> This isn't just compliance theater; it's a straight‑up national economic security play.
The woes of LLM contrasts…
In all seriousness, the points made ring true not only for European companies and should make everyone consider the implications of the current situation, as dreary as they are.
To me it is simply good writing, the kind that is found in literature, but feels a bit out of place in discussions on the internet. What makes it stand out is that real English speaker on the internet are way more casual in their writing. I’ve also noticed that non native English speaker are sometimes mistaken for LLMs due to these less casual sentences structure.
> Russian and China are already getting rid of Microsoft.
I don't know what you mean by China "getting rid of Microsoft" in the context of cloud providers. I mean, Azure is already present in China's internet, and just like any cloud provider present in China it's presence is a partnership with local cloud providers.
Russia is getting rid of Microsoft not because it has a choice. They are subjected to sanctions due to their invasion of Ukraine, and that essentially cut their access to all tech services. By that measuring stick, Russia is also getting rid of Boeing and Airbus.
The most interesting part is that they do not rely on Western software solutions (Russia still needs hardware, China may reach full autonomy soon enough). If they could do it relatively quickly, EU can do it too. And EU now has exactly the same incentives.
I heard him talk about GPLv3 someday, and what he said was that it was a mistake to call it "GPLv3", as if it was the evolution of GPLv2, because for him it should have been a totally different licence.
Which I find fair: there are different kinds of copyleft (like MPL vs GPL), it makes sense to say that GPLv2 is a different concept than GPLv3. Whereas I don't know if anyone should use GPLv1 because GPLv2 sounds like it fixed GPLv1 without changing its spirit.
True but obv. Only lunatics would use a Russian cloud service. The interesting part is whether and what extent China is different. Also, why Europe should start treating us like Russians.
> The interesting part is whether and what extent China is different
Much worse for the EU, both strategically and economically. You’ll be able to buy Chinese services and give them your data and money, but you won’t be able to operate in their market. Germany is feeling the pain there. [1] Strategically they’re a Russian ally and are actively supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine and further aims against the EU.
Something like Russia -> China -> US as worst to least worst partners.
The EU should invest in technical and military capabilities and divest from reliance on other countries and echos the US American position very closely.
Was that not an imperative statement agreeing with your cathartic comment? A little weird there isn't an explicit "this is why", but asking questions with a poorly conjugated why along with bad punctuation isn't usually a native speakers habit.
They said in a follow-up comment that they intentionally wrote something ambiguous, so… I don’t know, I wouldn’t waste too many cycles on comments that are deliberately unclear.
Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own. We used to live in a world converging toward maximal international trade, when in fact it was exploiting underdeveloped nations. As we progress globally, and as the development gap shrinks, we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way.
So now what? How do we preserve a lot of the efficiencies of the past, while strengthening the resilience and redundancy. How can multiple nations create policy which drives business on partially compatible protocols?
If I allow myself to be optimistic, I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements. Protectionism is natural, but taken too far, isolationism is a death sentence.
> we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way
The clearest example is a dependency on a single wealthy nation for military and world policing. It's a good thing for individual countries to be able to project their own foreign policy goals like containing Russia without having to rely on the whims of another country's politics. Even here in Canada we should be able to defend their own arctic border reliably and be able to project power to China/India beyond strongly worded letters.
> I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements.
Ignoring the US's recent moves there does seem to be more trade deals than ever between 'middle powers'.
> isolationism is a death sentence
The best way to maintain global relationships is to offer tons of value. Similar to how China can get good trade deals and influence simply because they have so much to offer economically. This isn't just issues of diplomacy.
One of the USA's greatest exports is intelligence and higher education, and what has been happening with that and the general anti-intellectual atmosphere is to me the most concerning as an american. Ironically, public education in america has been pretty bad for a while. But I'm going to start rambling here... way too many problems, and no damn leadership.
> I think at the moment Canada faces way bigger problems from the south.
Exactly. Not only there's the absurd campaign from the Trump administration on how Canada should be a state but there are also the recent treasonous talks between representatives from the Trump administration and the Alberta separatists.
Putin's regime might be a cancer of humanity, but Canadians have far more reasons to feel threatened by the Trump admin than from Putin, even if Trump is a proxy for Putin.
> like containing Russia without having to rely on the whims of another country's politics
That's true, but at the same time it was probably already the case before invasion of Ukraine, and it is definitely the case now.
The main issue is political fragmentation: would Paris and Berlin risk lives of French and German people (soldiers and civilians due to retaliation) to save Vilnius?
But if the answer is true (as obligated by the Treaty of Maastricht, independently of NATO) then Russia stands no chance with conventional weapons against the whole Western Europe, the balance of military, demographic and industrial power is ridiculously lopsided (involving nuclear weapons would also raise the same political question about the French willingness to nuke Russia in retaliation to Russia nuking Poland but if the answer is yes, Russia cannot win a nuclear war either (which everyone would lose)).
The answer is always going to be "maybe", but hopefully enough of a maybe to deter hostile actions. That puts everything in an uncomfortable state of uncertainty.
> The main issue is political fragmentation: would Paris and Berlin risk lives of French and German people (soldiers and civilians due to retaliation) to save Vilnius?
This is a wrong question. If one day Russia feels brave enough to attack any NATO country, the right question to ask is, "Do we want to fight this war on someone else's soil or on ours?". This is the reason why Europe is so focused on helping Ukraine BTW.
What do you mean? There was never any question of attacking Russia and fighting any war on their soil. Nobody in their right mind would attack a country with the 2nd largest army and nuclear weapons. The war in Ukraine definitely made this army still very weak, but, except Ukraine defending itself, I don't see anyone rushing to attack Russia anytime soon. It makes no sense now and made no sense before they invaded Ukraine. There is nothing to win by attacking Russia and a lot to lose.
The best way to 'attack' Russia is to undermine its economic and political systems then let unrest amongst its citizenry do the dirty work. 1917 showed Russia's proletariat was very effective at achieving regime change.
How do you undermine the economic and political system of a country? The economic one can be undermined by sanctions, and they happened only because the war - before that the West was happy to send billions to Russia. The political one seems quite stable, Putin had a few decades to cement it and make sure nobody takes it to the streets, and if someone is brave enough to do it, they will be quickly pacified. He is switching the internet on and off and there is no sign of Russians reacting like Iranians.
But I saw several people criticizing their relatively high position on this chart given high incompetence and losses.
EDIT: Apparently this website doesn't follow any rigorous methodology. So basically the only thing their army is 2nd in the world is the nominal number of nukes (hopefully most of them don't work).
> This is the reason why Europe is so focused on helping Ukraine BTW.
We aren't that focused actually. France produced close to zero 155mm shells in 2023 because the producer (les forges de Tarbes) couldn't pay its suppliers due to liquidity issues. That could have been solved by a phone call to the national investment bank (BPI) but lasted 9 months because we don't take things too seriously.
Another example is how negligible was the war in Ukraine in the debate about the government budget for the past two years. If we were serious about helping Ukraine we should be spending so much money it would become a priority topic in budget debates, but it's not the case at all.
I'm deeply disappointed about how complacent we have been for the past 4 years.
Right. Aggression can only be tolerated up to a point before it triggers a response. Remember, on 1 September 1939 the Nazis invaded Poland and two days later both the UK and France declared war on Germany.
“and two days later both the UK and France decided not to intervene and just set up defensive position in Belgium and eastern France” is what actually happened. With the terrible results we known for France (the defensive position being hammered on its weakest point, leading to the complete collapse of the French army in less than a month.
I wouldn't be so categorical about France. Pro-russian/ “anti-war” political parties earned the majority of votes (but not seats) in the last elections, and the personality of Macron is so divisive (he has had record low approval for most of his tenure) it really impairs support for war.
> Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own.
If anything, I'd say for other countries it's more urgent.
If China embargoes deliveries of light bulbs to Europe, all the light bulbs already in place keep working. The pain would grow over time - giving a grace period, to ramp up local production.
If America embargoes AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft? The pain would be instant and severe.
That would be as close to a declaration of war as you can get without firing a bullet.
The immediate and obvious response would be for the foreign branches of those companies to be declared "of national interest", nationalized and forced to keep operating.
I'd imagine the government would be in talks with the highest ranking local Amazon employees long before, but I can't imagine a country trusting the hardware or wanting to manage the jank.
AWS China is a completely separate partition under separate Chinese management, with no dependencies on us-east-1. It also greatly lags in feature deployments as a result.
In case of war AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft and others would be immediately directed by government to adopt its war strategy—like it or not—just as US manufacturing was forced to retool for war production during WWII.
I'm absolutely not an expert, but critical things for power and food production not to mention medical supplies and emergency equipment are also tied up pretty deeply in international trade.
The world would break pretty quickly if we all just stopped trading with each other.
Sure, but many products can be sourced from a load of countries.
If you can't get natural gas from Russia you can get it shipped from America or Australia or Qatar - it's expensive as hell, and you might need to quickly build new regasification plants, but your economy keeps running. And there's no remote kill switch that disables the gas you already have in-country.
That's not the case for the services provided by AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft though - the 'competition' is one US provider vs another.
It is risky to believe that the development gap alone makes for higher economic efficiency when manufacturing things in China. There are very real structural differences in how various industries are organized. Not least in terms of geography.
This is an aspect the west seems to have missed entirely as there are no attempts to learn from it or emulate it.
Everyone knows about Shenzhen. Not everyone knows that this is how every major manufacturing industry is clustered in China in various cities and regions.
The US did this with automobile and steel industries concentrated around the Great Lakes. It's not some kind of profound insight on the part of the Chinese.
The downside is that it decimates entire regions if/when the demand for what they produce drops.
Yes, it has its risk, but that isn’t why the US or Europe don’t cluster industry to create higher efficiency. The risk can be mitigated. The political willingness and ability to do it deliberately just isn’t there.
My point was that the development gap is what lead to the current situation, not that it's just cheap labor that makes Chinese stuff cheap.
My point about maintaining higher economic efficiency is actually the same point you're making. How can the globe (not just the west vs the east) learn from the past and build for the future. We live in a magical world with translation services available to billions of people, how can we empower them to organize around the right ideas. How can we preserve culture and art while flooding ourselves with technologies developed globally? Who pays for security and research? Intellectual property law in general?
So many big issues and questions still need a lot of work.
I think Congress is actually the biggest obstacle to efficient manufacturing in the US. It is a body where the primary motivation of representatives centers around what they can get for their constituents, not what makes sense nationally. So any government spending (eg procurement) will actually tend to drive fragmentation as representatives fight for their states.
Take for instance the space sector. It is fragmented by design. By Congress. Not only is it spread all over the country, making collaboration expensive, time-consuming and clumsy: there are essentially six different federal space agencies of which NASA is just one. This is terribly inefficient.
I remember when reading about the Apollo missions it was astonishing just how much time they lost by different parts being built all over the US and then shipped across the country to be integrated. Utter engineering madness that was only made to work because one could pour immense amount of cash on it.
This is why companies like SpaceX was able to run more efficiently: they do a lot more in vastly fewer locations. Ditto for Lockheed during their golden years: Skunk Works was famous for having "everyone under one roof and within walking distance of each other". (That Skunk Works neither exists anymore, nor can it exist, but that's a longer story which is also about extreme inefficiency).
It is reasonable to assume that Europe wouldn't do any better. Or any setup where politicians are inclined to optimize for regional gain. You'd probably end up with the same political fights over who gets what if the EU were to push towards more of the kinds of manufacturing that you find in China.
We know we're inefficient and we have some idea of why. We like to blame factors that are easy to politicise or evoke emotion (environment, exploitation of the poor etc), but I don't think they are as important as people tend to think.
We just don't want to change. And there are legitimate reasons for that. Chief among them that we're uncomfortable with strong central control. (Well, we used to be. It only took a majority of republicans about a decade to turn 180 degrees on that question and prefer an all-controlling federal government dominated by the executive branch)
I think Susan Collins is a great example of this. Her support of Kristi Noem is based on deals she finds acceptable for Maine residents. The fact that other states suffer at the hands of ICE doesn't effect her decision's. Collins feels she only is responsible for Maine and not humans that live outside of Maine.
I find this sort of compartmentalization offensive to the common good.
That's representative democracy for you. Heck, even China faces the same issue, but they get to make it a competition between provinces, on who can win the favor of the emperor. Helps for them that the emperor has supreme authority though.
No, that's the incentive this specific system creates. There are democratic systems which do not suffer from such hyper localism. Such as the German mixed member proportional system.
Sounds like a narrow interpretation for representative democracy:) Maybe I'm stretching/mangling the golden rule but "do unto others as one would like others to do onto Mainers."
That's only in peacetime. During WWII the Government directed US industry to gear up for war production and the transformation was not only remarkably swift but also the largest retooling effort in history.
In these fraught times it's worth revisiting that history to remind ourselves of what's actually possible. By today's standards, the US's industrial response to war was truly remarkable.
> How do we preserve a lot of the efficiencies of the past, while strengthening the resilience and redundancy.
Open source with clear international governance and maintainer/contributor base, in such a way that a geopolitical rift leaves both sides with working software.
That works for tech and the infrastructure, of course, but not for the corporations built upon them.
> more international lawyers
I don't see that as a significant source of safety in our current world.
> isolationism is a death sentence.
The current US admin isn't isolationist, it's merely reverting back to 19th century imperialism.
> If I allow myself to be optimistic, I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements.
One of the issues with the current system is that the WTO appellate body, which is effectively the court of world trade, requires USA approval for any appointments, which both Trump and Biden have refused to give. This effectively makes the WTO completely impotent.
Trade agreements, the WTO, its rules and appellant system, only work if nations are at peace and that peace is sustainable. We've just lived through a remarkably stable period of 80 years (since WWII) without which WHO, free trade and trade agreements could not have existed as we've known them. That era is seemingly now over, and the WTO is falling into irrelevancy.
Unfortunately, in the decades since the 1970s laissez faire economics/capitalism with its immediate need for quick profits, short-termism, a penchant for deregulation and ignoring traditional business ethics has meant that governments have ignored their long-term strategic interests. Despite the dangers of these policies being blatantly obvious dangers from the outset many Western governments encouraged such practices. Now it's payback time, and it'll be expensive—likely more than if the old order had been retained.
Anyone with a sense of history could see the headlong rush to deregulatate markets, indiscriminate reductions in tariffs and free (and indiscriminate) trade, would ultimately result in leaving many countries strategically vulnerable and open to exploitation by others.
We're now witnessing the true cost of these policies and what it means to have lost critical industrial infrastructure, loss of production know-how along with the loss of skilled workers, and an ongoing deskilling of the workforce all of which took decades if not centuries to build up.
With more nuanced policies much of the pain could have been avoided.
Rebuilding a strategic manufacturing infrastructure to insure resilience and independence in an increasingly uncertain and divided world will be costly and difficult.
>"but taken too far, isolationism is a death sentence"
I would argue that few large countries have everything to be self sufficient. For the rest - they would have to band together to avoid being at the mercy of their bigger overlords.
As for efficiencies of the past: I think they lead to a complete monopoly / near monopoly in few critical areas. The result - the monopoly power becoming a political weapon and or critical vulnerability.
