I didn’t see any mention of EU’s last attempt to build a sovereign cloud: Gaia-X. I think that didn’t really go anywhere due to disagreements over technical direction. Much like Quaero.
Don’t get me wrong, I hope it goes better this time and the author acknowledges the many pitfalls of such a complex undertaking.
" Innovation Mindset: Willingness to explore new technologies – especially related to trust frameworks and associated standards –, staying ahead (no kidding!) of main-stream industry trends (This is a real requirement, not ChatGPT – just look into our GitLab repos!)."
I checked their public GitLab and it's puny. Moreover, I suspect based on the use of bold and bullet points that the job description itself went through ChatGPT.
Without protection, a EU hyperscaler will never emerge. It's not that any hypothetical future EU hyperscaler would be an inherently less competitive. It's just plain old first mover advantage. Cloud computing is a VERY sticky good, and once folks got on AWS/Azure no matter how good your product is there's no way larger customers are going to migrate off to some "risky" startup (thus keeping scale small).
Source: I worked on a sovereign cloud PaaS in Germany. Admittedly the project was a disaster, hiring talent in the infrastructure space here is really tough. Probably mostly due to a lack of opportunities to acquire experience domestically and noncompetitive wages limiting migration of those with experience.
Gaia-X is a total dumpster fire though, perfect example of what's wrong with the EU. All the money was spent paying bureaucrats, consults, and standards committee folks to architecture astronaut and design by committee sovereign cloud "standards" bullshit bingo. None of the money went to the engineers.
We should really copy the Chinese approach here, straight out clone a subset of the best/most popular parts of AWS/Azure/GCP. I'm open to contracting opportunities in this space BTW (email in profile).
It's more or less covert subsidies for the usual suspects. In Germany that means the like of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Atos, Bosch, Deutsche Telekom, SAP, BMW and Siemens get some millions (and by "some" I mean around 200 million euro). If there's no outcome, like in the GAIA-X case, it's just bad luck for the taxpayer.
Disagreements over direction should be solved by making separate orgs/initiatives to go test each approach.
Better than funding “one true initiative” and force people to work together to keep the funding.
The VC funding model succeeds in experimental domains by letting many experiments run at once. Kind of a form of Darwinism. How to do that with funded initiatives is a really interesting challenge.
The impression I have, but I may be wrong, is that investors in Europe want a return on every investment. Failure is not an option. Which kind of choke innovation.
well put! making sure that the new, memory safe code interoperates with the old code and is equally well supported by tooling takes an incredible amount of work.
We're a small team dedicated to elimination of memory safety errors. We're maintaining the C2Rust tools and use it to move C code to Rust. See https://github.com/memorysafety/rav1d for an example of our recent work. Check out our github for (https://github.com/immunant) for other examples of the types of work we do.
If you're good at systems programming, we'd like to hear from you. Specifically, we're interested with folks who have significant experience in one or more of these technical areas:
- C/C++ and/or Rust (familiarity with assembly language is a plus)
- Compilers for any of the above languages (LLVM experience is a plus)
- Operating systems, hypervisors, firmware, bootloaders, JITs.
- Build systems commonly used in the above technical areas.
Folks with superficial knowledge in one of these areas are not encouraged to apply. If you have experience managing software developers in addition to meeting the technical requirements, you are encouraged to reach out. Please note that we can only consider candidates resident in the US.
We offer a remote-friendly, highly collaborative work environment with high flexibility and competitive benefits.
Send your resume to team@immunant.com; we look forward to meeting you.
To me this sounds pedantic, a good argument for a discretionary recruiting process and a good indicator of a bad interview/work experience. Why don't they instead try to define what superficial means? What do they expect from candidates in a way that can be measured? How many years of professional/research experience?
If you're interested in low-level, resource-constrained and/or privileged execution environments, consider joining our small team. At Immunant, we spend much time staring at weird build errors, ISA or ABI documentation, or digging through obscure build systems or C code written 20 years ago. In any case, we strive to make the systems we're working on more secure, more efficient, and have more Rust in them (whenever we get a chance).
If you have recent, professional experience with C/C++ and Rust and know about operating systems, hypervisor internals, or compilers, we'd love to hear from you. Candidates with only superficial knowledge in all of these areas are not encouraged to apply. Please note that we can only consider candidates resident in the US.
We offer a remote-friendly, collaborative work environment with a high degree of autonomy and competitive benefits.
Send your resume to team@immunant.com; we look forward to hearing from you.
reply