In beautiful EU bureaucratic style It's a framework for how to talk about how a European Cloud could look like.

It's not about technical standards. It's about how we can talk about how we can think of maybe eventually deciding on how we can come up with standards that might one day lead to talk about implementations.

It represents to me everything that is wrong with the EU today. A bureaucratic monster that can't decide how to talk about things or come to any form of alignment.

just give tax credits based on innovation / investment criteria, to both companies and employees, Europe needs digitalization so badly, yet they find more complex ways to enable it.

They repurposed the word milestone to mean agenda. It's just a list of events they're organizing. Because they have no actual milestones or goals.

"25 years ago each major US company had a German and/or French equivalent. Today equivalents of US tech giants are in China and Europe is on its way to become an open-air museum. What happened?" https://x.com/MichaelAArouet/status/1827588190342979934

Some of the top replies:

"Bureaucracy, Regulation, Aversion to Innovation, Green myth of degrowth etc happened"

[...] Europe’s challenges are significant, but not insurmountable. To regain its edge, Europe will need to foster a more dynamic business environment, streamline regulations, and encourage risk-taking in its startup culture. Without these changes, Europe may continue to fall behind, watching as the U.S. and China shape the future of technology.

The EU has a lot of talent, but it lacks good leadership and good priorities.

As for Gaia-X itself, governments are always on the hunt for programs to justify their spending of tax and debt money. Favorable outcome is the spending itself as a mean to subsidize this and that group.

Beliefs like these are common in Europe and I absolutely despise them. Inefficiencies in IT exist for boring reasons like requirements that are way too complex or that keep changing, internal politics, and inexperience. If you add more regulations that don't move the needle you just get more politics, more middle men that seek to profit from the regulatory capture (advisors, consultants, resellers), and you distract industry from focusing on those things that matter most.

Complexity is the enemy of progress. IT systems fail when they attempt to codify contradictory bureaucratic processes that make no sense. The solution is to simplify. Businesses that refuse to simplify get eaten by hungry startups, and deservedly so. What do you think will happen to a continent that refuses to simplify?

> Boeing makes the comparison easy for Airbus.

What else to compare against this claim ?

Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry. It is not just aerospace, even auto is still über competitive, European manufactures are on par or perhaps better than anything Ford and GM have to offer. I am sure Europeans can come with good examples for every bad one.

The point it is easy to paint a narrative however reality is lot more complex and doesn't match with sweeping generalization .

Plus a bunch of angry USians really irritated by the anti-trust stuff the EU has been doing (DMA etc).

This is IMO the root cause of why most public services are going down the drain in most Western Europe: people are there to work for themselves, not for their country. And the higher people are, the worst it is. Keep the status quo, embezzle if you can and shut your eyes to not see we're in economic and cultural wars against the rest of the world.

Then I look at something like this Gaia-X "milestones" list and think "Meh, this is probably not the job for me..."

That is to say: it's not all just paperwork and paychecks, it can be greatly rewarding work.

[1] Strangely enough I was just talking about another aspect of air quality in another HN thread. Never noticed this was a theme in my life before.

The thing that makes it so chill is that we work on very long time scales, based on the length of whatever NIH (or similar) grant we're on. If you're used to building things in the private sector, the comparison I make is that what took us 3 months at my previous YC startup would take us 3 years at the non-profit where I work now. A lot of that is because there are many moving pieces to coordinate, and because you have to be careful when dealing with sensitive data and research ethics. Blah blah blah, at least part of it is also because the breakneck pace of VC-funded software hasn't got its fingers into this pie, at least not yet.

Downside: pay cut. I make $18k less than I did 4 years ago, despite having gotten promoted in this new spot. Also, it can be frustrating trying to actually produce software at a company with no culture for it. You find out that software delivery practices are something people have to learn, and at places that aren't software-oriented, they don't know about them.

What's to stop an American cloud hyperscaler from creating a "properly patriated" subsidiary that it simply licenses the tech to? Wouldn't that side step the "sovereign" protectionism?