Last week I migrated our db away from AWS RDS to a European cloud provider. Everything runs fine and we also have it cheaper!
One of our domains is due for renewal in a couple of months. I'm setting up the transfer to a EU registrar for it next week.
This all takes time and it's not the most important thing for the bottom line, but on the long run I'm sure I'll look back and say it was a great investment.
Which one? I've been using DNSimple for so long, been trying to find something equally developer friendly who is based in Europe but haven't had much success. Used to use Gandi before DNSimple but it's obviously down the drain today.
I've been using DNSimple for ages and I'm looking to switch; not because of geopolitical reasons (I'm American), but they're just damn expensive for the simple dns and domain management stuff I use them for.
I use Scaleway as my registrar, I don't know if i can automate domain registration but I don't have to. They have APIs for managing records if you choose to host DNS there too.
OVH is awful. The UI is slow and buggy, operations often fail and you need slow contact with support.
Worse, closing an OVH account is very hard. Every domain you host there they sign you up to several services, and you need to manually disable each one before they let you close the account. This then often gets stuck, because of the broken UI, and you end up needing to badger support over and over until they'll fix it
But their web UI looks and feels like it was pieced together by hamsters. It doesn't leave me feeling confident in their technical abilities in any way.
This is happening in the US firms too. Yesterday, our CTO asked us to look into multi-cloud solutions. We know it is politically motivated decision with no cost savings or benefit.
We went with Hetzner as we already had good experiences with their VPSes. For this particular db migration, a resonably sized VPS with volumes does the job for us. We don't have planet scale operations so the lowish IOPS is not an issue atm. Also, with this experience at hand, I am confident that we'll manage another migration if need be.
Did the exact same thing for a client who's ops we managed on AWS. I was pretty against ditching RDS and a load balanced setup for hetzners load balancer and 3 instances (2 web, 1 db) but honestly, it's been pretty smooth sailing. The sites faster, and costs dropped massively, saving the client approx €900/mo for a better service.
Afaik Hetzner has a couple of server locations in the USA.
Is it correct to say that Hetzner has to comply to US CLOUD Act and therefore give away any data requested?
The one under US jurisdiction operated by Hetzner US LLC must comply, while the German ones are operating under the GDPR, which has extraterritorial clauses can can deny or challenge the request.
The reality is that if you have any interest, company or employees in the US you can be coerced to do anything the US government wants.
Either legally through courts, or through business influence, or through harassment (e.g. hardcore checks from the IRS).
Sorry, Stripe rejects you now because you are high-risk (you have to explain why you refuse to help in criminal cases, though there is a court requesting you).
You don't like to comply to US requests and protect terrorists ?
Any company opting for building digital sovereign systems should build a redundant and decentralized organization so that in worst case the company can split up its operations geographically to avoid being in the crosshairs of any host countries government.
Absolutely, but imagine, Zuckerberg creates a new company:
"Storm" -> "the European end to end encrypted privacy-conscious messenger app"
Now, an US court, requests data from that project to protect an imminent attack where people are going to die.
He refuses, his company refuses, everybody refuses.
Do you think he can evade US justice even if the company is incorporated in the EU ?
Collaborating is the path of least resistance, and as long as you can claim somewhat "we didn't have any choice, we were coerced" then you are fine. This is also why Apple, Google, Meta, NordVPN, etc, are all collaborating with the infamous FBI DITU group.
do you use FDE on your hetzner instances? I couldn't find a guarantee that they properly dispose of block storage so I ended up developing a utility for this https://github.com/mvelbaum/hetzner-fde-toolkit
As a European, I am glad that this is finally discussed in the open! I have made multiple comments in the last weeks that one of the most important things, for me, is an alternative to the Visa/Mastercard duopoly. And yes, I can use an app to pay, but whenever I rent a car or purchase something online, I still use one of these two American companies. Why isn't the European Commission mandating these app payments in different EU countries to connect with each other? Wouldn't that go faster than the digital euro, that is set to come no earlier than 2029?
It just plainly makes sense for central bank to offer a digital payments solution. Right now if I want to pay for something without 3rd party taking a cut is to mail the money in an envelope as if EU Central Bank denies existence of digital economy.
So you move the power from two American companies (Visa and Mastercard) to two American companies (Apple and Google)? What's that supposed to solve?
Also, fuck apps. I had to set up an app for my mother to recharge her new hybrid car and I am not joking: at one point I had to create a log in for her and was greeted by a screen with two options: Log In (blue button, white text), and Log In (white button, blue text). I would rather use cash than an app (and I'm in Belgium, carrying around cash is like herding sheep through coyote territory).
> So you move the power from two American companies (Visa and Mastercard) to two American companies (Apple and Google)? What's that supposed to solve?
Unsure what you mean, but for context I use an app developed by a consortium of local banks and it works by scanning a QR code. Indeed, I use an Android phone but my next one will be a de-googled one like a Fairphone with /e/OS. Hopefully the same app will work there...
That's the problem: currently many of those banking apps in the EU require having a phone with Google Play services and other "security" stuff that makes you reliant on American companies, like the post you're replying to claims.
Now that the cat is out of the bag, I am confident that those banking apps will (eventually) work without the likes of Google Play Services. Additionally, what i really want is an alternative to Visa/Mastercard, meaning I can use it for renting a car or paying online.
>>As a European, I am glad that this is finally discussed in the open! I have made multiple comments in the last weeks that one of the most important things, for me, is an alternative to the Visa/Mastercard duopoly.
The main reason we don't have an alternative to Visa/Mastercard duopoly is protectionism of EU countries. There are local alternatives that do pretty well (BLIK in Poland, Revolut Pay in countries where it's popular) but entering more markets is like pulling teeth because EU throws regulatory obstacles at every step.
>> Why isn't the European Commission mandating these app payments in different EU countries to connect with each other? Wouldn't that go faster than the digital euro, that is set to come no earlier than 2029?
It would but then their non-local alternative could win which they really don't want to happen.
> because EU throws regulatory obstacles at every step.
No, the gatekeeping is done by local banks and governments to protect their oligopolies/cartels.
There are many instant-pay apps across Europe and they are intentionally not interoperable outside of local markets. Each local banking oligopoly is trying to fence off competition. The main fear is from smaller neo-banks.
>>No, the gatekeeping is done by local banks and governments to protect their oligopolies/cartels.
If you are pointing the distinction between gatekeeping at the EU level and country level I am not contesting that. It's clear though that the gatekeeping is the problem here (and in many other industries in EU).
> The main reason we don't have an alternative to Visa/Mastercard duopoly is protectionism of EU countries. There are local alternatives that do pretty well (BLIK in Poland, Revolut Pay in countries where it's popular) but entering more markets is like pulling teeth because EU throws regulatory obstacles at every step.
That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense? How did Visa & Mastercard manage to go through the "protectionism of EU countries" then?
You forgot the part where there is a bootstrap problem for any fintech.
You need the appropriate license to make money, but you can only get that license if you already have enough money.
On top of that is a requirement that basically demands that you have employees in charge that have worked and gained job experience at the established businesses.
This is good for stability, but it also means that innovation gets nibbed in the bud.
Neither my comment, nor the prior one, had anything to do with fintech.
Concerning "innovation" in financial systems, done by relative outsiders, with little experience or incentive to keep the system stable: Given the track record, I'd argue that such innovations should either be outright banned, or limited to some tiny percentage of the relevant financial market. The world does not need more FTX's.
My brother actually was part of deal in talks to have UPI pilots as a project within London as a project within his college and I remember him talking about how UPI (India) is in talks with other European countries too.
With the mother of all deals recently signed between EU and India. I sincerely hope that UPI can have access within EU markets too.
If you ever come to India, you can witness the astronomical rise of UPI. From street vendors to literally everybody now has UPI and it has 0 fees and is really great/one of the best.
As for our brazillian friends, I have heard that pix is great too and I have respect to pix as well plus its open source as well. Both Pix and UPI are really great.
Yes, there are local alternatives like Pix here as well, but they only work in the same country. I need something that works across EU countries, like wero. I also need something that works on every site when I buy online and I can also use it when renting a car. So a real Visa/Mastercard alternative.
I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer. And if you are a start-up and you want to grow, the situation is even more dire.
And without a few hundreds of billions of EUR invested _today_ there will still be at least a decade until basic infrastructure will be somewhat on par with current day hyperscalers from the US.
And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.
Today, if for political reasons some EU companies will switch to whatever Europe has to offer in terms of cloud computing, they will need to spend a significant amount of money to retool their day to day pipelines and invest into developing or replacing cloud services with alternatives from the new provider or self-host if there is no native offering.
There’s a chance that the current situation will start to resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however that might look.
I dislike the idea that if a cloud provider can not provide every service it's not even worth considering. Where is the problem solving. Maybe don't lock yourself into a single vendor and shop around for solutions. Apart from that the cloud offerings of companies like OVH and Scaleway are constantly expanding.
This takes time and effort, thus, lost opportunity cost. The thing that makes these providers worth it, is that it lets the business focus on their core competencies and just add-on as they scale without worrying about complexity. A business owner who hyper-optimizes for every contract is unlikely to be focusing on growing their business, even if their business is more efficient on paper.
It would make me very uneasy to have my company be 100% dependent on another company. It sure is easy and convenient to just go to AWS/Azure/GCP pick all the components I want and plug them together but I'd say leading a company is not always choosing the easiest but sometimes the most sensible option.
> This takes time and effort, thus, lost opportunity cost.
Why should we assume this for every type of business.
> The thing that makes these providers worth it, is that it lets the business focus on their core competencies and just add-on as they scale without worrying about complexity.
Since when? Mastering the complexity and implementation of infrastructure from US cloud providers is a skill that takes time in itself. Personally I don’t see how Scaleway does not provide the same for example.
At some point we have to question are we choosing AWS, GCP, or Azure out of brand name, convenience, and marketability. Our if they actually enable faster business execution, higher availability, security, and regional compliance that alternatives don’t…
Europe managed the first ~60 years of computing without the cloud just fine, and (as per greybeard HN-style comment) one can in fact wonder how much of the past 15 years of innovation has actually brought us for "your average org".
Also: there may be _a_ chance that the situation will improve, but as the Dutch say "Trust Arrives on Foot, but Leaves on Horseback" and your even given your "even if" the trust thrown away in the past year will take literal decades to repair.
You don't need hundreds of services.
Give me virtual machines, reliable block storage, file storage and object storage, networking, dns, managed kubernetes, and it will cover the majority of workloads in Europe that run on Openshift or Openstack today.
Companies have this risk adversity when it comes to trusting all their infrastructure to a person that knows it all and can do it on three physical servers.
I am old enough to have set up services on bare metal servers with what was virtualization or containerization back then (vserver), but today no one wants to know how to tweak Postfix because some emails are not coming through or whatnot.
> Companies have this risk adversity when it comes to trusting all their infrastructure to a person that knows it all and can do it on three physical servers.
A person that knows it all and can do it all on AWS, on the other hand...
Sure, but let's say you do EKS, you set it up once and then it's mostly done, including security, etc. You set up your own, then you upgrade every 6 months manually.... this is a cascading cost.
When we designed the (by now largely self-hosted) stack for our production enviroment, we had that discussion. And honestly, on the persistence side, most people agreed that PostgreSQL, S3 and a file system for some special services is plenty. Maybe add some async queueing as well. Add some container scheduling, the usual TLS/Edge loadbalancing, some monitoring and you have a fairly narrow stack that can run a lot of applications with different purposes and customers..
We (10 people) run this + CI on just a VM + storage provider, mostly VSphere from our sister team of 6 (and yes it hurts, and we have no time to move it), Hetzner and some legacy things on AWS.
Though that's currently the problem -- there is a somewhat steep minimal invest of time into this. But that's good, because this means there could be value for European cloud providers to build up this narrow stack managed and get paid for it. We will see.
If those managers currently sold on The Cloud, can instead be sold on how much money they'd save not being on The Cloud, then corporate can do what it does best and change policy hard enough to give the staff whiplash.
I don't know what managers have been reading/hearing, but for the last decade or so as a developer what I've mostly been hearing is that the only people who actually benefit from Big Data architectures are FAANG, that it's much cheaper to run on a single small self-hosted system that's done right, that the complexity of managing the cloud is even higher than a local solution.
This matches my own experience of what people needed to serve millions of users 20 years ago. If you can't handle a chat system or a simple sales system with 100k-1M customers on a server made out of one single modern mobile phone, you're either just not trying hard enough or have too many layers of abstraction between business logic and bare metal. Even for something a bit more challenging than that, you should still be thinking thousands of users on a phone and 10k-100k on a single device that's actually meant to work as a server.
You might save 100k in server fees, but now you have to hire three full time people to manage your own servers. And you won’t get the redundancy or the security of having the experts do it across three data centres for you.
> If those managers currently sold on The Cloud, can instead be sold on how much money they'd save not being on The Cloud...
This is more than a theory, it's a trend that is already underway. The cloud remains supremely capital efficient for startups, but pricing has crept up and some customers are falling off the other side of the table.
They don't want to necessarily buy it, but they want to hedge their options from "my $guy can do everything" to "on which cloud platform can I find a competent operator tomorrow".
Note that once you have virtual machines, those other things can be provided using that same virtual machine interface. Layering and standards are really useful. Spin up your own storage cluster? if you want...pay a managed service from a third party on the same cloud? whatever makes sense to you. I find it appalling that because money was so cheap, people got used to just throwing it at the hyperscalers 'rich offerings', and now we have multiple generations of people that think RDS is some magic box that would take billions in investment to replicate.
This matches my experience. I run a pay-per-use VM service (shellbox.dev) entirely on Hetzner auction servers with Firecracker microVMs. Sub-second boot, full Linux environment, SSH-only interface. The entire "cloud" layer is Firecracker + Btrfs reflinks for instant copy-on-write cloning. No managed Kubernetes, no proprietary orchestrators.
The total cost of that stack is remarkably low — cheap enough to offer VMs at $0.02/hr running and $0.50/mo stopped, which undercuts most hyperscalers for bursty workloads. The "billions in investment" framing is exactly the problem. Most of what hyperscalers sell is convenience wrappers around commodity compute, and the lock-in is the product.
We didn’t do it because money was cheap we did it because there are tons of benefits to not having to inventory your own compute. Everything from elastic scaling to financial engineering was improved via the hyper scalar options and it’s ridiculous to act like those options aren’t valuable post hoc because Europe doesn’t have a native one.
I think the Heztners and their ilk are coming along nicely and probably can support a lot of Europes cloud computing needs, but they aren’t in the same league as the hyper scalars when it comes to capabilities currently. It would be great if they got there for everyone though.
there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer
That's true right now, yes. But things are changing rapidly, e.g. there is evroc [1], Mimer [2] and others are popping up too.
it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering
I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard benchmark, things in principle can be done much faster if you are smaller, nimbler and more focused. The solution to EUs problems is less paperwork and meetings, and more smaller bespoke companies that are laser focused on solving a specific sub-problem. Can they do it? Probably not if they try to create their Google or Microsoft.
Getting Google Docs to be a Word alternative was an order of magnitude easier than getting GCP to be an AWS competitor.
