings the whole empire down.
-jcr
Well, their complete failure to help (indeed, their punishment of) Greece when the banking sector went boom didn't lead to Greece leaving. I have very little faith left in the ability of European people to do something about what's happening in the EU. I had hoped that the combination of the financial fiasco and Brexit might have lead to a re-construction along democratic lines, but it hasn't worked out that way, sadly.
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The 4th Reich's utter failure to help Italy and Spain at the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak is probably going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back and brings the whole empire down.
-jcr
Well, their complete failure to help (indeed, their punishment of) Greece when the banking sector went boom didn't lead to Greece leaving. I have very little faith left in the ability of European people to do something about what's happening in the EU. I had hoped that the combination of the financial fiasco and Brexit might have lead to a re-construction along democratic lines, but it hasn't worked out that way, sadly.
The one thing that keeps getting forgotten about Greece is that it is one of the most corrupt banana republics in all of Europe. Furthermore, it's not like the Greeks didn't do this to them selves, they very much did. They voted for the politicians who got them into this mess and they kept voting for them for decades. While I am pretty pissed off by the fact that Germany and France didn't just make the banks who made the mistake of lending to this cluster-fuck of a country eat the losses and thus punish the
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And by punishment you mean giving them credit at far below the market rate? I wouldn't mind being punished the same way.
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Without monetary sovereignty their ability to do so is crippled.
The whole Eurozone is tied at the hip, it's an inevitable slide to federalism ... sovereignty a temporary illusion.
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Despite Trump's rambling executive order, free speech is doing pretty well on the US part of the internet. A little too well for people who can't stand Putin's 50 Ruble army using anonymity and free speech for psyops, but well nonetheless.
France has started dismantling it already on the EU side. Of course Biden could soon be in hot pursuit.
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Re:Oh thanks! (Score:5, Insightful)
As neither a citizen of the USA or the EU, I'd trust a EU cloud provider much more than any US corporation to protect my privacy.
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As neither a citizen of the USA or the EU, I'd trust a EU cloud provider much more than any US corporation to protect my privacy.
...and which is doubtless also what motivates Germany and France to do this.
Errr ... wutt? You're not making sense. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a EU funded cloud infrastructure project and has absolutely nothing to do with microblogging and social media built on top of it. It will, presumably, also have reasonable security and freedom from NSA and FSB and such. It will also come with rules that enforce compliance with the EU GDPR and similar rulings.
Whatever else happens on this project has nothing to do with the underlying infrastructure, and everything to do with common law of the respective countries of the EU.
I'd like to also note that right now this is nothing but some butt-ugly ambiguous slides and big words from EU politicians. If DE-Mail is anything to go by, this will be a spectacular failure and be replaced by some abstracted FOSS cloud infrastructure project that a small crew of tenthgraders come up with 3 years down the line.
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Now I know for sure that any such creation by the EU would be way worse than Tweeter and Facebook in terms of censorship and privacy violations.
Errr you think a large political union who actually has privacy protection laws will violate your privacy more than two American companies located in a country with laughably lax laws in the area, and one of those two companies which has been previously sanctioned by said political union?
It would be a sterile, soulless place where only the 'proper' messages would be allowed with mommy Merkel and daddy Macron benevolent smiling faces watching from the screen.
You seem to be unable to separate the EU from two countries you hate. The EU does not mandate proper messages, in fact they are largely supportive of free speech, as are many of their member nations. Now if you have a speci
Why do you need the goverment (Score:3)
2021 will be the year of the shocking cloud spends and talking about sucking everything back into a new rack in the old data center. We call that that the "CapX OpX merry go round."
Re:Why do you need the goverment (Score:5, Funny)
Are you fully leveraging the synergies enabled by next generation digital transformation modalities? Without a clear roadmap to the magic quadrant, competitors can out-agile you to consistently delivering customer delight. Secure on-prem cloud technologies allow immediate visibility into key stakeholder values. Markov blockchains are essential platforms for foundational innovations.
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Jesus, are you the Neo of CEO whisperers? I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
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psssst - Quantum AI fusion, too!