An American company would run circles around this mess.

I'm sure early days will be painful but there is no reason for this not to work.

I think this was the press release: https://www.telekom.com/de/medien/medieninformationen/detail...

This was a Microsoft 365 cloud hosted and operated by Deutsche Telekom in Germany. It was more expensive than the global version and had less features. It often took some years till new features were introduced.

They stopped this offering some years ago, I think they did not get as many customers as they expected, most of the German customers used the global version.

You don't just sound like a cynic, you sound like an ass for basically insulting half a billion people.

Do you have much experience with big European bureaucratic corporations? I could tell you some stories of big American bureaucratic corporations. Old farts reliant on auto & manufacturing? By that token, the US is reliant on tar sands, fracking, and peddling SUVs.

So please, take a deep breath and try to find some more nuance to discuss, instead of producing a baseless cliché word salad.

Pay people who do, not people who write white papers and frameworks, and spend material effort on “thought leadership.”

Meanwhile the EU likes to waste resources on failed hopeless regions. For example the new investments into making EU independent on chip manufacturing is going to the failed hopeless eastern parts of Germany. I know East Germany had the strongest electronics industry in the former Eastern Bloc but nowadays it's a literal failed hopeless zombieland.

The U.S. has a long history of subsidizing industries in so-called "hopeless" regions. For example, putting the FBI fingerprinting office in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

Doing things like that is how you keep "hopeless" regions from becoming even worse, and makes things better for the nation as a whole. You spend some money on jobs and opportunity, or you spend a lot more money on food subsidies and criminal justice.

Are you a European "Union," or not? If you want every region to fight for resources, then you'd might as well go back to feudal times.

Europeans on HN are always saying how it's the "civilized" continent. I don't see that in language like "hopeless zombieland."

But SAP is a plague upon Earth and I often pretend that it is imaginary myth.

It also funnels money into open source office software and "European data spaces", which is (very loosely) tools to replace US clouds with open source. I would say it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, making it easier for EU companies to ditch US cloud services.

And didn't exactly that happen here?

4 years ago, the "Schwarz IT KG" company was a day-1 member of Gaia-X. And now they have billions in revenue from AWS-like cloud services.

Given the fact they don't even allow public signups outside of DACH im highly skeptical of their claim they're doing billions of revenue in public cloud. It wouldn't surprise me if there is some interesting bookkeeping going on to boost the numbers.

The current status quo is that people in this thread want to try this but fail to figure out how to even sign up.

Also could you explain what part of being part of Gaia-X contributed to their success?

All we did for Gaia-X was the paperwork to get the money. It had zero impact on anything we actually did. Somebody I know who knew what other firms receiving Gaia-X funds did told me the others did even less than us. We certainly did not take it very seriously, apart from it being a great source of free money, and I say that as someone who reported quite a few developer hours for Gaia-X.

I think at most this project is about sending some money to some European firms, with little regard for actual outcomes, kind of as a concealed subsidy. I'm not sure if those who started the project actually wanted that outcome in the first place? A lot of these things are just ways to use the current system to achieve goals that the system does not directly allow. It could just be incompetence, but it could also be the case that somebody knows exactly what they created with Gaia-X and is perfectly okay with the outcome.

Governments want to grow areas of their economies that they think could be beneficial. It's not acceptable to just hand out cash, and that can be trivially abused, so they put a little work around it to make sure the right companies are applying, and they tie it to token artifacts to make it seem more specific. Some companies commit outright fraud, but they're likely the minority and it's just a cost of the program, some put in a ton of effort and do it properly, and that's fine, and the majority just carry on doing the work they were already doing that the government was trying to encourage, and they'll hopefully be just a bit more successful as a result of the extra cash.

It's all a bit silly, but I don't think it's malicious or actually that bad if you assume that the government isn't trying to achieve a specific outcome beyond growing a sector, despite what they say.

The wastefulness of EU is the real reason people want their countries out of it.

There seem to be zero journalists covering EU shenanigans so everyone just get the news from people in the trenches. While our local politicians gets fired for buying chocolate on the wrong account (true story).