Now that AWS has two serious competitors (and some non serious ones), privately funding another one just seems impossible to me. Who is gonna chip in tens of billions of dollars to fund "that, but European, and 15 years from now"?
I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is some combination of:
1. EU intervention (nasty regulations and expensive subsidies).
2. People using non-equivalent products (Europeans have to use lower-level infra and do a lot more ops in-house). This part would have its upsides anyway TBH.
> Just mandate EU countries' public administration to rely exclusively on EU cloud solutions.
This happens already in some areas and it is not cheaper or better. The EU funds national clouds where public institutions use them. What does it mean? VMware with Tanzu or OpenStack. And then some services thrown in to offer some S3 like buckets and that's it. The rest has to be built by the beneficiaries. Servers? Brand names like Lenovo/HP/Dell. Storage? Brand names like NetApp, HP, Dell, Lenovo, 3Par, IBM and the list goes on. Networking? Cisco (mostly), HP/Juniper. Firewalls? Cisco/Fortinet/PaloAlto/CheckPoint/etc.
Basically an enterprise setup masquerading as a cloud offering.
And even if there would be EU wide offerings for such cloud, there's too much money at stake to let institutions from one country buy services from another.
Yeah. The EuroCloud will always be dramatically more expensive and much much worse. Anyone who's claiming otherwise is living a fantasy. The only argument that makes sense is "but it's worth it".
(One detail: it will be much worse at the margins where current clouds actually compete. But actually I suspect only a small number of our customers actually exist at that margin. I think a lot of people are just massively overpaying for their cloud platform and so they might be fine with a EuroCloud anyway. This is why you hear stories today like "we switched to Hetzner, halved our bill, and it works exactly as well as the AWS products we used to use).
> And then some services thrown in to offer some S3 like buckets and that's it. The rest has to be built by the beneficiaries.
Ditto, a fully featured EuroCloud is not gonna happen. Again, it has to be worth this cost.
> Brand names like NetApp, HP, Dell, Lenovo, 3Par, IBM and the list goes on.
This is the only part where I disagree. I think it's OK if the EuroCloud is built out of US hardware (like how the AmeriCloud is very far from free of Chinese hardware). Obviously presents a significant risk re supply chain security but still, the _really_ important thing is actually sovereign operations. The most important thing is who has the keys to the DC.
> This happens already in some areas and it is not cheaper or better.
The goal is not for it to be cheaper or better. The goal is to have money spent on domestic actors. Will some of them provide a dogshit service? Sure. Just like it happened in the US. Time will sort things out.
> What does it mean? VMware with Tanzu or OpenStack. And then some services thrown in to offer some S3 like buckets and that's it. The rest has to be built by the beneficiaries. Servers? Brand names like Lenovo/HP/Dell. Storage? Brand names like NetApp, HP, Dell, Lenovo, 3Par, IBM and the list goes on. Networking? Cisco (mostly), HP/Juniper. Firewalls? Cisco/Fortinet/PaloAlto/CheckPoint/etc.
You need to cut this purity bullshit where Europe must own all the stack from the foundry, or do nothing. What you're building is an unwinnable battle.
> I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard benchmark
My point was that even with Google's money, they're still not on par with MS even if the Office files format has been standardized for a number of years. And if you extrapolate that to any other technology, you will find out very fast that it is very expensive to come up with a replacement solution that will actually be embraced by potential customers.
On the other hand, there is not much office work which could not have been done almost as effective in office 97.
I don't think the right explanation of MS monopoly is technical superiority, but rather the natural forces of monopoly. They are extremely hard to break with free market competition, but can definitely be broken with legislation.
I am convinced that 99% of office use can be replaced with competitors if needed, and it would work out OK.
Yes, we need a posix of productivity tool. You want to work with a EU government, you have to use this and that open standards. This is the way to break that particular monopoly.
> My point was that even with Google's money, they're still not on par with MS even if the Office files format has been standardized for a number of years.
The counterpoint is that they don't need to be on par :-/ The problem is that individual procurement decision-makers are incentivised to go with the Microsoft suite, not that the alternatives aren't a good enough replacement.
In politics things work differently: you have people that "spat on each other" today and tomorrow they'll act like they are brothers and the spitting never happened.
It is a bit more than "spitting on each other" which now is between the USA and its former allies. I seriously doubt that we will just go back to normal the moment there is a US president from the Democratic party. Possibly in some areas of politics and economy, in others (real) trust is more essential.
I believe at the moment it's still in the "spitting on each other" phase. Had Trump actually invaded Greenland* (and likewise if he does so in the future), that's where the Rubicon gets crossed and there's no going back.
I kinda do want it to have passed that point, but not as much as I'm glad he TACOed.
* There's other metaphorical Rubicons available, this is just the one most in my mind given I live in the EU
Trump and his team repeatedly saying they have no problems using force against Greenland and Canada were the red lines and they have already been crossed.
I want those actions to have been the red line, and wish my representatives to treat it so if they are not yet. It is important to keep separate what I want to be and what is.
They are the red lines. There is no going back. The USA is too dangerous to rely on, that's quite clear.
People don't quite realize how big a deal "invading" Greenland would have been. That's literally an act of war! What's next, occupying France? Saying that it's at all a possibility is far beyond any red line that the EU thought it would have to deal with.
Not only would the rest of the world ditch the USA, but the Democrats themselves would take the opportunity to publically announce that they do not recognize Donald Trump's government.
> People don't quite realize how big a deal "invading" Greenland would have been. That's literally an act of war! What's next, occupying France? Saying that it's at all a possibility is far beyond any red line that the EU thought it would have to deal with.
Yes, absolutely, I agree.
Thing is, in the end he backed off, so the result was all talk. He TACOed.
For everyone's sake (including Americans'), I absolutely 100% want the EU to disentangle as much as possible and as fast as possible from the US so that we don't even feel the need to be polite to Trump in the future: he obviously sees the world as only predators to be scared of and prey to consume, so it's better for us (everyone, not just the EU) to become big and scary really fast so he doesn't even try anything.
If he were to invade (anywhere, not just Greenland), that place and their allies basically have two options: fight or die.
> Not only would the rest of the world ditch the USA, but the Democrats themselves would take the opportunity to publically announce that they do not recognize Donald Trump's government.
I wish, but humans aren't like that.
The Democrat leadership keep pulling defeat from the jaws of victory, and people are the same everywhere so an external threat is more likely to pull everyone together than to split them apart (same for everyone else is why the EU and Canada are warming, or at least thawing, their relationships with the rest of the world).
What might have happened before an invasion was enough Republicans finally kicking him out (with Democrat support), or a US military coup (I'd say 50% if it got that far, but with high uncertainty).
A military coup would also be a crossed Rubicon.
But the military don't like traitors, and betraying an ally by invading it is an act of treachery.
No, the Democrats would do it precisely because of cynical human interest (they are like that). Donald Trump Republicans invading a Western nation plays right into their hands. They may as well just hand Gavin Newsom the next election. The overwhelming majority of US citizens do not approve of USA invading Greenland.
Nothing would have come of it. Ehe EU would have been upset for 3-6 months, then it would have got onboard with the idea that Greenland is now a US territory and that's that.
France has a too good of a cuisine to be invaded. I think Germany would be next, they are running their mouth more than they should and they suck at food.
Unless the mid-terms change the political majority in the US, the Democrats can wine all they want and recognize or not recognize whoever they want as president. It will not change the actual situation.
This is some top notch r/ShitAmericansSay material, especially Germany "running their mouth" and having bad food. Add in democrats "wining" and I'm pretty sure this post belongs on a Confederate cooking blog rather than HN.
It depends on what exactly Europe needs to defend itself against.
And Europe is quite rightly starting to regard this US-dependence as a problem to be solved without further delay, rather than an eternal and immutable fact of the world.
One of the criticisms I hear of Merz is that he's not tough enough on Trump; therefore the choice to target Germany at this time, matches a pattern of the target being painted on whoever wants to play nice.
All of that is why I want Europe to take it seriously, even though I think they might be cooling off now that Trump has backed off.
We (both of my "we"s given I'm a British citizen but live in the EU) sent in tripwire forces to defend Greenland. Their purpose is that getting shot is a casus belli for us to go to war with the USA.
Also remember: NATO has two other nuclear powers besides the USA, and the biggest flaw with one of those nuclear arsenals is how when the UK test-fired the missiles it bought from the USA, they went the wrong way or didn't launch properly at all.
I don't know what the order of events would have been given how heavily tied together EU and US (and UK) economies are, but essentially the EU banning the purchase of new US treasuries by itself would cause something in the order of US inflation going to 10% for several years; this, plus any economic departure (I'm thinking emigration more than internment camps like Japanese-Americans in WW2, much worse if that) from all the European migrants on visas (and some or all of the naturalised ones, but that number will be less… unless Trump also strips that like he's been suggesting), the US could loose 2-5 million people's worth of useful economic labour from the workforce. (Even if they're put in work camps, they're not getting good work out of them).
In the other direction, if the US cuts off cloud computing today, the EU is almost immediately screwed. Hence article.
But if the EU's screwed, then we don't have the money to buy the US treasuries, so screwing us also screws the US. That 10% inflation I mentioned, that's just from not buying T-bills; screwing the EU like this would also mean no more trade with the EU, which basically doubles the US unemployment rate on top of that, budget deficit goes to $3T/year, and costs the US 5% GDP relative to the baseline (i.e. what it would have been without invading) forever. Without a shot fired. But France has enough nukes that even if the USA's anti-missile defences can stop 80% of them, it could by itself destroy every US state capital and still have several left over.
And if you're worried about Russia taking over Greenland, oh boy you should worry about what they do to a catastrophically weakened Europe that isn't just a hard-to-mine sheet of ice supporting a population that wouldn't even half-fill these seats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Narendra_Modi_Stadium_vie...
Sorry but you're just wrong. This isn't a situation to be upset about. Its war. There's no universe where the USA invasion of Greenland doesn't end in disaster for Trump.
There's already been articles in Politico where USA lawmakers admit that there would have been a War Measures Act passed if Trump invaded Greenland. Unlike Venezuela.
It would definitely change the political situation if the state governments of California, New York et al stopped recognizing the federal government.
This isn't politicking though. This is national security. In matters of national security, you take no chances. There's no going back to the relationship the world had with the USA.
What's different this time is that the US has an extensive system of checks and balances that nearly everyone thought would make the current situation impossible, and now we are learning that they aren't nearly as effective as we thought.
No matter how reasonable the next few administrations are it is hard to see anyone else trusting the US nearly as much as they did before 2024.
This has been creeping up on us for some time. For my entire life, the US executive branch has done nothing but accumulate powers and slowly undermine constitutional checks and balances. It’s all fun and games while your guy does it, but it’s inevitable that you’ll get someone in power who you don’t want. That’s the entire point of the checks and balances, but few seemed to care until now. Even if we get a “normal” president after this, I’d bet a lot of money that he/she won’t do anything to reduce the power of the executive.
That's mostly how it was during the last US presidential term. The president even said that "America is back" (1)
The fact is, it didn't last. America going away was not a one-off. It happened a second time, worse. The lesson that the USA just is a country that does this from time to time. People in the rest of the world who learn that lesson will prepare for the next time.
As another US president accurately said: "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice ... you can't get fooled again."
> And if you are a start-up and you want to grow, the situation is even more dire.
I worked for/with several European startups. They really didn't need nor aim for planet scale operations.
There are also quite a lot of articles about how startups (in any country) focus needlesly on large scalability when they only really have a few customers. It's exactly the same false issue here.
> They really didn't need nor aim for planet scale operations.
It depends on the market they're operating in. Planet scale operations can mean have the site load as fast as possible in every country on the planet, because this is how we make money.
Working within a smaller geography I guess you can "host" your services anywhere in Europe and be pretty snappy.
I could mention the fact that EU based startups don't dream big and this is costing them a lot of revenue from markets they don't wish to operate in because they think Europe is big enough. But we're gonna start a discussion not meant for this thread.
> There are also quite a lot of articles about how startups (in any country) focus needlesly on large scalability when they only really have a few customers. It's exactly the same false issue here.
Offers such as Scaleway should be sufficient "feature-wise" for startups. Even if they don't have feature parity with AWS (I mean AWS is huge) it has, kubernets and serverless deployment options (functions, containers), S3 compatible object storage, managed databases, queues, llm hosted models, terraform provider.
Those should most of what startups need for deployment; at least what I've seen working with many over the last few years.
For those with pragmatic Linux Ops experience on the team, nothing will beat self-hosted on Hetzner dedicated servers, at a great price.
P.S. can't vouch for all Scaleway services, used it for a couple of VMs and hosted LLMs only. Happy to hear the experience of other users, no matter how few of those are here.
Free credits for startups are a different aspect of incentive, which is not negligible.
We've been using Scaleway's compute, RDS and S3 offerings for Ente[1]'s cloud offering for over 5 years now.
RDS backups and retrivals from cold storage[2] are both a lot slower than AWS. The "high-availablity" instances for RDS are in the same DC, so the feature is cosmetic. Ignoring these, our experience has been pretty good. Quality of support is great.
--
While linking to [2] I realised that Scaleway's own website is behind Cloudflare, which is disappointing given they have their own DDoS protection[3].
The real issue with Scaleway seems to be the lack of governance. I am more familiar with Azure and features like Entra and polices seems to be missing.
If your customers want features that require compute and money, and your competitor offers them, then you don't really have a choice if you want to stay in business.
That's up to you (and the customers) to understand that the location where the compute/data is happening is as important a criteria to consider. As it is today.
Businesses generally shouldn't be trying to fight ideological battles, they should just be trying to meet their customers' needs. As long as they're not doing anything immoral/illegal like engaging in discrimination or dumping toxic waste.
Risk = (probability of it happening) x (cost when it happens)
That a man/administration decides to cut off, or take hostage, or tax, online services because they are hosted on their premises, but benefits to/operates for "once good friends but now very unfriendly, bad, incompetent, the worst people", this is definitely not a law of nature.
But, that he/they decide to trigger absurd actions with long-lasting damaging consequences, while not a law of nature, that happened more often than not in the past 12 months than in the whole century before. Or, granted, maybe not "absurd", but definitely "not in line with a century of rather predictable behaviour".
So... you'd be rational to consider that the risk has moved from "low" to "med high" or "high" category in a lot of areas you do not control.
If the customer disagrees, fine: their business, not mine. My duty stops at notifying and documenting the risk.
If this is in reference to the parent's mention of Hauwei (200,000 employees, ~$120 billion annual revenue), then I'm not sure we all share your idea of a small company
Small company can mean different things to different people. Considering that some larger Chinese companies have north of 2 million employees, 200k is quite a small number actually. Go figure.
My solution is that sustainable companies are more worthwhile to society, than late scale capitalism companies that always lay off employees when the exponential growth targets set by their C suites aren't met.
I mentioned MS because OOXML is now an open standard, albeit a 6000 pages one, but still open. And a similar sized competitor - Google, is still trying to deliver the same functionality.
The point I'm trying to make is that going from zero to hero, even with basically "infinite" money like Google has is very very very hard.
I’m not sure it’s necessary. Office is bloated with features that very few people use on rare occasion. A much simpler word processor would do, and the next Google Docs doesn’t need to invent a lot of this stuff from scratch.