Re:Why do you need the goverment (Score:5, Funny)
Retention of those legacy approaches reduces business velocity. Our architecture demonstrates leadership for enterprises by continuous evaluation of emerging solutions-as-a-service. This facilitates an ongoing partnership relationship reflecting decisive revenue flow that rewards core competencies in hyperconverged development.
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This is hilarious. More please.
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Careful!
You are only a flowchart and a couple of glossy pictures of smiling ethnically-diverse people away from drowning in venture capital investments.
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I'm sorry, but that's a little too convincing. I'm going to have to ask what you're doing on a site intended for nerds.
Re:Why do you need the goverment (Score:4, Informative)
I am a simple engineer who is venting due to having to help write a proposal.
That piece was inspired by something that happened during the proposal kickoff meeting. The proposal manager introduced a reviewer as representing the Enabling Innovations group. She corrected him, saying that the group had been renamed to Solutions Empowerment. (Buzzwords have been changed to protect the guilty.)
I am pretty much convinced they are going to deliver negative net value for the customer....
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I don't even know how to respond to that. I feel for you.
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By all the gods, I'm glad I never went into management. Partly because I really suck at managing people, but mostly because I'd have to deal with people who seriously think that sort of drivel is actually important and adds value to a project. There's no way in the nine Hells that I could have kept my mouth shut.
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Honestly I see you're going to fail in business because you're unable to move the dial with your ideas.
Re: Why do you need the goverment (Score:1, Troll)
1) capitalism is bad
2) government is good
3) owning the means of production is good
4) lots of high paying jobs no one can fired from produces great looking numbers
5) G, A, M are American based companies so we can't control or tax them
6) Americans are so a gauche
7) ours is tax payer supported so it can never go out of business (see #4)
8) we hate Americans
9) Trump won't let us tax American companies to support our social welfare systems
10) there is no 10
11) he who controls the se
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This isn't a troll, dummy mod. It's reality. If you can dispute any of it, take your best shot.
Ok ...
1) BANG!
2) BANG!
3) BANG!
4) BANG!
5) BANG!
6) BANG!
7) BANG!
8) BANG!
9) BANG!
10) BANG!
11) BANG!
Happy now?
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Where do Europeans say that government is only good?
There's a lot of government critical movements in Europe. Some of the strongest EU haters are from within the EU.
Far worse, there are millions of Europeans still alive with a memory of strong government being...not so good.
Would that the younger generation paid attention before cheering on things like censorship under the false notion it may be safely wielded by democracy.
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Thankfully, we in the EU know that our governments can sometimes be incompetent, corrupt, etc.. However, we haven't really gone for the whole "Gubbermint's bad, okay?" corporate propaganda campaign because of Roosevelt's "New Deal" thing, & making guns for racist, homophobic, misogynistic nut-jobs a constitutional right, & forever trying to shrink the useful parts of government & allow the public justice system to be bought out by corporations so they can rule like robber barons, & elect an
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They'll almost certainly want to drop their data centers in Dublin, Frankfurt and Antwerp, the same as AWS and Azure, because that's where the fiber and power infrastructure is. They'll be starting at a deficit of a decade of experience, and since they won't pay scale wages they'll never catch up. I really don't foresee this being a success for anyone but consultants (who were undoubtedly the ones that gave them the idea in the first place.).
Re: Why do you need the goverment (Score:1)
I don't see the problem.
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" They'll be starting at a deficit of a decade of experience, and since they won't pay scale wages they'll never catch up."
There will be a law forcing people to use it because of privacy.
For now it's just allowed because there are no alternatives.
Re:Why do you need the goverment (Score:5, Insightful)
For the same reason the US has got it's hair on fire over Huawei. They look at these companies and see they're headquartered in America, run by Americans, and worry that the US government may have inordinate influence over them, possibly use them as platforms for espionage. Or, the cases of Amazon and Google, that they have become as big and powerful as a state.
The era of trust-busting in the United States started with Republican presidents with Republican-controlled Congress; John Sherman of the "Sherman" act was a Republican Senator. The small businessman base of the party feared that the wealth and political influence of big trusts like Standard Oil was undermining popular sovereignty.