Unless such wastefulness is directed towards your own country!

By the way, the only ones who actually voted to quit were those idiot Brexiteers who were not even aware of the EU funds invested in the UK.

The entitlement and refusal to listen to other people outside their direct org is mindboggling, its like if everyone at that company still thinks they are the hottest shit and they know everything better. Sadly, they are a gatekeeper. Super frustrating partner to work with

+1 on that. Same with the owner of the CSP mentioned in the article above.

It's weird because it was always only German companies that gave truly unreasonable feature requests AND were extremely pushy, despite not spending much compared to other customers.

T-Mobile is much easier to deal with, but they are also walking with their tail between their legs...

I'd consider myself reasonably accustomed to and able to deal with bureaucracy and formal language, and still find every interaction with official EU sites massively off-putting. Now imagine someone who isn't a native speaker in any of the EU's languages, mentally impaired, or generally quickly feels overwhelmed by bureaucracy.

I am not defending this state of affairs. Simply pointing out that it's a category error to compare it to national governments. I think it would be good if we had more of an EU state. It seemed to be heading there 25ish years ago. But the nation states do have little appetite to cede authority to the central institutions, so that's probably not on the table. And it's also undeniable that as a coordination mechanism the EU has been spectacularly successful. The fact that people treat it as a national government is proof of that.

But you are ignoring a ton of stuff here, too. The EU comprises territories that are far more different than the territories of the US. The EU has 24 languages spoken, and its poorest member state has a GDP that is a factor of 9 lower than its richest (excluding Luxembourg). While it would be nice to have strong decision-making, how do you make sure that the decisions are also perceived as fair and democratically justified? Imagine a president who doesn't even speak the native language of the vast majority of people in the country. Would that person be seen as legitimately representing the people? How do you even begin to organize public political discussions in a situation where most people can't read the same newspaper/watch the same content? It's far from obvious that any of this is achievable. It's easy to fantasize about a competent, legitimate central government. But how do you construct it from the pieces given?

The political analogue of the EU might be India rather than the US.

Historically, the EU also comprises the territories that for more than half the time period since the inception of the USA provided all the globally dominant economic and military superpowers, expanding the areas they ruled to the peak of colonialism in 1914 [1]. So the squabbling mess of European powers, barely coordinating under a balance of power system at home, was dramatically successful militarily and economically (at an even more dramatic human cost). Contrast the Quing dynasty, that had a central government. At least some historians I've read argue that maintaining the central government consumed so many resources that it was a major reason for the widening gulf in economic and military might between European power and China during the 19th century.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/graphics/1914-co...

I think a key difference between how the US works and how Europe works lies in the private sector and the people. When you build a new company in the US, you have a lot of private infrastructure and people to be active in all of the states. In Europe, this does not exist in that form. Here, all the investors are focused on their own country. Sure we have plenty of firms active in many EU countries, but the level of support especially for new firms is orders of magnitude lower than in the US. From languages to social issues to attitude and expectations of common people, the EU is much more compartmentalized and it is significantly harder to have EU scale.

So there are two issues, and the side of the government is only one. The private sector and the investors have to do their job too and provide their own side of the EU wide infrastructure.

We also don't have EU-wide media that needs to support the development of a shared EU identity, and many other things that unite the US population as one people. Much of that has to come from the private sector, from the rich, from investors. But apparently they don't think big enough here in the EU?

I get you like the EU, but "spectacularly sucessful" isn't something many people would use. See covid response, and Ukraine war response. I would describe EU's mechanisms as moderately successful, i.e. somewhat better if states did everything on their own and bilaterally.

> The fact that people treat it as a national government is proof of that.

People with triste knowledge of how EU works do that. I do not think having most people in dark about how EU works is "spectacularly successful".

The danger would be if Gaia-X were kicking goals and laying down the law ... and had banned Lidl from setting up their own cloud until all the paperwork was signed off by 13 major committees, 666 undersecretaries of The Cloud and the High Bureaucrat was satisfied that there was a genuine market need for a new AWS competitor.