The tricky part is how many organizations have an enormous amount of business logic programmed into excel sheets.
I think you're underestimating the features used within Office. Offices isn't bloated because they wanted to add fluff. It's bloated because of the large number of customers that have differing but overlapping needs.
The Engineers: Word processor with basic features is fine
My theory is that 80% of workloads on AWS/GCP/Azure are pure waste. They sell complexity-as-a-service. 80% of startups and enterprises could run on a single beefy baremetal server (or two). AWS/GCP/Azure are the result of hype bubbles and VC-funded waste culture, it's not necessary for Europe to recreate that to compete.
I once had a working program, running on a 4 GB RAM virtual server with MongoDB. Everything was fast and testing and deploying a new version took me some minutes usually. Existing users were happy as far as I could tell.
But then some corporate IT guy mandated everything had to be using managed AWS services in some three tier dev-test-production setup, despite having no prior experience with that on either side.
Cost went up at least 25-fold, the development sucked, new deployments took 30? minutes minimum (because now everything has to run through some build-system I did not control and I had to manually copy keys around every time).
I left the company, but I think the product exists to this day with less than 1000 customers. Nothing my 4 GB VS could handle...
I would love to write an email that start with "I can reduce cost 25 times by doing thing X" (the tricky part is hiding the fact that "X" is what you were doing before.)
This is an uncomfortable truth on this site, because many of us work for a FAANG company or FAANG partner. If the cloud hadn't grown that much in the last decade or so, the software industry would be relatively unpretentious.
Thank you. The AWS spaghetti is a trap of unnecessary complexity for most cases. You'd be shocked how far you can scale with a few good baremetal servers running something like Rails and Postgres.
And most (not all) of these workloads are custom software that try to fully reproduce/plumb functionalities that already mostly exist in Unix tools, with worse performance, instead of using/plugging into them.
> no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer
I guess we must be living on different planets. I have recently deployed a Django application for a client of mine on Scaleway (due to an existing partnership we preferred using them over other infrastructure). Scaleway right now (you can signup and check it out) offers:
* container registry - build an push your containers there
* ECS/Fargate equivalent - tell it to run N instances of your aforementioned container
* Managed Postgres & Redis with failover/replication
* VPC - put your managed DBs and containers there so they can talk over a private network
* S3-compatible object storage
What more do you need exactly? That's essentially all I would use from the incumbent cloud providers anyway.
> I could go on with the list of services currently used by the people that pay to push buttons
I too can build an engineering playground where every ingress byte traverses as many AWS services as I can find. But if you're building a business application, how many of these do you actually need?
Once you have the basic primitives you can fill in the gaps yourself if needed. But in the list you provided, Pub/Sub, CDN and GLB is already covered actually.
I'm sure in due time other services will be covered if there's enough demand, but to claim there is no EU alternative while the basics (app server + DB + S3, aka the most difficult to scale/operate yourself) are covered is a bit misleading I think.
> I too can build an engineering playground where every ingress byte traverses as many AWS services as I can find. But if you're building a business application, how many of these do you actually need?
I gave a real list, and all of them have real reasons for being used. I don't know from where you got the idea that apps are built just by chaining cloud services aimlessly.
My point is that you can go very far and solve real-world problems with the basic primitives alone.
While I’m sure there are legitimate uses for the services you mentioned, I’ve also witnessed plenty of engineering playgrounds where complexity was a feature and services were used for the sake of it rather than due to a specific need.
Having to roll each of those by your lonesome is still preferable over having some asshole cut you off from the services that you pay for on a whim. And that sort of thing is definitely on the table. Trump came within a hair of starting a shooting war with Europe, that sort of thing tends to cause people to re-evaluate their relationships.
It didn't make sense to have a Tier 1 cloud providers. EU using US tech and services was the social contract for the ally level cooperation. The moment this relationship goes towards the adversary level Tier 1 cloud and the rest of dependencies (and defense/ will be developed in house, no matter if the future administration is a Dems one. The point to take away is the change of direction in the EU as slow and as costly as that might be. Now it's a security issue.
I think it depends, honestly. As a startup you could be using civo or katapult as clouds and be getting almost everything you need. I think the main issue is actually network effect; easy to hire people who know AWS, easy to explain AWS architecture to a auditor who's seen it 100x before and it's easy to explain to customers that you use AWS like them, so easy to do VPC peering, or BYOC with them if needed..
If you just want dedicated servers/VPS the choice is much wider still and plenty of providers on comparison sites and so on.
Availability ain't worth shit unless the compensation for missing said availability is anywhere near the business losses caused by it. "Credit on your bill" doesn't count (and you're not even likely to get that since they can just lie on their status page and pretend everything is fine).
Cloud is convenient but don't expect any kind of availability you can actually rely on. If you actually need that, you're gonna have to go multi-cloud or self-managed bare-metal at multiple providers anyway.
You go multi-region. Multi-cloud is extremely expensive, both in terms of data and functional equivalence.
Bare metal is pretty much the same story: you can host it at different providers, but scaling that and maintaining coherence between data centers is not an easy feat as it might sound.
And seriously now, no sane provider is willing to cover your losses if they go do down. On the other hand, it's not a secret this is not happening and you can take this into account in your risk management strategy.
After years and years, Amazon now has an offering to shield you from when us-east-1 goes down. Funny, no?
If you’re going to go multi-region and take the latency hit may as well go multi-provider no?
Multi-region within the same provider won’t shield you against unknown shared dependencies on a single point of failure (AWS console auth still relies on credentials being checked in a single region if I remember right).
And yes fully agreed that maintaining consistency between active-active regions (whether cloud or bare-metal) is super hard and not worth it for most deployments. Active-standby with point-in-time-recovery and an acceptable data loss window is much easier - when one region is confirmed down, someone throws a switch and the standby becomes active.
> no sane provider is willing to cover your losses
Agreed, but thats why all those who justify the 10-90x premium of the cloud over bare-metal are full of it - that premium is not actually worth it.
> it's not a secret this is not happening
Maybe for you it’s not a secret? Literally every thread tries to justify cloud reliability and their resulting markups. Well if it’s that reliable they’d put their money where their mouth is.
> If you’re going to go multi-region and take the latency hit may as well go multi-provider no?
No. If you go multi-region, you use the same tooling, same terraform modules and logic and so on. There's little plumbing needed to make it work. And latency wise this is not an issue in most cases, since most of the requests are covered by the CDN anyway. And you don't have to duplicate everything.
If you go multi-cloud you need to learn a whole new set of systems. And that is expensive. Both in terms of operating and people - because you will need more.
> Agreed, but thats why all those who justify the 10-90x premium of the cloud over bare-metal are full of it - that premium is not actually worth it.
You get charged a premium for convenience. And a high enough chance you don't have downtime.
> Maybe for you it’s not a secret? Literally every thread tries to justify cloud reliability and their resulting markups.
Cloud is reliable if you are willing to spend some money to benefit from that reliability and convenience.
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Besides this, another thing where cloud saves you money is compliance. They have all the right attestations in place to make your audits go easy. If you self-host on bare metal, you're going to spend a lot of time to be compliant with various regulations. Maybe if you're a small company, you don't have that much compliance you need to do. But once you grow a little, those immutable Stackdriver logs are a godsend when you're asked to prove logs have not been tampered with.
> If you go multi-cloud you need to learn a whole new set of systems.
Isn't the whole point of Kubernetes that you don't need to do this? Also, if you want to know for certain that you aren't "vendor locked", running on two clouds is a constant test of that fact. That is to say, have a stack that can deploy to Kubernetes then have two clusters in separate clouds.
> Isn't the whole point of Kubernetes that you don't need to do this?
In theory.
In practice, all managed K8s offerings use different APIs to provision, monitor and so on. Then you have all kinds of ingresses that are offered by each cloud provider (setting up an ALB on AWS is quite different than setting up a GLB on GCP).
And you really don't want to run your own k8s cluster(s).
The only thing that is somewhat vanilla in all of this are how you run the pods of your app.
And K8s is not "the cloud", it is just an orchestration system for containers.
It's not just geographic regions around the globe.
It is also the wide array of services -- well integrated into their primitives of security, authentication, governance, monitoring and logging, etc
Is there a EU cloud provider that provides -- even if limited to EU geography -- the equivalent of Blob Storage + Azure Data Lake Storage + Azure Data Factory or Fabric + Microsoft Foundry with native access to OpenAI and Anthropic models?
Having used both worlds: a lot of the provided features come with strong vendor lock-in, and in most cases that not, with slightly stronger “local” engineering you can reach the same targets and needs locally.
The more I work (started coding 40 years ago, and data engineering 25 years ago), the more I favor designs that are less coupled to cloud features.
If you do so, the offering in the EU just as it is now is well enough to scale.
In short: more computer science, less delegating to cloud operators, stronger designs.
The irony is that EU education is still broader and more grounded in fundamentals, compared to US one that has become increasingly skills-oriented.
I also prefer to design solutions that are portable and platform independent, cloud providers simplify and hide something to you, it has a cost (not just money) that you cannot quantify on long term and that's clear for who has experience in both worlds.
This is sane advice but maintaining strong internal engineering and IT teams is not everone's cup of tea; even organizations gthat intend and try to do this cannot achieve it -- and furthermore the big cloud operators have spent millions of dollars spreading the gospel that the only correct way to survive and build is to migrate to cloud and use their lego building blocks.
A lot of the justification for moving away from own datacenters and heavy in-house engineering teams actually makes sense to organizations of many shapes and sizes. If the core business is not technology -- it is hard to stay invested in a in-house cloud-agnostic engineeringc capability.
The world has more or less accepted this reality and adopted the services like S3 and managed databases, and tight integration with the likes of Microsoft Entra/Purview/Sharepoint/O365 etc for ready-to-use business integrations. Prying organizations away from taht convenience is going to be hard. But the current environment cretaed due to lack of trust in US could the strongest motivator ever to push businesses and nations in that direction. I reckon it will be a long and painful process though.
How about not limiting yourself to specific services? If you've built your product around specific cloud providers services then that is the problem not the fact that there aren't alternatives to those seevices.
What are Scaleway and OVH missing? Many of their products are even AWS compatible.
I hosted all our stuff in Europe at the last startup. The 2 providers above were much cheaper than our GCP stuff one the free credits ran out. It’ll have been the 4th place I’ve worked where Big Cloud wasn’t the default.
Other decent office suites exist, not to mention not all documents need to be cloud-based.
I find your statement lacks context, otherwise it doesn’t seem rooted in reality.
Ok, so the notion that one can spin up and down resources and be billed by the time unit without having to source components and provide power and cooling and hands on is an unqualified win.
but the resulting 'hyperscaler' systems are built around lockin and loss of sovereignty. rather than bemoan the cost of replicating the US environment, wouldn't it make sense to come with a different spin? maybe one thats not so tightly integrated and siloed? isn't AWS just a mirror the the same US dominance that you're trying to avoid?
for example, despite the amount of snark thrown towards the development of open standards, wouldn't it be really quite useful is there weren't 3-4 hyperscalers with different APIs for the same basic services? couldn't we design an EC2-lite that allowed for real commoditization and competition?
ignoring that, consider the value of rethinking things a little bit so that the important part - easy and incremental access to compute are preserved and all the sleazy business practices aren't.
I am no expert but making an office suite seems like a joke compared to getting the hardware to replicate the cloud providers, which should be imo the first priority.
I wouldn't go this way, at least not now. But the European Commission should mandate the usage of EU based software for every public institution in the EU, at all levels. That means from the European Parliament all the way down to municipalities. So no more Windows, Office, Azure, AWS etc. in public institutions all across the EU.
> I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer.
But there is also no requirement for... most of their specific offering to start an online business.
Some people seem to miss this in the picture: you _can_ build without them, outside of them, and fund equivalent technology development while staying outside of them.
It's also a matter of "how easy is to find people that are good with X, Y, Z" where X, Y, Z are some niche technologies or offerings compared to the more wildly used ones.
You can start a business in your laundry room if you know how to set up servers and get internet and stuff. But that's gonna be you and maybe a few "hobbyists" that might want to join on that endeavor, but the rest of developers or admins will want to stay far away from that.
Optimizing your business for how is easy is to find talent is also a matter of strategy.
I definitely hire talent that can grow the business, and grow with it.
And that means knowing your 0's and 1's better than knowing how to operate the latest trendy calculator: it's easier to understand the calculator, when you know what it's made of; harder to work your way backwards, although doable.
Yes, finding people that master PostgreSQL clustering (and SLA/RTO tradeoffs) is harder than finding AWS-certified folks, but that deeper knowledge definitely pays off: you understand the tradeoffs why, before you migrate, not after. When you know the fundamentals, you learn their implementation way faster.
The "wildly used", locked-in services are more often than not, built with/over the "niche", no-strings-attached ones.
> There’s a chance that the current situation will start to resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however that might look.
I don't think it can - dependence on US digital infrastructure grew at a time where American stability was taken as ground truth.
How can an EU leader sit across the negotiating table from a country that can delete (if not read/alter) all of their data, and a willingness to exercise that access?
Even if Trumpism goes away, to know for a certainty that Americans won't do it again one election cycle seems like it will take a long time to establish.
>And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.
And yet they _still_ don't have a desktop client for hotkey-driven and very fast-paced workflows, meaning that any serious professional spreadsheet work is still a Microsoft monopoly. If even the US market with all its favorable conditions can't deliver a competing product after years of trying, a fragmented, brain-drained, overregulated and high-tax continent attempting the same is just hopes and dreams.
Wrong point. Nothing wrong with browser based clients. Even if they build some desktop client, by the time google (or anyone) does that compatibility Microsoft will change their formats. MS even removed their apps from ChromeOS to make it so. The issue is you can't fix MS. regulators are just too rich to care.
It is even the same as Office for Mac is not 100% compatible with office for windows (or so called CoPilot AI whatever)
What hotkey-driven and fast-paced workflows are you referring to? I used to be an Office user, now G Docs, and I hardly miss anything. Hotkeys do exist, and more complex stuff can be automated quite well with AppsScript.
Maybe I'm not enough of a power user, but these things often sound to me like the 0.1% productivity boosts that are nice to have, but often hardly relevant in the grand scheme of things.
There isn't any single provider that can match each and every AWS service. But for subsets of services there are options.
If there's a specific AWS service that you cannot get anywhere else but do absolutely need, that's vendor lock-in. Would it be fair to blame EU companies for your bad decisions?
Yeah this is just circular reasoning. You don't go from zero to AWS the same way AWS didn't go from zero to what it is today. They started with a few basic features and built up from there. There are plenty of EU alternatives that have those same basic features AWS had a while ago, but until it makes economic sense to replicate all of it, no EU company is going to do so.
Whether you can switch from AWS to an EU alternative depends solely on how deep down the rabbit hole you are. If you're just looking for basics to host your stuff, you can. If you want to never have to touch Linux but to rely solely on proprietary abstractions on top of Linux, you can't.
What makes you think I'll move the goalpost - the original question was pretty clear; EU cloud providers who offer services like AWS does.
What you've linked to is a broad scope site listing a multitude of EU based products and services, making it look like you cant even list ONE let alone a few .
