Full steam ahead towards a true multi-cloud offering to deliver on broken promises

Full steam ahead towards a true multi-cloud offering to deliver on broken promises Scale • Yann Lechelle • 18/03/22 • 10 min read

On 18 November, we announced that “Scaleway will not renew its GAIA-X membership. The objectives of the Association, while initially laudable, are being sidetracked and slowed down by a polarization paradox which is reinforcing the status quo, that is an unbalanced playing field. Scaleway will focus its time, money and attention on its multi-cloud product offering - a key factor of true reversibility and openness.”

Many of you asked us about the motivation behind this decision: now is the time to share comprehensive and transparent feedback on the past 18 months since co-founding GAIA-X.

Supporting the ambitions of GAIA-X

Before Day 0, fully supporting the ambitions of GAIA-X, in spite of numerous challenges

Let’s first of all get back to June 2020, when the initiative was launched by German Minister Peter Altmaier and French Minister Bruno Le Maire, Scaleway being at the time among the 22 founding members .

We were indeed fully supportive of the goals expressed and endorsed at the highest political level on both sides of the Rhine , i.e “ guaranteeing data sovereignty, availability, interoperability and portability ” and “ promoting transparency ”.

Of course, we knew from the beginning that progressing all together and promoting a common vision would be an interesting challenge , due to the sheer nature of the industrial players involved: three cloud service providers in France (OVH, Outscale and Scaleway) vs. the predominance of vertical industrial players in Germany (BMW, Volkswagen, Deutsche Bank, etc.) using mostly non-European cloud technologies and services.

The objectives of the project being fully aligned with our philosophy and our multi-cloud DNA, we decided to partake in this impetus: on the one hand to strengthen the European digital ecosystem by fixing common, federating rules (i.e: rebalancing the current cloud market conditions and dynamics), and on the other to improve the uptake of cloud solutions in our continent, based on Europe’s values, practices and standards: both pillars having to go together, naturally.

Beyond my own commitment (weekly board meetings + all the underlying follow-up, preparation and coordination), almost 10 Scalers (cloud architects, business developers, communication, public affairs) got partially involved, in the first 12 months of the initiative, to build the first demonstrator featured in the 2020 GAIA-X summit, to support the technical and policy works and get GAIA-X on track. For a company of about 300/350 employees back then, the level of investment we decided to allocate to make GAIA-X fly was quite substantial.

We have no time to lose playing games

The first few months of GAIA-X’s existence were characterized by a significant lack of understanding about its scope and objectives : some described it as an “Airbus of the cloud”, others believing it would operate a “sovereign cloud”, yet others talking about a “federation of cloud offers” or a “metacloud”. In the meantime, numerous doubts about the membership perimeters persisted: should non-European companies be allowed to become members, with or without any limitations, with or without any safeguards as to their level of commitment in the workflows?

Scaleway and I, personally, made it very clear that we would leave GAIA-X, should non-European companies be entitled to take part in the governance of the board. Believe it or not, this wasn’t a given for some; I even had to use my veto to avoid a disastrous decision being taken.

A few months later, in April 2021, when the board had to validate the applications of the so-called “day-one members” (having applied between Q3-2020 and Q1-2021), the same discussion occurred again: should we accept all applicants, coming from all over the world? It is obvious that non-European players, having a (very, too strong sometimes) foothold on the European markets, were legitimate to join GAIA-X. But couldn’t we have set up criteria to exclude companies with a third country’s government in the shareholding (e.g: Palantir, Huawei), to differentiate “entrance” and “entrism”?

Typically, we wanted to avoid a situation where such entities could, later on, claim they are key contributors, through GAIA-X, to European digital sovereignty. Looking at how GAIA-X advertised Huawei (Europe)’s contribution to digital sovereignty on Twitter a very few days ago , or considering the sponsorship structure of the last GAIA-X summit in November , I am sad to see that reality proved us right.

Accepting all the non-European dominating cloud service providers without any limitation had a significant impact, probably not anticipated enough : once they joined the technical committees, these dominant entities and their “tech diplomats” flooded other contributors with orientations, requirement proposals and comments that, individually or collectively, the European collective could not possibly cope with, thereby introducing structural bias in the standard-like elaboration process. The risk being, therefore, to create standards favorable to the already dominant players, and not echoing the needs, expectations and challenges of the diverse local technology suppliers throughout Europe. We see similar patterns in a number of similar organizations; the interests of the major players end up being protected while innovative yet contradicting orientations tend to be muffled.

A recent Synergy research group study laid out that, in the past four years (2017-2021), the European market share of European cloud service providers declined from 27% to well under 16%. Amazon, Microsoft and Google would now account for some 70% of the same market share - and “ their share continues to steadily rise ”.

While the Digital Markets Act is being successfully negotiated by the EU institutions to strictly regulate a great deal of gate-keeper behaviors in the digital markets, i t would be somehow inconsistent, through GAIA-X, to put in place new entry barriers for our local ecosystem.

Regrettably, the renewal of the board last June did not send promising signals in terms of proper representativeness of the European cloud and digital ecosystem : the board now has only one cloud service provider (OVH), since neither Outscale nor Scaleway were reelected, nor Aruba, but four telecommunications operators are now in. Three trade associations have joined the…