The EU has a lot of clever and motivated people. If the legal situation wasn't blocking success I expect they would succeed.

I think that the EU can very well find a consensus when it wants to, going so far to push for legislature that will be clearly thrown out by the ECJ or HUDOC (see Chat Control for great example).

It's just that we also have a lot of "token projects" which serve for virtual signaling for topics where there is a lack of domestic competence. Gaia-X is one of these things, the idea of a "european cloud" as laughable to begin with, due to dependence on foreign technologies to facilitate it.

Also only country with comparable language complexity to EU is India, so many languages adds enormous amount of paperwork and bureaucracy, US does not simply have to deal with it.

What makes it very exciting is that there not too much innovation required to compete

AWS launched it before EC2 even it's that valuable.

Rolling your own storage comes with at least some operational expenses, if you’re counting your data/egress in gigabytes that’s likely not worth it compared to just using S3 or similar services.

The durability can have value at scale, because ensuring it at scale with MinIO can be a lot work. But I often recommend to clients that they deploy a Hetzner setup as a cache, often with storage all the way up covering 100% of their data depending on access partner, because the AWS egress fees are so insanely extortionate that you never really want to read data from AWS at scale other than as an emergency option.

Obviously the fully-managed nature of S3 is very valuable compared to MinIO but the licensing issues seem neither here or there. Or is there some extra part of the AGPLv3 that I'm not aware of?

K8s probably means more s/w than hardware, more bodies (for them) more helpdesk and more documentation, more process. More up-front cost. And, they seem to be making money without it. Maybe thats their position?

You can complain about AWS and GCP support as much as you want, but given their sheer volume it is an accomplishment how rarely you actually need it. The situation when you need it is of course a different thing and I understand that satisfaction there greatly varies. Their support might be hit or miss, but at least their processes are streamlined and tried and tested enough to have you rarely need it.

With Hetzner on the other hand, if you use them seriously you will run into a situation where you need support sooner than later and my experience with that always has been abysmal.

Yeah, sure.

This is the kind of mentality which lead us to "Cloud" being developed by an online book seller and not hosting companies. Then those hosting companies needed 10 years for open source solutions to be available to close some of the gap. Next time a random company disrupts the hosting market, it won't come from hosting companies because "there not too much innovation required to compete" and those companies will wonder what is going on.

Basically it's just Openstack with some customizations. The rest of our customers run on gcloud. I'm currently eyeing Hetzner as I want to lower our hosting cost.

But the point of Openstack is that it's generally fine and that the feature set it offers is a commodity. AWS definitely overcharges for this stuff. If you do the math, most of their vms will cost you the hardware it runs on within months typically. Amazon runs this hardware for many years. In some cases they host multiple vms on them. Their margin on this stuff is huge. That's why they are so rich. You pay for the convenience and the uptime of course. But undercutting their pricing profitably isn't that hard.

Haven't talked to the guys for two years, so it might have improved in the meantime, but it's Telekom, so I heavily doubt it.

But I wouldn't say it's a niche if you look at the size of the EU even if it "hasn't being doing that well" it's still a lot of purchasing power

And especially in recent years there has been an increasing push away from US cloud providers and this somewhat evening out the playing field of "newcomers" compared to Amazone, MS, Google.

Also because HN is quite US/SV focused and differences in business culture especially compared to SV about e.g. businesses doing blog post and similar you don't really see much at all from this marked on HN. But that doesn't mean it's not a big marked.

Here is a press release from 2020: https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sich...

Title: Open Telekom Cloud – die sichere Cloud made in Europe

> Im Rahmen der Innovationspartnerschaft liefert Huawei mit dem Cloud-Betriebssystem Huawei OpenStack Distribution eine zentrale Softwarekomponente der Open Telekom Cloud.

English translation: Title: Open Telekom Cloud – the secure cloud made in Europe.

> As part of the innovation partnership, Huawei provides a central software component of the Open Telekom Cloud with its cloud operating system, Huawei OpenStack Distribution.