Don't pull the 'moving the goalpost' nonsense, the original post you replied to made it very clear they were talking about an AWS comparison, and a cursory glance at the 'cloud providers' section of that site shows a bunch of EU hosting providers offering general VPS hosting, which isn't remotely close to being the same kind of thing.
Ok let me try this, because I can assure you my intent is not to throw some sort of "gotcha" in here. I'm thinking about this purely from my own personal usecase, and right now as far as I'm aware theres no AWS alternative in the EU that can do all this for me. Nothing I am using here relies on some sort of obscure feature of each service at all.
My usecase is:
- MySQL (using Aurora but really dont need to), hands off like it is on RDS so yeah a managed service would be preferred.
- 2x VM instances with internal networking and an EFS drive connecting the two (The efs drive is critical for a ton of applications)
- Load balancer
- S3 + Cloudfront for CDN
And a few more bits I appreciate are very niche to my usecase but would be nice to keep under the same vpc:
- SQS queue workers (can switch to something redis based if needed)
- SES mail service (again can switch to another 3rd party as i doubt many people offer this)
- Lambda for some app specific background processing
Hopefully this kinda explains my position. Yes, I can split a lot of this out into multiple individual providers who specialise in just that one thing. And perhaps that's the way to go. But I dont think you can deny it's a heck of a lot more convenient to have all of it in one place.
People do not realize how dire the current economic situation is. Many of the large traditional businesses are on the verge of becoming unprofitable.
The monumental task of ripping out the IT systems they have built up over the last few decades, to move away from the US will actively threaten the existence of some of these companies.
People are living in a fantasy land where e.g. Germany has an enormous automotive industry which can be arbitrarily regulated and still be profitable enough to keep the German economy afloat. This is non longer the case and many EU companies are currently struggling for their existence.
At my company we use scaleway, and while it doesn't have yet all the products offered by AWS etc. it still has almost everything we need, and can be managed by terraform. I think it has already a nice offering, and is much closer to AWS etc. than 15 years
I mean, once you have managed SQL, managed k8s, serverless, object storage, private networks, kafka, sqs, sns, glacier, and IaC support, you can already be happy as a startup
I kind of share the opinion of the FSF Europe that it is less important where software comes from compared to whether it’s libre, but for cloud hardware I really hope that we manage to create competitive European offerings. Maybe we’re lucky and this European initiative will produce more than five Fraunhofer institutes and a gift to SAP.
I would say there’s even less chance nowadays to generate a fully private set of European alternatives to American cloud offerings.
Europes bureaucratization and the growth of the size of states has increased the last 10 years. I have less and less hope that we’re able to set the right free market conditions for real competition to happen.
That doesn’t mean that won’t be alternatives to American offerings, but most probably will come from somewhere else (Singapore, China, Taiwan…)
> set the right free market conditions for real competition to happen
Just as a curiosity, what exactly are those "right free market conditions" and where have those been successfully implemented before? Because I think most of us (Europeans) are desperately trying to avoid replicating the American experiment, so if that's the "right free market conditions" I think we're trying to avoid those on purpose.
But maybe you're thinking of some other place, then I'm eager ears to hear what worked elsewhere :)
"You can't do X" is a much different experience from "you can do X, but you need to spend a year and thousands of man-hours of paperwork applying for permission to do it".
In China, if the five-year plan prioritizes something, businesses will be up and running in months. In France, if the French parliament enacts a law prioritizing something, businesses still have to fight individual departments or local governments that have their own ideas about how they should regulate it.
I can't believe we're talking about China in the context of a Cloud sovereignty issue and this is even a question.
Having worked for these Cloud providers China has consistently used bureaucracy to exfiltrate Cloud technologies and to tip the scales of effectiveness of offerings through levers with China Telecom/Unicom. Analyzing the backbone, you could see it in real time.
China basically offsets its bureaucracy by doing the one thing Europe has not done so far in this space: overtly hurt foreign competitors. It doesn't matter how superior your offerings are if the end customers end up throttled creating a less desirable experience than the less-featured, stable domestic competitor.
Unfortunately - the elephant in the room is China got to where it was by being overtly adversarial with the US from the jump after 2010 which translated to a number of anti-competitive measures. The EU's in a spot because it's mostly responding to Trump and a poorly written US law. The US and EU are weird friends in that we could both exfiltrate each other's tech, patents, and industrial assets and move on with business but that's not actually what either side actually wants.
China weaponizing bureaucracy towards foreign companies isn’t really relevant though.
AFAIK domestic companies operating in China don’t have to endure anywhere near the amount of red tape that EU companies typically do when operating in the EU.
I wonder is the GP is referring to the CLOUD Act, as it is true that US companies cannot be compliant with both the GDPR and the CLOUD Act, but it doesn't weaken the case for European tech sovereignty.
Sounds like a broad blanket statement, have any specifics about this?
GDPR and cybersecurity laws are designed to be compatible, not mutually exclusive, but I'm sure there are edge-cases. Still, what exact situation did you find yourself in here in order to believe they're mutually exclusive?
All US companies selling to European customers have to comply with GDPR. European companies selling only to non-European customers don’t have to comply with GDPR. It’s all about who your users are. Not where your company is registered.
> European companies selling only to non-European customers don’t have to comply with GDPR.
Usually they do. European company processing personal data of non-EU customers falls with article 3(1) "This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data in the context of the activities of an establishment of a controller or a processor in the Union, regardless of whether the processing takes place in the Union or not."
Of course if they do not process any personal data then it wouldn't apply but that's pretty unlikely (and if that was the case the EU customers data wouldn't fall within GDPR either).
I think what OP means is that a US company cannot simultaneously comply with the CLOUD act and the GDPR. That case has also been made by some courts in the EU, that US law and practice are incompatible with the requirements of the GDPR. US companies who claim to process data in accordance with the GDPR seem to be deceiving their customers. Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me that companies in the EU who rely on US services, corporations in the US, and even governments themselves keep quit about this unpleasant truth. It means that Microsoft Windows violates the GDPR, Google violates it, every US social network violates it, etc.
Of course, as someone else mentioned, that is not an argument against EU sovereignty but rather one of its motors.
> Europes bureaucratization and the growth of the size of states has increased the last 10 years.
None of these things matter. They're trivially set aside. All that matters is how many insane threats the US Gov keeps making. Hopefully as many as possible. This is what creates demand, and from demand, everything else follows automatically.
Like, how can you not see this based on recent events? I'm willing to bet a house that in Feb 2026 there will be much more relative movement from US to EU clouds than in Feb 2015. Despite all of that "increased bureaucracy".
Ok, but it's not like nothing was done after Draghi report - EU formed at least 5 committees and commissioned multiple think-tanks to develop reports about possible development of the pathway to the programme that will work on bureaucracy and overregulation.
We already have excellent cloud providers in Europe. But most importantly, most businesses using the cloud would be better off with simple on-prem solutions. So much cheaper to operate and control.
Until you factor in the salaries of the new employees you have to hire now, the cost of that hiring process, the compliance and security implications of operating servers on your premises, the ongoing maintenance of the software and operating systems, the new infrastructure to maintain, including but not limited to backup power supply and overall redundancy, the need to manage the lifecycle of the new hard- and software, the documentation for all of this… I could go on for a while.
It's not like these cloud solutions are just solving laziness.
A lot of this could be standardized and packaged into a product, a modern take on the 'server appliance.' Unpack some gear, plug it together according to a nice diagram, connect to a management console that feels familiar to anyone who's deployed to the cloud.
Listened to a story about a fairly large company that switched to cloud and then back to on-premise. When they went cloud they quickly found out that they needed employees to manage the cloud infrastructure. The employee costs were similar for both setup.
Compliance and security testing does not go away just because you use cloud. The steps and questions will be different, but regulations like NIS and GDPR have extensive requirements regardless if you implement it yourself or buy it from an external supplier.
I would also not recommend to go with a single cloud solution with no backup solution and overall redundancy, unless a $5 voucher is good enough compensation for the service being down a whole day. The general recommendation after the latest waves of outages was for cloud users to use multiple cloud providers and multiple backup solution. It is just like how on-premise solutions need off-premise backups.
> Compliance and security testing does not go away just because you use cloud. The steps and questions will be different, but regulations like NIS and GDPR have extensive requirements regardless if you implement it yourself or buy it from an external supplier.
That’s a bit disingenuous. If I don’t operate a physical server rack, I also do not need to take care of physical access control, fire suppression policies, camera monitoring, key handling, and a wide range of other measures I would be otherwise obliged to take care of under GDPR. You can absolutely outsource classes of problems. What’s true is that that doesn’t lift the responsibility from you to check your cloud provider fulfils these obligations, but that’s very different from having to fulfil them yourself.
Go through a security review. It not as simple as just saying "we outsource that so we have no idea what they do or how they manage the data". It is disingenuous to claim that people can just outsource the whole problem and not care.
This would be part of the responsibility of the cloud managers, which need to be hired, paid and trained, on top of the cost of paying the cloud providers. There is no free lunch.
I am responsible for security reviews. I never claimed it was that simple, nor that there was free lunch. I said it is easier to outsource it than to handle it yourself to an equal level of what a cloud provider is able to do, from a legal and operational perspective.
Easier is a very subjective measurement. Lets compare two solutions with different hires. One hire system administrators that rent space in a serverhall. The other hire cloud managers that rent space in the cloud.
What can we definitive say about the difference be in salaries, training, and team size? Can we say anything specific about legal and operational perspective?
Sorry but I think it is indeed much easier to have a cloud provider take care of those things. That's partly how we came to the situation we are in: a lot of people outsourced this type of work to Microsoft or AWS, because it was easier.
I get what you are saying, that responsibility is still yours for making the correct choices, and to know what the cloud providers are doing. In the real world though hardly anybody cares, even though we have threats like the CLOUD act in place. So, yeah, people should care but ultimately they often don't.
Yes, it is true that no one ever got fired for buying IBM. It is also very common that people just use an AI for reviews and then deal with the fallout if anyone actually calls them on the bluff. Paying fines, if anyone do care, are just part of doing business.
However in the same way, it doesn't then matter much if you are using the cloud or not. The work needing to copy the output of an AI to fill in the forms takes similar amount of time.
First off, servers on someone else's premises are by definition not on-prem; and second, it still leaves you with a lot of the maintenance, management, and documentation overhead that comes with operating infrastructure equipment.
I'm not sure it will convince the "haters" nor they'll get it, but I'll keep it close to share with some people that are confused but open enough to understand the nuance.
No, most wouldn’t. Too much risk and overhead for most companies to do so… most companies should and do just focus on the business value they add, rather than the underlying physical infra
Exactly. People used to think that aws is somehow convenient(partially true) and much cheaper which it absolutely isn't. Hooking on anything trendy and pretending it solve all the issues is tech illness.
For example micro services. You do not need infrastructure heavy software paradigms for large majority of use cases but it was just blindly accepted as new standart which we are now, again, moving away.
Right, but have you tried recruiting someone recently who is capable of running a pair of local servers (including organizing redundant power feeds), upgrading the OS on them with no downtime, and arranging for off-site backups of the enterpris's data?
These used to be the skills of a generalist sysadmin for a small-site with on-prem services.
Those skills are no longer available on the market. Students in the local apprenticeship program have one class about hardware, and they don't even touch it, just talk about it.
Offer just half of the typical AWS cloud bill and you'll magically have lots of candidates! But greed often doesn't let companies pay any more than "market rate" even if it means paying twice that to AWS or a vendor instead.
Just hired a 45yo who excels and loves and thrives doing this stuff. Proxmox, local storage, local backups + offsite backups. 1Pb of data, colocation costs are 5k/month. Guess AWS costs for similar
They are not European. They are French, or Swiss, or Scandinavian, each of those countries who may sooner or later not align anymore with your strategic interests. Countries should only trust themselves for sensitive stuff.
> Please provide a list, no sarcasm. And please don’t put Hetzner on it, as it is not a cloud provider.
In what way are they not a "cloud" provider? Because their managed services portfolio isn't as wide as AWS or Azure? What about Scaleway's services then?
The implied question was what OP's idea of "the cloud" is, where they draw the line between "cloud" and server host. It's possible they simply aren't familiar with the Iaas/PaaS terminology.
I posted a link to what most cloud-native developers understand to be "cloud" a few times already. If IaaS is the only offering on the table, it's not cloud.
In my book a cloud provider is a provider where you can spin up VMs at scale, offers multiple geographic regions across the world, offers managed complementary services such as S3, CDN, GLB, IAM, Managed Databases, backup & restore, FaaS, container registry, managed K8s or another container orchestration platform, PoPs around the world.
Hetzner has an S3 compatible offering, a VPS offering and that's it. Their core business is renting physical servers. And I see lately they offer a load balancing service.
You know, we used to have a single tech company providing essentially an entire tech stack to its customers. Its core enterprise pricing provided a platform with impressive compute capabilities, high redundancy, global support, strong backward compatibility and the backing of a company providing consulting and an ecosystem made of a lot of other software products. That company is still alive and well, although that product is probably less appealing now to new customers.
I'm talking about IBM mainframes.
Eventually, as the Internet (networking) and open source technologies (like Git and Linux) become more and more widespread, people realized they could build their services by combining products from different vendors (not to mention FOSS). I'm talking about the 1990s-2000s.
Now, after 20-30 years, we're thinking that the same company must provide the entire tech stack or lose relevancy as a provider.
To be clear, AWS and mainframes are pretty different from a technical standpoint, but I do wonder if we're kinda repeating the same cycle over and over. Asking the same company to provide everything and then build stuff with different products, to then find a new company which can provide everything and so on.
It's one thing to say that a lot of AWS/Azure/Google users take advantage of many managed services.
But saying something is not a cloud provider because they don't provide a specific SaaS is kinda weird, especially if you read the NIST definition of cloud computing or when you consider that not every AWS user is using more than a handful of services (does that make AWS a cloud provider only for more "advanced" users?).
Sure, smaller cloud providers don't usually have all those services, but this doesn't mean they are not cloud providers. They cannot attract users who are more familiar with specific managed services, but they can probably satisfy the needs of other users who are more than happy with a smaller feature set.
Also, limiting yourself to a smaller portion of AWS/Azure/GCP services can facilitate migrations to other cloud platforms (think AWS -> Azure or viceversa), because you're less tied to specific proprietary tooling.
> because they don't provide a specific SaaS is kinda weird
I think for most business stakeholders it's not about the number of services but rather the coverage of business-critical needs. When you have access to Azure Entra, you know that you can cover 90%+ of your auth needs with that service. If you have access to AWS S3, you know that your various storage needs would be possible to cover with that. If a managed Postgres is available, you know that most of the IT systems you run would be able to take advantage of that. You look at Azure their IAM/audit/observability offerings and it's the same.
When you look at Hetzner as a business stakeholder, all you see are bare servers and and one object storage service that you are not sure of how battle-tested it is. And then you start thinking: "okay, I will need to run k8s or some other workload orchestration approach, my IT systems need Postgres/MySQL/SQL Server etc, I need auth, I need audit, I will need to build, operate, maintain all of that in-house". I am not saying that this is a wrong path for everyone, but Hetzner essentially leaves you no choice. And many business stakeholders who have been operating their own own-prem infra or colocated or rented IaaS plus a large dev team for decades and have since switched to one of the hyperscalers and reduced their dev/IT headcount - may not want to go back to the old model.
