Europe and the cloud
The bigger picture of all the things we get wrong in technology
Hey there,
I’m Fabian - engineer, business owner, and a European citizen living in Germany.
For more than 10 years I’ve been roaming through the world’s tech-scene, always focusing on thinking global and acting local. I have a formal education in informatics and overall technology but have always been a self-driven learner, constantly expanding my horizon and interests and trying to be open-minded and pragmatic when it comes to the reality we live in.
In 2017 I quit my day-job and started a consulting business in cloud native technologies - mainly DevOps stuff, but also lots of custom software development, team- and venture-building and product development.
For the last 5 years that effort has grown into multiple businesses, digital products and - even more important - a very diverse view on the European tech-scene. I often feel the urge to jump ship and do what I love to do elsewhere, where culture and legal frameworks are more supportive for people that seek to improve the status quo. But at the end of the day, I really like it here.
Europe and the cloud is mainly about my personal opinions on how Europe - and Germany specifically - has evolved from industrial trailblazers to cloud native copy-cats.
Thinking global
You might have realized we’re copy-cats by looking at successful TV-shows and tech-infused businesses in Europe: most of the good stuff originated in the USA and has been refactored for the European markets. Think of “The Voice”, “Germany’s Next Top-Model” or “Zalando” - all of them success stories in the USA, rebranded and launched in Europe (i.e. Germany) to become successful here, too.
Unfortunately, this way of recycling original ideas has invaded the technology markets at large.
My personal pet-peeve are cloud native technologies - stuff like Kubernetes, Cloud services and Open Source software. Those have originated from a new way of thinking and doing business that was born “across the sea” and they greatly accelerated innovation in non-industrial and non-public sectors - they improved the speed and robustness of pretty much every industry that involves software (not that there’s anything left in this world that does not involve software).
But they come at a cost and this cost is change. Change in thinking, change in operating models, change in revenue streams, change in business models, change in people and culture, change in power distribution.
These specific technologies entered the European tech-scene roughly 7 years ago, starting with AWS, then Docker, then Kubernetes (at least these are the signal-technologies in my sphere of interest). Today we have many European-based businesses trying to replicate the speed and success of AWS or re-invent how software is distributed.
Unlike TV-shows, replicating and adopting technologies not only needs more skill, but also has to happen in compliance with different law frameworks and mindset than in the US.
So how do we “think global” in Europe?
Fuck up local
First: we try to strip raw technologies from the necessary mindset and culture they have been forged in. Because in Europe - and Germany specifically - we do not have a culture that accepts failure as a necessary outcome of progress and we also do not have a history of sharing things that we can keep proprietary. No wonder the only relevant software vendor that comes to mind that has its roots in Germany is SAP.
Second: we try to shoehorn these technologies into our industrialized way of operating. Everything needs to be compliant, secure and planned from day one. But the very thing that made that technological progress happen across the sea is a culture of fast failing and constant iteration. Not to say that you should fail often - just fast. Make assumptions, test them against reality, start over until you make the right assumptions. We totally suck at that and this comes from our industrial past.
Third: we’re trapped inside a capitalistic and corporate system. Not to say capitalism is bad - having a driving force (even if it’s money) is a must to succeed. The point is that we failed to acknowledge that money only fuels innovation and only after that innovation has happened it generates more money (i.e. profit). That’s what Venture Capital in the US maxes out on and that’s how you create those lovely Unicorns.
In Germany we require monetary justification for every move we make - and the reason is not that we’re greedy. But we built up a hierarchy of MBAs controlling industrialized systems over the past 80 years. For industries manufacturing real-world items - the car industry, pharmaceuticals or real estate - this makes sense, as innovation happens in very slow cycles that can be carefully planned and adjusted and it’s not so easy to quickly iterate on “hardware” as it can’t be replicated without enormous environmental and financial cost.
But digital goods are a different beast to tame. The biggest cost center for digital innovation is people. Individuals and their ideas have huge leverage on the speed and quality of innovation and improvement because their work - software - can easily be replicated at almost no cost apart from time.
Our current way of operating businesses isn’t able to digest the idea of “trial and error” as a driving force of innovation. Old people try to write new stories with legacy ways of thinking. And the outcome is a lot of technical and societal debt.
What happened?
I bet every generation ever felt superior to their predecessors. But we have to acknowledge that the rise of software has brutally amplified the available knowledge and skillset of almost every human being in the world - and that started to happen with the advent of the internet.
This means that, starting in the 90s, the gap between what the last generation (the boomers) was capable of understanding and developing and our current generation (it’s “Z” I believe) has grown exponentially with every new paradigm we encountered. 40 years ago, nobody would have been able to get hired into a top-position just by learning their craft from books without a formal education and many years of on-the-job experience.