Software wise they where anyway OpenStack based, which is a trusteable open source project Huawei is a major contributor to but other major contributors include AT&T, Canonical, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Intel, Red Hat, IBM. This made moving away from Huawei quite viable.

Hardware wise they also moved away from Huawei, but I'm not sure if this apply to all data-centers of them. But AFIK at least some data centers are Huawei free.

Or at least that is what they told some of their business partners which wouldn't have used them if they still used Huawei hardware in the data center that specific bussiness partner uses AFIK.

Customers do ask about it, and it's always iffy to have to justify your GDPR compliance when using US cloud companies.

Unrelated, I think this also happens the other way around.

Every time they make use of a zero day or a backdoor they run the risk of it being discovered. The harder it is to get a new one, the more they will think twice about using it for mass and low stakes surveillance. A non-US company will be less inclined/forced to cooperate with them, making it harder for them to siphon data out, hence lowering probability.

No one is 100% safe, agreed though. Probabilities and threat models is all we got.

and cloud is an essential service for many companies

and how things played out in recent years has created increasing insensitive to not use Amazone/Google/MS Cloud

but it's marked which isn't really that visible on HN and similar US focused sites

Well, this isn't even remotely accurate on the numbers. For virtually every big tech company the US is about half of the market, Europe about 30%, then ~15% Asian Pacific, and give or take a bit in the rest of the world.

Given that most large tech companies are locked out of China or quickly leaving the only large country with comparable purchasing power to Europe in Asia is Japan.

In Asia, South Korea is already comparable to Japan as a technology market (but also stagnating). The big Asia-Pacific growth opportunities are going to be in India, Malaysia, and Philippines.

Imagine if you'd compare only California against all of China, it would look like the US was in seriously bad shape.

But now lol and behold unbeknownst to me that there's actually a Lidl cloud and it's not an April fool news.

[1] Hetzner Pricing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41179371

[2] How does Aldi keep their prices so low | Aldi Vs Lidl: Supermarket Wars | Channel 5 [video]:

https://youtu.be/AhwycD3GMlM

This is not necessarily a bad strategy if they want to do something different than OVH/Scaleway/Hetzner.

For instance, I understand you cannot possibly run a decent mail infra on the above hosting vendors IP ranges because they are so popular cheap self service hosting service they have been used a lot by spammers.

So definitely not targetted at the lone developper starting a side gig but more as a vendor for the many larger EU institutions/companys that mostly kept their stuff on prem until now because of patriot act.

Given the CLOUD Act and FISA, no it should not be enough to regain the trust of those European corporations that look for data sovereignty. As long as those exist, all proposed "sovereignty" guarantees by vendors that have their (or their parent company's) HQ in the US are entirely worthless and should be ignored.

This is not a new idea and is how Azure(or AWS) always operated in China. The Azure Fabric software is licensed to DCs owned and operated by 21vianet a Chinese company. Microsoft has no control over what happens there.

No amount of legal[1] US pressure can make Microsoft give access to those DCs as they don’t have it in the first place

This is why you cannot just provision hardware in China in AWS/Azure, you have to enter into separate contract with the Chinese operator first and comply with any government restrictions that the Chinese state may require

[1] illegal/unauthorized tapping is a different matter and preventing that is not the intent of sovereign clouds .

Now potentially they could try to trick the operator, but I'm not sure a company could be compelled to do so under US law. While there doesn't appear to be any relevant cases, this would fall under compelled speech (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compelled_speech) and it seems like it would fall on the impermissible side to me.

Note that the money is simply a matter of a contract (e.g., we will hire your company, which is located in China to operate our cloud region. We'll give you X dollars, and you'll give us Y revenue).

For the Germany region, they're using a mixture of technical controls (e.g., the AWS user has to sign off on accesses in a way that's technically not circumventable (think like a phones unlock screen or something protecting the data on the device) and only allowing AWS employees located in the EU to operate it (presumably the goal being that employees physically located in the EU can't be compelled in the same way as those located in the US).