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That was perhaps the biggest thing I remember from my paper on Teddy Roosevelt. He was concerned the amounts of money they had gave them power that, they felt, should only be controlled by democracy.
I was less cynical then, so didn't bother with concerns politicians may have been threatening controls to get kickbacks, legal or otherwise, the guiding principle and why people go into government in the first place in much of the world.
A very European solution (Score:1)
Re: A very European solution (Score:2)
Pretty much every government around? Except maybe China, NK, and Russia? And actually considered the best way to do it.
Including and especially the US? The last big thing the US govt did itself was the moon landing and the NHS.
Re:A very European solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Had you bothered to read the article, you would have realized they were aware that it would be unrealistic to try and do this, which is precisely why they have focused on the framework part and obtained industry opt-in from European cloud providers. Apparently the institution thought about this more than you did, but what else to expect from an anti-EU simpleton.
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Had you bothered to read the article, you would have realized they were aware that it would be unrealistic to try and do this, which is precisely why they have focused on the framework part and obtained industry opt-in from European cloud providers. Apparently the institution thought about this more than you did, but what else to expect from an anti-EU simpleton.
I can't speak for the GP, but I'll throw a bit more coal into the fire here. Give a competent IT professional $10 million, a few building permits, and two months, and it's possible to have a working datacenter. Hyperscale and geographically redundant? No. A dozen racks of air conditioned Poweredge servers running Kubernetes upon which at least some government agencies could start moving away from AWS, creating a positive feedback loop to improve capacity and redundancy? Yes.
The article doesn't mention fundi
Re:A very European solution (Score:4, Interesting)
If the focus were purely on building a hosting solution, you would be absolutely correct. The issue here are the regulatory frameworks and the extent to which data is allowed to move between countries and in and out of the EU. The GDPR is only one bit of legislation that governs a small subset of data, and even then, it's not implemented uniformly (different derogations, intersections with national-level legislation, data type exemptions, etc.). Part of what was missing in the GDPR was the free-flow of non-personal data (e.g. cloud metadata pertaining to a service provisioned for a specific user), so the FFD was quickly slammed through to try and patch this hole. Now the remaining parts are the sensitive category data for which no cross-border free-flow is possible (think medical data, pension / social security data, etc.) - this will come, in time, but no one is willing to wait for the legislation to catch up when the building blocks are already in place. Amazon and Google simply throw their hands up in the air and say "we're only the data processor, you're the controller, so compliance is your problem and we only do what you tell us" in order to shaft you with the liability and wash their hands of the matter. Solving, or at least coming up with a mechanism that can improve things here (especially for small businesses), is going to go a long way to improve the state of the art - and they're entirely right to say that this has to be solved in Europe, and we can not rely on American companies to do anything but find some way to weasel out of it wherever possible.
If their framework solution can start making in-roads on this problem, there are certainly large European companies that can step in and fill the infrastructure gap, or as you say, others will step in and create their own. The point of this framework is specifically to allow this sort of pop-up datacentre case to proceed while allowing users to transfer between them as needed. I expect they're going to run into practical problems here as each provider has a lot of their own tooling, so it's probably going to face the same hurdles as the data/service portability issue in the GDPR (well intended, but something that wasn't reviewed by a technical person until it was too late).
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Create the Bureau of Cloud to build a 2015 solution that will be ready to use in 2025.
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You mean like Airbus?
Made by Politicians, not Business? (Score:1)
But well known for having no Government, and 7 different Parliaments
B. Naming it after an incestuous God.
I guess they want it to bear a number of Titans
C. Allowing members to poach customers from their "friends" super easily.
So when one company's employee says/does something stupid, all of their customers can move to a competitor provider in minutes. Sounds like they want to make a European AWS because there can only be one winner in a system like
Geography Lessons Needed (Score:2)
Silicon Valley giants Amazon, Microsoft...
When did Seattle become part of Silicon Valley?
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When did Seattle become part of Silicon Valley?
Probably about the same time that Silicon Valley became a synonym for "evil American tech company".