Today? Do a course on Udemy and you’re well equipped to build software for enterprise corporations.
News travels so fast - just share a Youtube link on WhatsApp - that established institutions have trouble keeping up with the ever growing amount of false information. “Software is eating the world” is exactly what’s happening on a global scale.
Yet locally, top-level executives still seem to fit the “grey beard” stereotype and most of those grey-beards have trouble keeping up with the speed of change happening in the digital space. Experience comes with age, they say. They’re wrong. Experience comes from experience and if you’re only planning things instead of trying them, you won’t gain any experience in a world that changes by the hour.
Working on the edge of that space for years now, even I have trouble converting all that progress into actionable things before the next wave of innovation renders everything obsolete that I learned and worked on for the past year. And I’ve grown up with computers and technology dominating my life early on so I deem myself quite “fit” for that situation.
There’s too much old thinking on the helm - which is something every generation says, I’m sure. But for hundreds and thousands of years the difference in skill and knowledge between generations has been marginal at best, as all knowledge has been distributed by central institutions like universities and established media outlets. Today, everyone and his mum is their own media outlet and legacy educational systems lose ground to viral platforms like Youtube or lately TikTok (TBH, I learned a ton of stuff on TikTok, and I would not call myself an early adopter of these platforms).
Wasn’t this about the cloud?
It is. While there are many places where this gap contributes to the slowdown of progress, I personally care for the cloud - or to frame it different: software infrastructure.
AWS pioneered a new way of building technology to run software on it. And like on many occasions before, we tried to copy and implement the obvious things and failed to understand the true reason why companies like Amazon really made a dent in our universe.
Looking at the present, we’re working hard to become the bad version of “Fortress Europe” coined in WW2. Instead of building up forces together to fight a common enemy, we increasingly isolate ourselves, only concentrating on separating European concerns from US boldness. While I do think it’s important to keep ourselves autonomous, sovereign and free from too much foreign influence (if it is forced upon us), I sincerely believe we failed to learn the relevant lessons of how change and innovation need to be approached in a world that changes mind- and skillset day by day.
I believe:
we must start to own the technologies we use to drive our businesses, not only “use” things from across the sea; i.e. we must build competitive platforms that we not only control but also understand to scale
we must start to build our own digital infrastructure - but one that is actually en par with what’s technically possible and NOT with what can be digested by non-technical decision-makers
we must fill key positions with people that have actual experience in digital fields; it’s useless to give MBAs or politicians with a law degree power over the implementation of technologies
we must accept that we will fail a lot and that we can’t plan everything
we must NOT follow the VC model of blowing things up just for profit, but we need to ease funding for the above mentioned platforms
we must stop to isolate ourselves with ill-implemented data protection laws that we can’t abide since we do not have local alternatives to the global offerings that we try to protect our citizens from
we must start to become builders and innovators again and stop thinking that “having a safe job” is a valid operating model in the long term
we must improve our educational systems to account for the speed of innovation; it’s quite useless to run engineers through their Bachelor’s degree on curricula that have been established in the 90s
we must learn that “the cloud” REALLY is just someone else’s computer and that we have all the tools at hand (mainly in the form of Open Source software created by builders and innovators from overseas) to build our own version(s) of it
we must acknowledge that we’ve surpassed the advent of New Work and are already on track to “No Work”; the classical employee (born from a factory worker more than hundred years ago) will cease to exist and it will start with knowledge workers who already gained a massive advantage over classical employers during the Corona crisis; people seek for meaning and inspiration in their work and increasingly refuse to do bullshit jobs for bullshit managers. The future is collaborative and infused by common sense
we must learn to collaborate in a positive manner, working together on non-proprietary solutions for a sustainable future; outcomes must be democratized or people will stop investing their precious lifetime in your capitalistic ideas
I dedicate a huge part of my life to the improvement of this situation and am going to write about the status quo and how it could be changed for the better here on a weekly basis.
By building businesses aside from the beaten paths and fostering business- and working-conditions that cater to the needs of us modern people, I hope to inspire others to do the same and make their own dent in the universe.
But I do want to emphasize that this will be a very opinionated stream of content. I’m in my mid-thirties now and quality of life became more important than professional progress. However, I’ve also always been someone who doesn’t make a difference between “work” and “free time”. I like to invest all my time in things that make sense and TBH work has the single biggest impact on quality of life at large so I want to improve that situation by sharing my thoughts with a bigger audience than myself.
So long,
Fabian