You can read more here https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-european-s...

For comparison, the structure in China is more like what I was describing above: https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/about-aws/china/

I'm not as familiar with it, but it looks like GCP is going with an operating company approach, see eg., https://cloud.google.com/t-systems-sovereign-cloud?hl=en for Germany.

> As I pointed out in my previous blog post about the shifts in AWS, the one-stop-cloud-shop approach has shown cracks. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba et al. won’t be able to cover all grounds, neither in tech domains, nor in geo’s.

This doesn’t make much sense to me. What cracks? Aren’t aws regions the solution to geographic control to where your data and infra reside? Also, what tech domain does aws not have a solution for?

I’m not saying the underdog can’t catch up. I’m saying that when aws made this major switch to offer their cloud, it was certainly a first-of-its-kind offering. Lidl offering competitive services to aws doesn’t sound that scary, especially considering that I don’t believe for a second that lidl’s cloud offering comes even close to what aws provides. At that point, if this competitor’s only real value proposition is that they’re “in Europe,” then I’m not sure how compelling of a selling point that is for me to give up everything else I get with my aws offering.

Note: I am using aws as my example solely because it’s what I know best, not affiliated in any way with them as of this writing.

If you understand German and want to take a look at OEDIV's remarkable datacenter, der8auer posted a video [1] around two years ago giving a tour through their datacenter. Small but high-quality. This is what Schwarz Gruppe is after, though not as closed as OEDIV.

[0] https://www.oediv.de/en/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMFo74rArBw

* Yes, Oetker, the pizza-maker.

There are a few videos of their previous homepage designs available on YouTube, it's an amusing window into the past. Right below the first one was another video about 2Advanced, which I also hadn't heard of since 20? years.

If what you need is a DigitalOcean, then yes, you could shift to this. But when you need a DigitalOcean, you're probably in the wrong place if you were using an AWS/GCP/AZ instead, which is also where this article seems to create a failed comparison.

The play itself does make enough sense, there is a significant duplication in effort across companies, even if you're not doing hyperscaler things and using 'enterprise hardware', the people, processes and technology involved are pretty much the same in all places (which means you wonder what value is added by doing it internally at all -- spoiler it's usually legacy reasons, legacy governance and aversion to change).

When there are enough regions and scalability (capacity, higher resolution consumption pricing, shorter cycle times) you could probably use this as a datacenter-in-the-cloud type of deal, which while 15 years too late is definitely still an improvement in so many businesses. We have some larger companies like Hetzner, OVH and Leaseweb which also try to pivot to more of an XaaS but that in itself is just adding to duplication and a fractured ecosystem. Will this actually work out? Only time will tell...

Like I get that this is part of the platform's marketing but I don't see the sovereignty (which is a rather cringy term imo, as it implies that something as big as the EU isn't sovereign) angles to this.

China's tech is already self-contained, to a lesser extent so is Russia's, the US is investing a lot in semiconductors just in case something happens to Taiwan, and India has already banned pretty much every Chinese app. The EU, on the other hand, is completely reliant on the US for core tech infrastructure and trying to address that.

None of it makes sense economically, but essentially every superpower is doing something towards at least making it a possibility to "self-contain" their own tech sector. I don't even think this has anything to do with the current political climate (Russia-Ukraine war included), I think it's more in preparation for when climate change consequences start ramping up.

After the second world war, Europe was developing space launch capability (multiple governments and companies in Europe joined together to do this). USA said, don't waste your money on that, you can use American launchers. So it didn't continue. Some time later, European commercial sats that competed with American ones couldn't get launch opportunities on American rockets. So then Europe developed its own launcher.

EDITed to remove caveats, after checking that it really is accurate: https://www.inventingeurope.eu/knowledge/the-unfinished-symp...

The economies are too integrated for this scenario. There are big R&D centers of many American corporations in Europe, doing big part of their tech. They won’t move, instead in a very hypothetical “Russian” scenario they will change owner and continue to operate. I’m sure EU regions of AWS or GCP won’t cease to exist, for example. There are some services that are operated from USA, e.g. CloudFront, but that won’t be too hard to replace.

