
Gaia-X: Technical Architecture [pdf] - doener
https://www.heise.de/downloads/18/2/9/0/6/1/1/7/gaia-x-technical-architecture.pdf
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jpfr
To be clear, this is not a new cloud-hyperscaler.

Rather, different providers can offer services and (compute) nodes with
different levels of certification / geographic location.

So a government agency / hospital / critical-Infrastructure on can use cloud
offerings without loosing „digital sovereignty“ by depending on single
providers or outside actors.

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antpls
So, a multi-cloud marketplace with unified API across vendors ? It could be
interesting

~~~
qznc
I don't see the "unified API across vendors" there. At least not for the
actual cloud part. Unified is only the part interacting with the market place.

Devils advocate: So you get this EU-verified catalogue which lets you pick
your vendor lock-in between Amazon, Microsoft, and Google just like before.

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tlarkworthy
Yes but user data can be securely accessed between these services too, and
fingers crossed the trust mechanisms allow that access to be on a needs basis
and incentivised without copying

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rad_gruchalski
And how is that „secure” achieved. As soon as someone reads your data and has
it in their system - poof, the promise of security is gone.

The most common answer to this problem given by the people behind this is „but
there is a legal contract backing the data exchange and the governing body”.
Nothing different than what we have today.

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lorey
If you're wondering what this is:

> We, representatives of the German Federal Government, business and science
> communities, are striving to set up a high-performance, competitive, secure
> and trustworthy data infrastructure for Europe. To this end, we have drawn
> up the foundations for a federated, open data infrastructure based on
> European values, giving it the provisional pro-ject name ‘GAIA-X’.

Here's the executive summary:
[https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Publikationen/Digitale-
Welt...](https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Publikationen/Digitale-Welt/das-
projekt-gaia-x-executive-summary.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=6)

~~~
qznc
What they build though is a service catalogue with some metering tooling on
top. What is the magic second step which spawns this "high-performance,
competitive, secure and trustworthy data infrastructure"?

~~~
ashildr
Just sprinkle a little T-Systems and SAP over it et voilá...

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Aeolun
Honestly, reading through the first parts of this document I’m immediately
struck by a ‘if they’re going to make it this hard nobody is going to use it’
feeling.

AWS can be so successful because they do everything themselves as part of an
integrated whole. Trying to make disparate (European!) services work together
and somehow end up as a cohesive package is a recipe for disaster.

An equivalent European player can _not_ be a bunch of separate companies each
doing their own thing.

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rswail
I can see possibilities, but also can see the classic "apply to some body for
permission to do something", particularly "Participants" registering
"Services" in "Catalogs" that will require some form of attestation to a not-
yet-defined set of standards.

It's there that the old lumbering beasts of EU IT (eg Bull) will turn it into
the equivalent of Web Services.

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heipei
Maybe stupid question, but who assures them that any private company will
actually rise up to the task of building out a product set that conforms to
the Gaia-X interoperability guidelines? Even if there might launch Partners
that have committed to a certain set of services (or Euros spent), what would
prevent them from ditching it once they realise that consumers still rather go
with AWS? Or is this supposed to be for government institutions which are
legally forced to pick a Gaia-X compliant cloud provider? Confused at this
point.

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Havoc
Starting to see where they are going with this. Quite ambitious. Perhaps
overly so.

A searchable catalog of all say virtual machines across countries & providers
would be pretty cool for starters.

Don't quite see how they're going to get around stuff being in different
physical locations. That creates latency, cost and reliability headaches that
AWS/GCP/Azure doesn't need to deal with since you normally put say DB and VM
into the same data center

~~~
jpfr
Usually you move the computation to the location of the data and not the other
way around. That's the basic premise of Hadoop/Spark and many similar big data
tools.

GAIA-X self-descriptions give visibility on whether your data is (would be) in
a data center that also has GPU-capacities. And if not, what you would have to
pay for interconnection.

See this demo for the basic idea of the self-description graph:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f17c3Vpi3rA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f17c3Vpi3rA)

~~~
Havoc
It's more of an example really. Patching together multiple provider offerings
is going to involve interconnecting them somehow.

Thanks for the vid. The app they're demonstrating seems to be publicly
accessible too:

[https://staging.gaia-x-demonstrator.eu/](https://staging.gaia-x-
demonstrator.eu/)

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blopeur
From the doc: "GAIA-X itself does not act as a billing provider or clearing
house. But GAIA-X will define standard interfaces and mechanisms for metering
to be used by the Consumers and Providers. "

Yea.. so basically you have a catalogue but it's going to be up to the
consumers or providers to find a way to stitch up a clearinghouse solution for
dynamically orchestrated services from a multitude of providers. This is not
only hard. It's near impossible. Without this crucial element, the platform is
stillborn.

~~~
orwin
I don't think its like that. My understanding is that they will create a
catalog with multiple services you can choose, and service provider will
provide an unified API for those.

So you can take your prototype build on a server in $european_country_1 and
publish it on the cloud of $european_country_2 once the dev is done without
any change except the billing address.

If this is what you propose, this will be yet another stillborn project (Hey
AI4EU!)

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viraptor
The roadmap seems pretty ambitious. From the concept 3rd quarter this year to
a prototype in 1 quarter? With 40 or so companies involved and a massive scope
to cover up-front? I've been to openstack core meetings and things do not move
that fast even in smaller groups.

I'm also curious how much is this going to be a "openstack does this, let's
just adopt it" decision. (The Catalog, some Federation, etc.)

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j-pb
They lost me at the UML diagrams. Nothing good can come from a waterfalled
system like this.

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teleforce
It seems that Europe is going in the right direction with GDPR and now GAIA-X
project. The fact that GDPR is mentioned a lot in the proposal really make
clear their main intentions.

Perhaps the limited presence of big, powerful and influential FAANG like
companies significantly reduce the lobby or pressure on the European
governments to take the necessary actions to guard and protect their citizens'
data.

Hopefully this can provide the right fundamentals and creates impetus for more
personal data friendly localhost first and cloud second software paradigm.
This paradigm is more natural and secure than the cloud first software
paradigm currently being practiced by major software companies (e.g. FAANG).

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Fiahil
So, it's an open-market AWS with data sharing capabilities, certified third-
party services, and RTF APIs.

I tought we agreed the semantic web was a failed experiment? Stop trying to
bring it back "because it looks smart"

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FAKEDETECTOR
Provide facts and sources or be tagged forever.