> limiting yourself to a smaller portion of AWS/Azure/GCP services can facilitate migrations to other cloud platforms.
Yes, which is why you insist (where possible/reasonable) on Postgres-compatible DBMS offerings, IdP solutions based on OIDC, observability on OpenTelemetry.
> Sure, smaller cloud providers don't usually have all those services, but this doesn't mean they are not cloud providers
Yes, it could mean that they are not cloud providers.
> but they can probably satisfy the needs of other users who are more than happy with a smaller feature set
Please see the linked article. This is essentially "users who are happy to build some of the furniture themselves".
I agree that there is a difference between "wood" and "furniture".
Although maybe a more apt comparison is IKEA vs another furniture store.
With IKEA you have a relatively basic "style". You'd be hard to pressed a 1800 style table, for example, but if you are a student or someone who just wants to live in a new place, it's a pretty solid store to go. However, they give you the pieces (not just basic wood, already pre-made pieces) and you have to put them together.
Other furnitures have a lot more choices in terms of styles and they allow you to just buy stuff without any DIY needed.
Different offerings in the same space (no one in IKEA is asking you to cut wood and make your own chair legs or whatever), both valid.
Furniture metaphores aside, what I'm saying is that there is a subset of users which is completely fine with those services, which are still provided in a self-service, pay-per-use way without the need to have admin rights over the entire platform. That's a cloud provider. A more limited one, sure, but it can still be a cloud provider.
And when it comes to business stakeholders, coverage is important, but so are other concerns, including the ability to move out when needed (which still requires some sensible technical choice, because if you go "all in" you're complicating your exit strategy), or even concerns like the ones mentioned in the OP.
Obviously, each company has its own risk aversion and its own decision making process, and so far market share heavily favors the Big Three even outside of the US, but this doesn't mean alternative options should be dismissed as "not cloud providers" just because they don't provide all those services.
I have used Hetzner off and on for years, nice products and services.
I don’t care what provider you use, if your business or app use case needs any sort of reliability have a plan for reinstalling code and data on alternate providers quickly as possible.
There are horror stories of people and companies being cut off because of pressure from the US government, or having one of the Google/Microsoft/Amazon tech giants cancelling accounts.
Really, in today’s world, why totally rely on anyone?
EDIT: it seems prudent to maintain a cloud account in Europe, US, and Asia and have a plan for moving application code and data around if required. Outside the US I have mostly only used Hetzner, but Alibaba has impressive looking services.
Sure they might not have all the same offerings but they are really easy to abstract upon and personally I feel like hetzner is seriously one of the best cloud providers.
Hetzner is absolutely 10x more competitive than AWS. It's actually hard to match the competitiveness of hetzner with their scale actually. I seriously can't understate this enough but AWS being competitive is really somewhat of a mass delusion or maybe the fact that Companies don't know other alternatives exist but I genuinely find it absolutely strange.
Also, just go ahead and try hetzner and see their competitiveness out for yourself. Seriously, one of the best (netcup another german hosting is really great too and they can be even cheaper at times and its something I personally use and can vouch for both netcup/hetzner)
Without a viable MS Office/Google Docs alternative it's all rather performative. If those get blocked the entire bureaucratic machine stops dead. Hell block just excel and entire countries might actually collapse.
I have seen transitions from MS suite at universities and I don't think what you are saying is true.
First assumption is that there are no alternatives so you can't replace Excel as a software. Obvious ones for Excel - LibreOffice, Collabora, OnlyOffice or Grist (which i highly recommend). The paradoxical problem is there is no clear THE ONE so organizations get into decision paralysis and never move anywhere.
The other assumption is that even if there were alternatives people will not adopt them. In reality this is rarely issue. Turns out users/employees/students actually don't care much what software they have to use. They just use what is available or what they are told to use. So the reason why people use MS Office is actually because it's mandated from the top. Lawyers use it because state/gov/court communication requires it. Students use it because they need to submit thesis in MS Word. It's socially locked in.
I've been at a university which switched over the summer from MS Office to LibreOffice. The results were boring. 40k people just adopted it, no drama, some liked it more (works on linux yay), took some people few weeks to learn/adjust. People are used learning new things.
So can we stop with that story that 40 year old software which barely changed in last 20 years can't be replaced?
This whole digital sovereignty is i think extremely scary proposition for Microsoft because just as they are now mandated solution by most western world... they are one law away (all state/university communication must be with libre software) to be on the other side of their current mandate / lock in.
Well I hope you're right, the transitions I've seen proposed were mostly shot down because people refused to learn anything new and due to nebulous certification requirements that Microsoft of course has.
Speaking of OnlyOffice, I've seen it crop up more and more lately and apparently it's Latvian, so maybe that will be the one eventually. Though my experience with it has been that it's not very stable (lots of crashing around embedding video anyway) and has a smaller feature set.
That's the point though: there was never a particularly compelling reason to move so no one did. 5 years ago "what if America starts making threats?" would've been a ridiculous notion.
Proton drive is fine, their docs service is usable but could use improvement. Their secure and private file and docs sharing with other Proton users could be a great feature, if you need it.
EDIT: I just re-tried Proton docs and spreadsheets - much improved docs, and I think the spreadsheets are a new feature; looks OK but I am on mobile right now so minimal testing.
This already happened. Hetzner, OVH, and countless other local cloud companies exist. It is only the path of least resistancd and market inertia, that stops companies from switching.
I run on Hetzner and am saving big bucks compared to the ridiculously high priced AWS.
> I run on Hetzner and am saving big bucks compared to the ridiculously high priced AWS.
IMO even Americans should take a look at whether they need to be using the big cloud providers or not. They're so much more expensive compared to smaller hosts like Hetzner, Digital Ocean, Vultr, and so on. It depends on what you're doing, of course, but I'm American and moved off of Azure last year due to the price and the complexity it encourages.
Reposting my comment from another thread on the same topic a few days ago:
> This is why I moved off of Azure and over to Hetzner's US VPS's. For what I was deploying (a few dozen websites, some relatively complex .NET web apps, some automated scripts, etc.), the pricing on Azure just wasn't competitive. But worse for me was the complexity; I found that using Azure encouraged me to introduce more and more complex deployment pipelines, when all I really needed was Build the container -> SCP it into a blue/green deployment scheme on a VPS -> flip a switch after testing it.
Comparing EU cloud providers to AWS is like comparing a 1963 Zastava to 2025 high end BYD because both of them are cars and can drive from point A to point B.
Well, if the Zastava had 5-10x the amount of horsepower and storage space of the BYD for the same amount of money. Because that’s what is often the reality. Bare metal is unreasonably efficient compared to cloud services for not that much more know-how.
I do tech DD work for investment funds etc and one thing I often see are slow, complex and expensive AWS-heavy architectures that optimize for problems the company doesn’t have and often will never have. In theory to ensure stability and scalability. They are usually expensive and have nightmarish configuration complexity.
In practice complexity tends to lead to more outages and performance issues than if you had a much simpler (rented) bare metal setup with some spare capacity and better architecture design. More than half of serious outages I have seen documented in these reviews came from configuration mistakes or bugs in software that is supposed to manage your resources.
Nevermind that companies invest serious amounts of time in trying to manage complexity rather than remove it.
A few years ago I worked for a company that had two competing systems. One used AWS sparingly: just EC2, S3, RDS and load balancers. The other went berserk in the AWS candy shop and was this monstrosity that used 20-something different AWS services glued together by lambdas. This was touted as “the future”, and everyone who didn’t think it was a good idea was an idiot.
The simple solution cost about the same to run for a few thousand (business customers) as the complex one cost for ONE customer. The simple solution cost about 1/20 to develop. It also had about 1/2500 the latency on average because it wasn’t constantly enqueuing and dequeueing data through a slow SQS maze of queues.
And best of all: you could move the simpler solution to bare metal servers. In fact, we ran all the testing on clusters of 6 RPIs. The complex solution was stuck in AWS forever.
All aws is selling a web gui on top of free software. You still have to know ins and outs of the software to manage it properly.
Heck their support is shit too. I have talked to them to figure out an issue on their own in house software, they couldn’t help. My colleague happened to know what was wrong and fixed the issue with a switch of a checkbox.
Hetzner doesn't even have an RDS service. I've heard rumors for years but they haven't done it. Also, while I agree that leaning too much on the cloud leads to lock-in - this is an abstract concept that needs to be guarded against when managing technology, always, anyway - and vendor-driven hellish architectures, "vanilla cloud" offers other conveniences other than compute, bucket, storage managed and load balancers, like IAM, good CLIs, secrets management, etc. Only Scaleway or OVH seem to be timidly developing what I would consider "vanilla cloud".
when you compare IT stuff to cars, the discussion pivots to discussing cars, please think twice before using any analogies / comparisons with the physical world
I know that's not what you really meant, but as an unrelated tangent, modern cars are safer exactly because they're not built like tanks. The car crumpling up even at the smallest of crashes is good, because the more the car crumples, the less any of the impact is transferred to the passengers. It might mean the car is totaled and you need a new one, but that's better than someone in the car being totaled.
Yes, modern cars are superior when it comes to safety. But the daily experience is orthogonal to this since most people have serious accidents very infrequently. In your daily experience reliability and economy is more important.
And in computing, having a bit of downtime 1-2 times per year is often a price worth paying if avoiding it requires 90% more cost and effort. (Of course, people end up having downtime anyway because they have something so complex that they have 100x the number of ways something can fail).
Except 95% of companies have no need of ultra scalable super cloud.
If you are a very big SaaS company that is not Google or Apple, you are probably serving hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of unique users. AWS may be convenient, but you don't /need/ it, you can build an infrastructure that will handle such workload with any of the big european providers.
You'll just lose in comfort what you'll gain in data sovereignty and infrastructure costs.
I worked for a 7M€ MRR company that had maybe a million of users who used the software every day. The thing ran on a dozen of OVH servers, including multi-site redundancy.
Exactly. AWS proposition was much more alluring where compute was more expensive and it required yearly estimations and updates.
In times when one physical server can have 32, 64 or even 96 cores... you pack your own little datacenter right there and it's pretty cheap to simply overkill it, have one or two servers for redundancy and bye.
So many businesses will happily run from 4 core 10usd VPS (that would have been beefy server 20 years ago).
This is just my opinion, but there are some services that just package software as VM and let's you spawn it with a fancy button, leaving you with a largely unmanaged instance.
There are other services like S3, BigQuery or SQS that feels like magic.
It is easy to argue that it is expensive and complex. Since it is. And lots of people have made that argument. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone argue in favor of AWS while skimming the threads here.
So this is your opportunity to make the case for AWS.
It _used_ to be great and free tier made it easy enough to migrate most personal use cases to their infrastructure. But they have enshittified the free tier to a point where it’s unusable without forking over obscene amounts of money.
Plus their support is non-existent unless you are one of those big corps.
Plus for a 1T+ company. You would think that their infrastructure would be top tier, never go done, best practices?
Nope. us-east1 continues to be dogshit and their typical response is to fork over more money for multi region and zone support.
And yes, the scale at which aws advertises is largely overkill for many companies. Even some Fortune 500.
But technology is driven by clueless C-level executives that get easily impressed by deck presentations from aws marketing.
Instead of investing in workforce. They invest in cLoUd.
Scaleway (maybe upcloud as well) are also great and atleast Scaleway from what I know has many many features and its really competitive with the offerings it provides in general and has many offerings.
Europe has no wafer production and no companies that produce GPUs.
That means it is dependent on Taiwan for wafers and the USA for GPU design.
Then there is the question wether there is a will to invest. Gemini gives me this list of publicly traded companies in the US and what they invested in AI infrastructure in 2025:
Given Europe's productivity gap with the US, they appear they are becoming even further a vassal. They will survive, but they further lose their leverage with each year. We see this in international politics as the US pivots away from Europe and towards Asia. (Although Russia's decline has also made it less necessary too)
If you want Europe to rejoin 'great powers', as 'survival', yes they need AI.
Productivity in producing slop? Because that's the only thing LLMs are good for so far. And by the time this change the GPUs installed today will become obsolete.
People tend to fixate about cutting edge technology, but my naïve intuition says the problem in Europe is not in lack of some secret sauce: it is hidden in plain sight lack of energy to run the DC - and worse - lack of long term desire to make the tough choices to get that energy
I would also add lack of technical competence at C level. In my previous job, I have dealt with quite a few European CEOs whos only background was an MBA. Unlike the US where a lot of CEOs have a deep technical background...
Of course. One only has to take a look at Microsoft, Apple, or Google, to notice that they're run by CEOs with a "deep" technical background. No MBA whatsoever...
Google and (and more debatably Microsoft and Apple) were run by technical founders during the timeframe that they were achieving critical mass. The MBAs came later to run the machine and optimize the business. But, the machine was built and grown by technical leadership first.
I read years ago that Hetzner placed data centers near inexpensive power, but I understand that the EU’s energy situation has deteriorated. So you are correct, they have the larger energy problem to contend with.
> That means it is dependent on Taiwan for wafers and the USA for GPU design.
Both being dependant on ASML, that we're crippling to please our bully, the USA. We probably have more leverage that we want to admit, but that requires a lot of politic will and... planning the economy.
Well it is like Thiel said in a recent interview - European companies and investors are very risk-averse and will never be a vanguard like the ones in the US.
You'll never get here that kind of cash for any risky project, it usually is low risk + low margin.
Feels like people write that like it somehow is failure on investors side.
If you are investor on US market having 300M people speaking roughly the same language and then high possibility to easily spill over the world upsides on the bet are really high, burning cash to have a chance hitting jackpot are much much higher than in EU.
In EU you are starting in a single country so like 60M people and your payoff is capped from start at most likely scenario you go big in a single country and then you basically have clean start in next country.
That is the reality of game theory, not some failure of imagination or being scared to take risks - payoff is just not there, in US you have a shot at insane payoff in relatively short term.
> If you are investor on US market having 300M people speaking roughly the same language and then high possibility to easily spill over the world upsides on the bet are really high
The topic is cloud providers. Do you think it would be critical for a EU-based cloud provider to translate their admin GUI to Elfdalian, Basque and Romansh in order to succeed? Or perhaps there are some deeper underlying causes for European failure in modern computer tech that you can think of?
Thiel recently called Greta Thunberg the anti - christ. Thiel is maybe crazy as Musk. at least he is not an authorative source.
Besides the soure what does he mean with all of Europe: Berlin? London? Paris? Estonia? Sweden?
The start up eco system is fragmented / decentralised. I doubt Thiel is a good overview and he argues probably not in good faith anyway.
Yes, this is a core issue. Most datacenter investments in Europe come from American big tech. If AI is going to be half as huge as predicted (kind of a big if), then Europe would depend even more on the US for compute. The highest energy prices in the world coupled with conservative investment mentality means Europe is practically out of the AI race.
Wow you're so right, you did such a good job asking computer mommy to confirm your priors!
But actually, that's not the goal here. AI, at least the kind of products that need dedicated datacenters ie. generative, isn't critical infrastructure. The focus is on documents, collaboration tools, file servers, single-sign on, databases etc. that are seemingly monopolized by US providers.