So are the US and Chinese economies. Yet, here we are.

> I’m sure EU regions of AWS or GCP won’t cease to exist, for example.

The servers, maybe. I highly doubt AWS will continue to provide access to its platform. Actually there is zero chance they do. The servers are not useful much without the AWS platform.

This exact reason was put forward by political thinkers in the 1910s to "prove" that a major war in Europe was completely impossible. It was then put forward again in the 1930s to "prove" the same thing; for real that time.

In a way, we’ll probably see more cloud fragmentation in the future, especially as other countries develop their IT sectors more and feel like they want more control over their own infrastructure, and whatever tertiary benefits can be extracted from that.

Relationships don’t even have to turn sour, there just has to be enough protectionism and popular appeal to support it. Just like saying “build it here”.

It doesn't need to be suddenly hostile, it already is for decades. This is about economical competition and not trusting foreign agencies (like NSA, CIA, etc.) which are known to spy on European data and abusing it for the benefit of US-companies. Since Snowden there are several long-running discussions about independence of data, and USA being unreliable in their laws and actions.

How will the sovereign EU stop the US from exercising the CLOUD act over the data stored in AWS in Europe?

German corporations (and politics) are full of bean counters, bureaucrats and underachievers. It's filled with people who love to talk, excessively plan, draw flowcharts and build frameworks - essentially everything except getting shit done.

While I agree, that DACH mentality in big German corporations "has been devastating on serious tech development" at these companies, I don't see how this would affect the whole of Europe. It's an opportunity for other countries/companies to do better.

at least for jobs which often are referred to as engineers (through legally speaking are not as enginer is a protected title having little to do with software development)

maybe for jobs of people which mainly idk. replace hardware in servers all day but don't really administrate the servers at all

Most EU tech and non-tech companies, with some notable exceptions like Spotify, have this mentality.

And then all of a sudden due to lack of workers and other factors even DACH began to change and basically accepted English as the defacto working language in tech.

Unfortunately it's a small change, too little too late as they say. Without proper transeuropean companies and unified market we will never be able to challenge competitors from Asia let alone the USA.

Though companies like the Schwarz Gruppe or OEDIV tend to understand their value so I don't think parent's comment is valid.

If you happen to want your supplier to be slow, extremely reliable, and you don't mind paying for the high profit margin they expect to be able to extract, you'll be a perfect customer of a DACH-mentality company. There are hundreds of niche categories where they dominate the market, including machine tools, forging, factory automation, etc.

But don't write off DACH: there are plenty of companies in DACH that run circles around their competitors by blending typically DACH traits with agility.

For future career possibilities worth investigating, would you care to name a few good examples/companies you are aware of?

At least DACH made the progress of opening up. It would be ideal to combine DACH liberalism for language and french attitude towards tech and innovation.

but DACH mentality? Perhaps hard-working like people in Germany, Austria and Switzerland? Or overengineering or being stubborn and old-fashioned?

I'm not sure this model ever applied to A & CH, and might be starting to collapse in D as well.

For example even when a larger company gets acquired (or a merger happens) it could take a decade to consolidate overlapping services.

Are there any other countries where tech engineers are among the best paid workers?

Sure if you are one of the best of the best and are willing to take high risk for high reward and in general give up QoL/Work live Balance then especially in SV you have better chances to make a lot of money.

But for most skilled engineers they can get their money worth in the EU, through depending on their priorities and goals in live.

Like to put it in context to have a similar quality of live in US I think I would need to earn around 50% more before tax and that is even through US has much less tax. Through that 50% more also would allow me more flexibility for reducing my QoL at the current time, invest it and long time have more money (or much less if you mess up). So again a question of priorities.

Historically, too: Poland, Czechia, Hungary and Romania, but German speaking communities have disappeared or are in massive decline.

Disclaimer: this list of German speaking countries might be incomplete.