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Sounds sensible (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure that sensible, but if you think that cloud computing is valuable, then that sounds like a sensible thing to do. It's important for stability that crucial infrastructure not be dependent on the good will of an external entity. The only alternative would be to diversify and make treaties for access with China and perhaps Russia as well as the US. But China is also imperious, and has vulnerable communications, Russia is a neighbor that has uncertain friendliness...so as a single supplier the US has seemed a better choice...until recently. But it would be better anyway to have anything crucial sourced locally.
P.S.: Analogues to this argument apply to every group/organization large enough to manage it's own crucial infrastructure of whatever nature. But you also need to balance costs vs value. To me, and for computers, even for small groups the balance has tended to favor local hosting, with possible live external backups. But those should be secondary.
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The two are not always at odds, cloud is increasingly being leveraged as a methodology, not just the traditional on-prem/external hosting decision. There is plenty of critical infrastructure that is run in cloud, just not in (or not entirely in) public cloud. People have realized that things like Kubernetes and other cloud-native projects do a pretty good of maintaining operability of their compute clusters, which allows them to throw out a lot of legacy tooling while still maintaining the reliability they
OVH customers generate mucho spam (Score:2)
They also hosted wikileaks and have had some information security issues...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Just sayin....
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If it wasn't for Wikileaks, the world wouldn't have evidence of America's military murdering civilians in cold blood.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/05/wikileaks-us-army-iraq-attack
Just sayin'...
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Fat lot of good it did. Anyone go to jail? Just Assange and a couple of the leakers. Shrub, Cheney, the Clintons, etc. are all still running around getting paid six figures to do a half hour speech.
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Excellent point. However, at least the Clintons can visit other countries without having to worry that they might be arrested and put on trial for war crimes.
Top five headlines for next story dupe (Score:1)
Story dupe is gone, by you never know when another might return. More alternate headlines:
"Germans and French rise again to seek world domination."
"Brats and Baguettes seek Billowing Bounty"
"Time has come for a cloud service with long names and indifferent service"
"Parlez Vous Cloud? Ja Bitte!"
"German and French secret service create worlds largest honeypot"
Health data lake (Score:2)
I was at an EU presentation and they talked about making a data lake of anonymized health records to enable AI tech. They also wanted to build their own Google since Google was just lucky, in the right place at the right time. Whatever, if itâ(TM)s good we can use it. At least it would be useful to our project if there actually did exist an open anonymized dataset...
ah, yes to enforce censorship (Score:1)
The EU needs to be able to enforce its crazy censorship rules on its subjects, so this makes perfect sense.
help reassert Europe's technological sovereignty, (Score:1)
> help reassert Europe's technological sovereignty,
I'm sorry, my stomach hurts so bad from laughing so hard.
You can't "reassert" what wasn't there to begin with. For the last 180 years advances in medicine, pharmacology, electronics, manufacturing, etc. have not come from Europe. I know the EU wants to feel like "Kind of a big United States and we can make things and stuff" but the regulations (referenced in the OP) hobble them so they can't win....
Then they try to pass laws to hobble US firms so every
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Ever hear of germ theory, anaesthetic, pasteurization, immunology, the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum...you incredible fuckwit?
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You allege, "Anesthesia was invented in the US ..."
"The modern era of anesthesia began in the late eighteenth century when chemists began to investigate the use of various gases. Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) discovered nitrous oxide in 1772, and in 1800 Humphry Davy (1778-1829) discovered that the gas had anesthetic properties when it was inhaled. In 1818 Davy's student Michael Faraday (1791-1867) determined that inhalation of ether had the same effect. Henry Hill Hickman (1800-1830) experimented with both
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Thanks for the laugh. An American grant drone working at an American institution, both frantically kissing American government ass for funding conduct a rewrite of history in an attempt to grab credit for work already done by others.
Quelle suprise.
You must have dived deep into some very unsavoury places to dig up that turd nugget.
And I'm not European, shithead.
Definition? (Score:2)
I do not think "moonshot" means what they think it means.
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https://whatis.techtarget.com/... [techtarget.com]
A moonshot, in a technology context, is an ambitious, exploratory and ground-breaking project undertaken without any expectation of near-term profitability or benefit and also, perhaps, without a full investigation of potential risks and benefits.
All due to lack investment capital and culture (Score:2)