> documents, collaboration tools, file servers, single-sign on, databases
All being (or soon to be) fed through LLM agents running on fibers and datacenters controlled by NOT European entieties. And if you build DC you'll be powering them with energy imports.
Software being built on library repositories also under foreign jurisdictions. Network infrastructure built on imported tech running whatever backdoors "partners" see fit.
Its like you didn't notice the snowden revelations, the shift from dependence on Russian Gas to US gas, nordstream sabotage, stuxnet, etc
Also to be honest, suppose EU uses kimi model which is open source. They can literally swap out one word from the provider and move from say American datacenter companies to European.
Quite frankly, there is literally 0 moat and its great to see EU focus on the real moat/lock-in issues.
If they wait a year or so, the new AI chips being used now in China will probably be available for LLM inference in Europe. It seems unfortunate for small and medium size countries, and also for the EU to be dependent on any IT infrastructure only from China or the USA, but perhaps being flexible enough to be able to switch venders or use both is safer?
exactly. in HPC we all understood that it was a tradeoff between money and time, and that the curve was exponential. if you wanted to race ahead of todays capabilities, you could, but you couldn't go very far without burning alot of cash.
because of the investment story about being first and building a moat, we have companies torching 100s of billions of dollars to see who can climb that exponential the furthest.
we have so much work to do, in infrastructure, and distributed computation models, and programmability, quantization, and information theory...just relax a little. you dont have to compete with OpenAI. OpenAI is just a giant waste of money. take your incremental gains and invest in research and I assure you we can get there without directing our entire economic output into buying the latest highest margin parts from Nvidia only to use them at 30%, if you're being generous.
It's true that the progress on clock speeds has slowed. Now we have to address the parallelism problem in order to keep moving forward. And we haven't done a very good job. Progress on that front will get us back on the acceleration curve. Saedfly, the current framing of 'who buys the most hardware', while I providing a nice marketing story, isn't netting us that much progress except what Nvidia spends internally.
I think reductionist opinions about the "Free market" and price competition being the only factor are naive. Culture and trust are major components of a project, and cultural sensibilities and development culture can be a part of procurement decisions.
I worked for a company that chose Tresorit over any other option because it gave them Data Sovereignty, E2E encryption, and most important, it was not American.
There is intrinsic value in being "Not made in America" and data sovereignty is a major issue for a lot of organizations. Just as an American company would be concerned about storing their data in China, the rest of the world is/should be concerned about storing their data in the US.
We are a little misled, on purpose, with the term "sovereignty", though. For instance, if you are a French entity then sovereignty means your data stay in France. Moving things to de facto EU control is the opposite of sovereignty.
I think Chomsky would have a lot to say about this and the broad manufacturing of consent taking place across Europe.
> For instance, if you are a French entity then sovereignty means your data stay in France. Moving things to de facto EU control is the opposite of sovereignty.
It’s something that crops up fairly often and I think most of the time from people who are profoundly misguided or just cannot understand that other people might see things differently. Germany is never going to annex parts of France while the EU is a thing. It’s on purpose. The whole construct is full of feedback mechanisms that make it physically impossible.
So yes, for a French company using Hetzner is a bit more risky than OVH, but not that much, and either of those are much better than Azure or AWS.
The big countries all have projects for national infrastructure for things like defense and taxes. In these cases everything needs to be directly controlled by the state and it makes sense to use a local company. Most of the time that would be companies you’ve never heard of.
For random users in the EU, it does not matter because all big service providers will be following the same regulations.
So if someone doesn't agree with the narrative and points out the obvious manipulation taking place they are wrong, misguided, or simply stupid... I mean, you couldn't prove my point any better, could you? And quite ironic, too about others seeing things differently...
What this means to most people is really independence from the US, whatever the wording. Could you expand on this "manufacturing of consent" part? Who's doing the manufacturing here and at the bidding of whom?
And for a lot of cases, that's ok. The world is a connected place, and it's more economically efficient for that. You work best when you trust your friends. You balance self reliance, according to your best judgment.
It's sure worrying to watch a good friend become an enemy. But you won't fix that by swearing off friends entirely.
This means exactly nothing in relation to my comment, but that and the bare downvotes are actually a good illustration of my point about manufacturing consent.
Isn’t the more fundamental question why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to creating startups and how can you lower them and preserve the enviable European social model? Solve that and you’ll solve the problem of a native cloud.
In global economies, it is a general rule that different regions of the world specialise in their respective sectors. In the IT industry, we generally observe that early innovators can extend their advantage by binding customers to their technology platform. One example of how this also applies to Europe in the IT sector is SAP. Founded in 1972, they were one of the first companies to offer ERP solutions. Their founders initially worked at a German branch of IBM and took over a software product that IBM was no longer interested in. SAP's leading position in this market has been so strong ever since that no US company has been able to pose a threat to SAP. Oracle, for example, has tried.
You can see this mechanism at work in the USA itself. Microsoft tried to get into the mobil market, but gave up. Google tried to build its own social network, but gave up. All other cloud providers are stuggeling to catch up with AWS.
Brain drain to USA, lack of good VC / funding, Patents war / patents controlled by the USA, industry espionage, EU mentalities that don't favor innovation in the same direction than the USA, too diverse markets to serve, distributed controls / governments / decisions. The list can go on and on
> Isn’t the more fundamental question why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to creating startups and how can you lower them and preserve the enviable European social model? Solve that and you’ll solve the problem of a native cloud.
IMO here in the UK we are good at starting tech startups, we are just bad at not selling them to overseas investors early in their life, or having a tax framework that is advantageous to them growing in the UK.
In the UK see Google Deepmind, ARM, Deliveroo... Elevenlabs being incorporated in the USA, Dyson moving to singapore etc - Even outside of the tech space, Cadburys, Sainsbury's, Jaguar Land Rover... If the UK kept hold of everything that the UK created, we would be great!
Even our infrastructure we sell to the French, Chinese, Germans etc just for short-term gain, despite that we are cutting our nose off if we look forward 10 years.
I am just speculating, but Europe has let itself be very dependent on USA for many things - military/defence, technology etc. "We don't need weapons, USA builds them for us". There has been no need to try and compete.
This is changing now. So maybe the incentives will now appear more clearly.
You don’t have to, this ja the reason. There were multiple successful EU alternatives that were killed by the loads of money the US companies could muster to kill or hobble them. And Europe decided it was fine.
There isn’t even an European card brand that operates across the whole continent, the just accepted to use visa and Mastercard for everything. I hope they change it.
And several European countries had their own card systems. The banks have just decided that letting US companies do the work is more lucrative. It was definitely cheaper and it was necessary if they want to be part of US hegemony network and trade with Asian countries since many of them had bad relationships due to colonialism.
Let me start with saying I'm all for the European social model, which is sadly regressing. However, this model/system is often a hurdle for start-ups, or any small company for that matter. The rules are designed to regulate big companies also apply to start-ups, adding up a bug overhead in the initial years. I think agriculture specifically is outside most of these regulations, because European countries love their agriculture, i.e. rural votes coming from the farmers.
Talent pool in EU is large but not concentrated like in US. Combine this with every EU country having different rules, and not being able to hire across EU without incirporating in every country you want to hire, it's also challenging to access to the large talent pool.
The divergence of being many smaller countries with different regulations, primary languages, currencies etc have been a blocker, but progress is being made[1] and it seems like people are aware of the problem. It just takes a while when every plan needs to be approved by all countries.
No need, it was much more comfortable to stay in known sectors such as banking, industry or tourism. Now there is a real need so I'm positive things will change.
Well, at the early stages, yes. But at the point where incumbent tech firms have an insurmountable advantage, just adding more startups probably isn't going to save you. Entrenched providers can use their market power to buy up/outcompete/destroy any smaller competitors. You really need both a native market and a startup scene.
China has a huge population that mostly speaks Mandarin. The US has a smaller, but relatively wealthy population that mostly speaks English. Europe is a hodgepodge of languages, cultures, and regulatory environments. That’s a beautiful thing, but it’s not an efficient thing from a business perspective.
That was a good article, I don’t usually read The Register.
Even as a US citizen, I say: good for Europe!
The world is simply a better place when countries have independence and can be as self reliant as possible.
In the US media there is an ongoing rhetoric that everything in the US is wonderful and everything in the rest of the world is much worse. I am privileged to have travelled widely so I know what a mostly wonderful and friendly world we live in.
I just use a few EU tech products (Hetzner, Proton, Mistral) but they seem good enough to me.
> The world is simply a better place when countries have independence and can be as self reliant as possible.
I would tend to agree, but to take the other side: This also gives rise to massive wars. You don’t tend to go to war when your economy is so intertwined that war is the economic equivalent of a mass casualty event.
> You don’t tend to go to war when your economy is so intertwined that war is the economic equivalent of a mass casualty event.
That is after all the core motivation[1] behind what became[2] the European Union:
The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes, not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.
I can also agree with the ‘other side’ viewpoint as well. There are things to do to mitigate war though besides interlocking infrastructure: young people studying abroad, travel, friendships with people in other countries. Not too far off topic: a US war planner during world war 2 took Yokohama off the list of Japanese cities to be annihilated with bombing because he and his wife visited that city and loved it. Anything that fights against dehumanizing people in other countries during times of conflict is a good thing.
It's not practical IMHO to move out of US owned cloud companies at this point in time. It could become so over years.
However what is mostly practical is to avoid building on their proprietary layers and stick to relatively portable tech. Just treat it like highly flexible servers / generic services provisioned through APIs. It's a battle to stop "cloud experts" from cargo culting "best practices" which invariably involve everything they can find at the extreme end of the proprietary stack.
Even if you are right and everything is the same regarding surveillance and regulation: there are other important aspects that make the move to move european data out of the US worthwhile.
European citizens have the right to shop around. If they choose a cloud provider from a European country with higher data protection than their home country, they can send a message to their own government.
Swiss data protection law is an example of this. An Italian municipality could choose to use Infomaniak or Exoscale and increase their sovereignty and privacy.
As a European citizen, I can assure you, my options are getting ever more limited. Several global companies have kicked me off their platforms recently due to all the regulations they can't be bothered with. Those that make an effort to comply are by default required to submit to the EU surveillance system. At the same time, I have no illusions that any of this would somehow protect my data from the NSA and the like.
In my view, data can only be protected by its rightful owner. And for that, we need education, not regulation.
Greece took on more debt than they could serve. Do you expect the tax payers from other countries to just pay for that without significant changes to how Greece operates? If you can't pay your debts and you can't print your own currency, you lose some sovereignty. But I feel like Greece would have been worse off if they still had the drachma and tried to print their way out of the crisis.
Pretty much every single country in the world has taken on more debt than they can serve. And the 2008 crisis wasn't triggered by Greece either. The private creditors should have taken the loss. And that holds true for the rest of the world.
If a debtor can't pay their debt, you don't just get to wipe out the bond holders. There is some kind of negotiation to try to restructure the debt and see how much the bond holders can still get. Simply wiping out the debt would create a terrible precedent with terrible consequences for the credibility of the whole eurozone. Who would want to lend money to an EU country if they just get wiped out when things get bad? It would've also had bad consequences for the financial system and potentially caused some institutions to go belly up. The way that countries typically get rid of their debt is by printing money to serve it and thereby inflating it away. But that is obviously not popular among the remaining EU countries. It was always clear that the Euro comes with this constraint that you can't just inflate away your debt.
Europe was able to impose policies to Greece because Greece was requesting loans from Europe. Those loans were required because other investors were unhappy that Greece had hidden the real state of its finance in its reports.
Educate us, tell us when did we vote for the commission and the likes of von der Leyen. (If your answer is "you didn't vote for it, but you voted for someone who voted for someone who voted for it in a secret ballot" I am going to chuckle)
And when did Americans vote for the director of FBI? Chair of the Fed? The local judge who can sign a warrant permitting the police to rummage your house?
> Educate us, tell us when did we vote for the commission and the likes of von der Leyen. (If your answer is "you didn't vote for it, but you voted for someone who voted for someone who voted for it in a secret ballot" I am going to chuckle)
Voters place their trust in representatives who then act on their behalf during the EP voting process and other legislative matters, such as electing the President of the European Commission
A story I read goes thus: A nicely dressed young man was waiting at a bus stop in a rural part of India. He need go to a nearby city. Suddenly clouds gathered and it started to pour down heavily. He took shelter in a chai (tea) shed beside the bus stop. The chaiwala (tea shop owner) announced that the bus is cancelled for the day as road was damaged due to the heavy rain. The young man looked worried and tried to go by walk in the rain. Chaiwala warned that rain would get only heavier. Young man returned and sat back. Other people ordered more chai. Due to more demand for chai, the chai jar (tea granules) got empty. Chaiwala commanded the worker boy to run to a shop that is half-mile away and get more chai packs. The boy sprinted out as if there was no rain. He came back in half hour, fully soaked, starry-eyed, with tea packs in his hand. Young man gets up and starts walking out. Chaiwala was shouting that winds and rain are going to persist the whole day. Young man didn't listen, and didn't feel the rain.
This! I'm Danish and everything in the government is Microsoft. USA is trying to make a hostile takeover of Greenland, a part of the Danish Kingdom, and meanwhile the parliament is migrating to Azure. I hope someone in the government wakes up soon before it's too late.
> 61 percent of European CIOs and tech leaders say they want to increase their use of local cloud providers.
Oof, the company I work for is proudly telling us we've just migrated from a local provider to Azure, and partnered with Google for "digital sovereignty" solutions. Glad to know that's not the trend everywhere.
I think that Google has some partnership with Deutsche Telekom where they provide the software and Deutsche Telekom Runs it because Google doesn't have the encryption keys. In that case Google even if they want they cannot provide the data. Anyway that is still not digital sovereignity as Google might decide to stop providing updates or add a backdoor...
I'm personally very aware of that, and I wish Europeans dropped our collective tech-inferiority complex, but I'm currently a junior at a large corpo and that's not even my business branch; I can't steer it.
1. Europe doesn't have comparable offerings. The amount of money invested is below what a single hyperscaler spends per quarter. (StackIT might be on track to change that looking at the pure numbers)
2. European politicians still seem to believe it's about renting compute and storage; they seem to have little understanding of what "a cloud offering" really is; the EU has less than 5% of GPUs, supposedly
3. For healthcare, they already forced you years ago. This led to hosting on Telekom Cloud which runs on OpenStack by Huawei. (EU commision wants to ban Huawei from 5G but it's ok to use their software? 'Is open source and can be inspected' seems largely theoretical given the reality of cybersecurity)
4. If push comes to shove, the EU is critically dependent on the US in so many aspects (defense, lng to name two very important ones) that eventually, they would falter if the US wants your data in a specific case anyway
5. As a private citizen, given the incarcerations in the UK and Germany, it seems one should worry more about the EU getting your data than the other way around
That said, would be nice to have healthy competition, but after hearing this for 10++ years, it's getting really old. It might have been a good idea not to sleep on the AI trend, but, well...
True for the current situation, but something needs to happen before the thinking turns into acting. There's no better time than now, since most cloud services have become commodities. You don't need to be big-tech to have a competitive offering that. Naturally, the tech won't be as efficient and shiny as those of the big ones, but you have none of the corporate bloat and inefficiencies.
