SAP splashes €20B on Euro sovereign cloud push
theregister.com
theregister.com
> If you want to compete you must also invest in associated PaaS and SaaS-services supported by a development framework to code and integrate it all.
People have got to start somewhere, and they can't really take shortcuts. Messages of the type "you need to build all the spectrum of services available on big US brands ovenight" aren't really useful.
Better committing $20B now (by one player) than only talking about it and continuing to rely on others.
And while the point about OSes is also well made, there is no reason to believe that this will not also happen, albeit at a slower pace and via community mechanism rather than SAP funding.
I've seen many projects that go in that direction that have been launched. In a way, one has to 'thank' Trump for incentivising fixing something that should already be done right from the start, and which otherwise would have left undone for longer.
Right now cloud is just at the bottom of a huge equation... There's mobile, OS, apps and AI frontier models and chips to tackle to say the least. And all that with ferocious competition from US behemoths. I just don't see that happening. If a nationalistic US government were to chop off or heavily tariff the UE on digital goods and services exports, it would probably crash markets on both sides of the pond, I don't see that happening given the UE propensity to negotiate and bend over when push comes to shove.
Might sound absurd but tell someone on 1st January 2000 on Linux kernel mailing list that one day, half of the world population would be holding Linux operating system in their hands and here we are - excluding Apple, every single device is running a Linux kernel.
I worked on FlexiScale, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexiScale. The Architecture of IaaS provider doesn't need to look massively different from k8s.
- Node Agent that either listens or connects back to an API for instructions. - An API to request your workload. - Various decision daemons. IPAM, Block Storage, Etc.
What's missing in Europe is a Culture of Tech Leadership and Investment.
Case in point, I wrote or rewrote borderline 100% of an early European Cloud Provider, and I've never heard of nor been approached to work for another project like this. Even if one existed, they likely wouldn't come anywhere near offering a salary I'd be interested in, and leadership would almost certainly be full of people who haven't built a Cloud Provider before.
( This isn't so say I'm the most credible candidate in the market, but I have had salaried offers for IC in Meta and HFT in London. I'd have loved to build another cloud provider ( with more than a team of 3-5 ) but I've spent most of my career as a contractor interfacing with "cloud" teams offering things like vsphere, wondering where it all goes wrong. )
Yeah... I wonder if that culture of investment comes from people all over the world giving money to US companies so they can invest. I guess, once they've alienated all of their economic partners to the point sales only happen forced at gunpoint, we'll find out that this "culture of tech leadership and investment" was always an abundance of cash derived from a global market.
Cash definitely helps, because people don't like working for nothing. But there's also a culture of entrepreneurship, not related to wealth, that the US (and other places, e.g. South Africa) has, that lots of European places don't.
But now that the US has shown Europe what cloud is, and done all the investment and learning, maybe Europe can copy one a bit.
Europe is really risk adverse, yet technology by its very nature require you to experiment and fail more than you succeed.
Everyone only uses 10% of them and complains that it'd be a lot simpler to use if the 90% went away.
But everyone uses a different 10% of it =)
The same is true with cloud offerings. There's no way to force full feature parity with AWS without a trillion euro investment.
But can they find the 10% that is enough for the relevant users? The ones that can't for legal and privacy reasons have their data exist physically in the US or even within US companies.
A better one would be Microsoft 365 and AWS.
Sure migrating out of Excel might be difficult, but migrating out of PowerPoint, Teams or SharePoint? Not necessarily.
In fact, migrating out of EC2 or S3 is almost trivial as most competitors even offer identical APIs.
Also, any company that is so vendor locked is asking for trouble and huge bills.
Since we're talking about Europe, my first instinct here is that I want to double-check what they mean by "billion"[1].
This article being in English makes me assume short scale, but SAP being German makes it possible (even if unlikely) that it could be a mistranslation that everyone else just copied.
If only any of these articles could link to a source. But searching for literal quotes doesn't seem to return any authoritative source, or even any transcripts (if this was announced verbally).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#German-s...
The idea of SAP spending 20e12 EUR seems hard to believe.
and the relevant quote: "Durch eine langfristige Investition von über 20 Milliarden Euro setzt SAP einen klaren strategischen Fokus auf digitale Souveränität."
"more than 20000 million euros"
> 20 Milliarden Euro
Yep, so the source uses the long scale "milliard" and the translations use short scale "billion", it checks out.
Short form is the norm these days all over Europe.
even if they truly spend 20B over 5 years, it's nothing.
20 billions in the pocket of Hertzner or OVH to build a cloud, I believe it but 20 billions with SAP, I don't.
My favourite is simplicity. I can understand its Cloud offering in minutes, use it to its full potential within hours to solve business problems. Back when I worked for an AWS-based unicorn, AWS took lion's share of my time.
My second favourite is the ability to move resources between accounts. The effort my fellow colleagues spend now for such migrations is enormous, and they justify it by saying that even AWS can not do this without destroying/recreating resources and copying data.
It's easy to be simple when you have almost no products to sell.
Looking at Scaleway, I think this strategy paid off.
Is 20B enough to offer a competitor to AWS? Not a chance in hell. But that specifically say that's not what they're offering.
The only other meaning I can assign to "cloud" is IT infrastructure. I think you can easily compete with Google Workspace for 20B. But I think that's probably not what they meant, I think they just meant "here are some buzzwords and a big number, please write an article about us".
(The other meaning for "cloud" that you can obviously build for 20B is something like Hetzner. But... We already have that).
Anyway, there are obviously pretty serious things you can build for 20B and it's probably good if we try to build some of them in Europe...
I very much doubt SAP has the competence to replicate this. I'll also bet those unnamed open-source technologies are mostly sprinkled on top of proprietary Azure tech, like the rest of their infrastructure.
I doubt thats the case.
why you'd want to fork it it beyond me.
In large cloud environments it's about who controls the data, not the physical location. Gigabytes of data can be transferred in seconds to other side of the world. With a flip of a switch it can be totally erased or made inaccessible even to people with physical access to the servers.
What annoys me to no end is the temporal amnesia there is to this. Sure, yeah, true, cloud providers are practically an American cartel at this point in time. But cloud itself is a fairly novel thing in most corporate histories: we used to run most things on premise with people on payroll, and that was a single digit years ago. Moving out of the cloud is as valid an option, if not a better one, than trying to come up with a competing cartel.
One is highly bureaucratic, highly regulated, credentialed with at least a M.Sc. required, top down management tied to politics, defense and academia and super slow moving needing a strong manufacturing base, while the other is fast moving, less rules based, flat hierarchy, no credential/degree required, and not tied to government policies, academia or manufacturing.
Basically, one is "safety and national security first" the other is "move fast and break things and we'll worry about the rules we broke after we have a successful product". If your comparison were true then Europe would have nailed SW too not just planes. But they didn't.
There's also the culture of failure around entrepreneurship where in the US that's considered a right of passage to try and fail at your own business, while in Europe it's shameful and can financially wreck you for life if your small company goes bankrupt.
Then there's the WLB differences. By the time European companies get unblocked from some project manager's 2 month vacation and then from the tech lead's 5 month sick leave, the competing Americans have already launched 5 different software products and pivoted the company 3 times and found a market they can capture. Long blocks in the dev process when nobody answers emails for months because of vacations and sick lave can work in Aerospace industry where Airbus has a monopoly, or other such niche industries where EU "mittlesand" companies are the only players you can buy from, but doesn't work in creating SW companies that need to be fast to market otherwise someone else eats your lunch due to an even playing field and lack of regulations that act like a moat.
Basically, you can't win a race against unscrupulous opponents who disregard regulations and prioritizes financial success at all costs when you prioritize WLB and following regulations. Straight up. The playing field is completely unbalanced here in favor of the US and China. That's why rich Europeans put their money in US SW companies instead of EU ones.
The problem IMO is politics, not nationalism (which only enters into the politics indirectly). European integration is a half-done project. Political forces that want to finish the job get cancelled out by political forces that want to undo the progress we've already made with the net effect of nothing getting done in any direction, maintaining a status-quo that pretty much nobody wants, and nobody (nationalist or otherwise) ever wanted. And that status quo is that doing business in a pan-european way is a bureaucratic hellscape.
The best market to expand besides your own Euro-country is the US but tthen when you enter that market you are too small of a fish to do anything.
There is no such thing as european companies. It's german companies, french companies all mainly focused on their main markets.
A bit like SpaceX doing rocketry with modern CAD and computing power. It’s much cheaper and faster iteration from what NASA had to deal with.
The problem is, the European mindset towards software. Maybe Americans doing it in Europe can have much greater chance.
Isn’t it? Iaas is a lot more than just VPS and a few PaaS offerings, you need object storage, a command line and more. Last I looked the European cloud vendors were very lacking.
but SAP that want to build it??? idk about that, rather prefer OVH or Hetzner to take the helm
For example:
* Object storage: lots of horror stories out there regarding flakey performance so hard to justify sticking mission critical stuff there.
* Private networking: Again, too many anecdotes about loss of service. Lots of people just using the public IP6 interfaces to avoid their private networking entirely. And private networks are IP4 only.
* Kubernetes CSI: I've had issues with this where a PV gets in some locked state and I can't remove from console.
I'd love to see more competition here.
We (lithus.eu) deal with their custom solutions team regularly and often provision private networks in the 10-100G range. On top of that we deploy MinIO and OpenEBS/Mayastor, and the whole thing just hums along very nicely indeed.
Its not just cloud. There is a lot of reliance on mobile OSes too, also American (and anything that needs updates is effectively controlled by whoever supplies the updates).
From past HN stories the EU is developing an age verification app that only works on Google attested Android or on iOS. The NHS relies on AWS. British courts use MS Teams for remote hearings. The majority of my clients (apart from some I guide elsewhere) use AWS - its the safe choice. AWS is the current "nobody ever got fired for buying X" supplier. Gmail holds the same position for email.
And it also seems that themoviedb.org also has an IP ban on Hetzner, found this out last week trying to build a tool that would've needed it to enrich its data.
You could get one running on their own custom hardware for like 4€/month, enough for a bunch of small utilities.
Tried to get one some time ago, but they've sold all of the capacity and it's not available. Need to check if that has changed.
A big EU business moving to their own cloud infrastructure is a good thing, even though you and I can't immediately take advantage of it.
Supports lots of countries, affordable and the people there are super nice.
There are a lot of small providers here and there, but they can't offer the scale of even GCP (the smallest of the bunch).
Sorry but the ones with the money in the bank are not the ones who will actually be concerned or capable of working towards sovereignty because its opposed to their income source.