And don't forget about legislation. If there are new laws that set a limit to egress costs you can say goodbye to the walled garden of cloud empires.
After all, how many cloud services does the average company actually need? Most problems have been figured out by now, so such a project would be less like creating thought-leaders and more like a public infrastructure project. With exception of cutting-edge technologies, the cloud has become a commodity.
"5. As a private citizen, given the incarcerations in the UK and Germany, it seems one should worry more about the EU getting your data than the other way around"
As a private citizen given the cold blood murders of US citizens by ICE, it seems EU citizens should really be worried of what such an administration is willing to do and can do to their long time allies.
This is surely not what OP was referring to, but: arguably worse than incarcerations, I strongly condemn EU sanctions against EU citizens and residents, such as Hüseyin Dogru, Jacques Baud, and Nathalie Yamb, merely for speech that is not aligned with EU foreign policy.
Note that I don't consider it at all relevant whether one agrees/disagrees with the content of their speech.
If this isn't what OP was referring to, why bring it up? I don't see how this is relevant, to the security of data from European companies, stored in European clouds.
It is a related complaint. Moving services to a jurisdiction where free speech is grossly violated (even the lower level of free speech that was prevalent in the EU compared to US).
In the past, protection of free speech in the EU might have been less absolute, than in the US. Given the actions of the current US administrations and the (in)action of the supreme court, free speech in the US currently doesn't even serve its most essential purpose of being able to criticize the government, without fear of repercussions (e.g. Kimmel, Colbert).
As such moving services to the EU jurisdiction is most likely also better, if you're concerned about free speech, at least for the moment.
I don't actually see what's stopping European firms from figuring this out in terms of hardware infrastructure.
Buildings full of computers aren't that difficult a problem to solve compared to things like semiconductor manufacturing or energy.
Perhaps the issue is more on the software and architecture side. Getting sucked into weird cloud products that don't translate clean to other premises is perhaps the more difficult aspect of this for larger firms. I've made a very strong point to only use EC2, Route53, S3 and Azure AD. Moving between environments is a lot easier when you stick with the VM as the unit of deployment. Getting out of something like a MSSQL hyper scale instance is simply not possible without switching to a different SQL provider or accepting new operational risks.
If you mean to say that OpenStack is made by Huawei, that is not true. They are a major contributor and a platinum member of that open source project, though.
Europe doesn’t have similar offerings because they never had a chance to or need to compete Silicon Valley. Now that the cats out of the bag, offerings can simply materialize out of the really high demand for homegrown solutions, EU have a large population after all.
US Tech really went off the rails in the last year or last few years, it simply cannot be trusted anymore. Even if such offerings may lag a little behind, they still look like a better proposition. EU is in a similar situation with respect to self defense, they have to step up to the plate and start building their own.
The Huawei ban in the European Union (EU) has been a gradual, uneven process, shifting from voluntary guidelines in 2020 to increasingly mandatory, country-specific, and EU-wide restrictions by 2025–2026.
Here is the timeline of Huawei's ban and restrictions in the EU and UK:
Phase 1: Initial Restrictions and Voluntary Guidelines (2019–2020)
May 2019: The United States places Huawei on a trade blacklist, restricting access to key technologies (Google Android, US chips), which triggers security reviews across Europe.
January 2020: The European Commission launches its "5G Security Toolbox," encouraging EU member states to restrict or exclude "high-risk vendors" (HRV) like Huawei from critical core network infrastructure.
July 2020 (UK): The UK government announces a total ban on buying new Huawei 5G equipment after December 31, 2020, and orders the removal of all existing Huawei 5G gear by 2027.
October 2020 (Sweden): Sweden bans Huawei and ZTE from 5G networks and orders the removal of existing equipment by January 2025.
Phase 2: Implementation Hurdles (2021–2023)
2021-2022: Many EU nations slow-walk the implementation of the 5G toolbox, with only a small number of countries actively banning Huawei from core networks due to costs and dependence on its technology.
June 2023: EU officials express frustration that only one-third of EU countries have implemented restrictions on high-risk vendors.
Phase 3: Hardening Stance and National Bans (2024–2025)
July 2024 (Germany): After years of delays, Germany announces an agreement with major operators to remove Huawei and ZTE critical components from 5G core networks by the end of 2026, and from access/transport networks by 2029.
August 2025 (Spain): Spain cancels a government contract with Telefonica involving Huawei equipment.
November 2025 (EU-wide): The European Commission pushes for a binding, mandatory ban, threatening to make the 2020 voluntary guidelines legally required for all member states.
Phase 4: Proposed Mandatory EU-Wide Ban (2026)
January 20, 2026: The European Commission unveils a new proposal aimed at forcing EU member states to remove Huawei and ZTE from their networks within three years of adoption.
January 2026: Reports indicate the EU may move to ban Huawei and ZTE from critical infrastructure, including fixed-line and fiber networks, not just 5G.
Summary of Key Country Timelines
UK: New equipment banned (Dec 2020), full removal by 2027.
Sweden: Full 5G ban, removal by Jan 2025.
Germany: Core removal by end of 2026, RAN removal by 2029.
EU (General): Proposed 3-year mandatory phase-out starting from 2026
Must say, tech that has held up for all that time, must be doing something right.
So this cloud ride, the possibility of a whole new paradigm in computing could happen before we see EU cloud centricity.
I think you should pause for a moment. There are plenty of European cloud providers that allow you to run VMs in multiple points of presence across the world. Some even offer managed Kubernetes clusters.
It is true that most European cloud providers don't offer many high-level managed services such as function-as-a-service compute solutions, durable execution engines, etc. However, those are not exactly hard requirements. In fact, some cloud providers offer these services for reasons that are not in line with the customer's best interests, such as better hardware utilization and vendor lock-in.
So think about it for a second: if you can put together a Kubernetes cluster, what high-level service do you absolutely need to be able to put together a working service?
I can tell you right away: nothing.
> 2. European politicians still seem to believe it's about renting compute and storage;
I think you need to touch grass on this one. European companies require cloud services for the same reason any other company requires cloud services. If you take the time to learn about how cloud providers such as AWS market their services, you will learn that they firmly base their offering on the exact criteria you are arguing against: compute that scales, and reliability. To argue otherwise, you must argue against how US cloud providers market themselves, which would be baffling.
> 4. If push comes to shove, the EU is critically dependent (...)
There is no "if". We are already at that point. NATO is already running military exercises without the US, and since Trump took over support for Ukraine has been driven primarily by Europe. NATO has been very vocal in how France and the UK have been the primary providers of intelligence to Ukraine.
> 5. As a private citizen, given the incarcerations in the UK and Germany, it seems one should worry more about the EU getting your data than the other way around
You got to be joking. The US now demands access to your social media accounts as precondition to enter the country, and the US also outright disappears people out of the street.
> So think about it for a second: if you can put together a Kubernetes cluster, what high-level service do you absolutely need to be able to put together a working service?
Agreed that K8s helps a lot. But let's say I want managed Redis or MongoDB Atlas, I can't get that, at least I couldn't when I last checked (I can them physically hosted in the EU of course, but on a hyperscaler)
> that they firmly base their offering on the exact criteria you are arguing against: compute that scales, and reliability
Sure these are central, but I can also get e.g. computer vision, distributed queues etc.; a lot of money has gone into the software, not just the hardware is my point.
I am in the middle of this - my audit committee just told me we need an exit plan "just in case".
I don't think this is practically possible. The governments are currently focusing on enabling sovereign clouds - there is real work in France and the Netherlands that I am familiar with.
However, almost any company uses a lot of SaaS stuff - also for very core capabilities such as IdP, employee productivity, not to mention the boring stuff - CRMs, ERPs, payment, etc.
Some (all, maybe?) have non-US variants, but as anyone who ever worked through an ERP upgrade or a CRM replacement - theoretically trivial exercises - this will be hell on earth.
And that does not begin to address the questions such as next gen productivity tools such as frontier models for coding. If Anthropic, Google and OpenAI decided to shut down the Europeans, we'd be screwed for a while.
On the positive side, the absolute toxic stuff that tech companies brought to the world - shorts, social media networks - would for a while be inaccessible too, so there is that.
I've carefully read this interesting discussion: some political, mostly about full cloud services (AWS) vs partial EU providers, or lock-in vs indipendence.
I think the problem is elsewhere. The real advantage of big cloud players isn't their individual services. It's seamless integration and simplicity.
We need a service integration standard for infrastructure that enables:
- Service discovery
- Networking
- Observability
- Configuration
This benefits everyone: EU companies, US startups, enterprises anywhere avoiding vendor lock-in. A standard letting services integrate regardless of who provides them.
Not just container orchestration (Kubernetes), but something working across bare metal, VPS, containers, and remote machines.
We recently moved two companies from AWS to Scaleway which is the closest to AWS you find in EU AFAIK. It's like AWS 5-10 years ago, eg much fewer managed services and you don't have as much tooling, but it works great and it is also cheaper. You do get managed kubernetes, Postgres and Redis plug and play though.
A much better goal would be to ditch dependence on a single company and become, as much as possible, cloud provider agnostic. Not that I mind giving US big tech grief -- they earned it in spades.
But if you wrestle your technology chains from one evil master, do not willingly give it to another, even if he looks more benevolent today. My 2c.
AWS seems to have seen the writing on the wall and has already launched a European Soverign Cloud -- a separate partition like they have for GovCloud and China.
I am guessing other hyperscalers must be doing the same?
Are we seeing a strong aversion among EU companies to use these offerings from US firms (AWS, Google, Microsoft) and viable competition emerging from Europe?
The selling point of many offerings from current market leaders is that they have the widest array of services especially easy to expand into say datalake, BI or AI/ML experiments and production workloads starting from a core IaaS only setup one might have after migrating off own datacenter. I wonder if there are lesser known players positioning themselves in this space -- with managed services in platform/application space. Curious to know some examples.
For most medium sized business or government agencies, the main reason for cloud providers is that you don’t need the in-house skill.
You can replicate most of their offerings for that target group with open source stuff easy enough, but you will need people to maintain that and those are more expensive.
The time for Great Firewall of Europe was 2005, when Friendster, Skype, Xing were still a thing. Probably too late now but effort still needs to be made. One upside of a sovereign European Internet is an ecosystem which may sustain thousands of well paying jobs
Great Firewall? Is that where you think we - Europeans, Americans, anyone living in what used to be called the 'free world' - should go, just follow the Chinese and North Korean and similar regimes in restricting access to whatever those in control deem to be appropriate? Do you even realise what you're proposing here?
We in what used to be called the 'free world' used to revel in our freedom of movement, our freedom of thought, freedom on conscience, religion and more. We used to look at places where such freedoms were not a given like they were and to a large extent still are here. The Chinese 'Great Firewall' was seen in the same light as the Berlin Wall: a means to keep an oppressive regime in power, to keep the citizenry of China unaware of anything the regime did not want them to know about so they could mow them down at Tienanmen Square without people outside of the area learning about it. Now there's some HN user claiming that Europe should also build one - why exactly? What is it that we Europeans should not be allowed to access? Why should the European Commission - maybe I should start calling them the European Commissars - have such power over Europeans?
I say no to any such proposal and will, just like the Chinese, find a way around any such tool of oppression.
Most of my European clients fall in two categories:
1. Ain't nobody got time/care to move out of AWS/azure but we can consider alternatives on new stuff.
2. We moving all to European cloud vendors and gonna mail them to ditch US hardware as well.
The first group is bigger than the second.
One wish to say trump has done damage, but he was voted and he's doing exactly what he said he would do so it's hard to treat this as "it's just trump", it's not, it's Americans treating others like enemies.
I keep seeing over and over how Europe should be self sufficient. I’d be happy for Europe to be self sufficient.
But the truth is that Europe does not have the infrastructure and offering to be self sufficient. Even looking at basic things like AWS SES, there is no European offering. Apart from scaleway, there are no competitions for big cloud providers. There are no alternative to office suites.
And I’m not even talking about hardware. What’s the point to build data centers if they run US made hardware.
So, as the saying goes: talk is cheap, show me the software.
Perhaps there should be an EU committee to draft a mandate for a working group tasked with identifying the necessary stakeholders for a preliminary report on digital infrastructure.
It's called the Cloud Act. If your business wants to keep its production secrets and personal data safe, think again. This has nothing to do with Trump.
Don't fall for the trick of using an AWS EU sovereignty cloud. Amazon is US-based and falls under the Cloud Act. Don't be tricked.
To really understand how complicated is this matter, put into the mix that before AI in Europe there was no shortage of knowledge to have all our cloud services (to the point that a decent part of key infrastructure software is developed in Europe or mainly by Europeans), social networks, ..., but yet it was never strongly wanted. To reach this point, something is really odd with the current US-EU tensions.
This is not just a sovereignty/security/privacy issue. I genuinely believe that ditching Big Tech will produce genuinely better technology for consumers. Once the monopolists lose their network effect advantage, startups should be forced to adopt more interoperable protocols and foster healthier competition. Big Tech is a cancer, same as any other monopoly.
But those do exist and they are generally a lot cheaper; not more expensive.
BTW. it's all hosted in the EU if you use it in the EU. Amazon, Google and Azure have data centers all over Europe and using those is not optional for EU based companies. If that wasn't the case, they'd have no business here. Companies legally have to host in the EU and do business with US cloud providers through EU based subsidiaries (mostly based in Ireland. There's a bit of a murky situation with what level of access US intelligence agencies have exactly to all the data or who copies what where and when. But generally, data isn't supposed to leave the continent unless that's needed/required.
I work in Germany. We currently use Google Cloud. It's cheap and convenient enough. Our spend is only 300 euros/month or so. I could replace it. One of our customers insisted on Telekom Cloud; so we support that as well. I've used Hetzner in the past. There are a few other providers. It's not that big of a deal. But it's not a big/urgent issue for us.
However, Vms, object storage, elastic load balancers, managed databases, etc. are all commodities at this point. You don't need to pay AWS 2-3x for that. They aren't magically any better. They certainly aren't any faster. AWS squeezes hard on those VCPUs.
And there's a lot of exotic stuff that some people use. AWS is offering lots of that. But most of those things are a combination of a bit niche and very pricey and more aimed at enterprises than startups. When it comes to GPU hosting, AI stuff, etc. the premium options that Amazon offers really add up really quickly. I'm sure it's fantastic. But many people I talk to in Europe use alternative/cheaper solutions.
For bread and butter hosting, AWS is just expensive and overrated. Big companies don't seem to care much and are sensitive to big brands and the warm fuzzy feeling they get from expensive consultants telling them what to do. And AWS is very good at vendor lock-in. That's also why IBM still exists and why companies like Oracle still do a brisk business separating rich clueless enterprises from their cash. Vendor lock-in is all they have left at this point. But those are at this point the idiot option. AWS is increasingly like that. The times are gone that they are a sane solution for startups. Ten years ago they'd lure you in with "free" hosting for a year and then you'd be hooked for the life time of the startup. But it's not that obvious anymore that is a good choice for cash strapped startups.
Btw. Hetzner now operates in the US. It's a pretty good deal there as well. It's not like you have to give your money to Amazon.
'Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM (now Microsoft)' has been an important factor around my neck of the woods. A cheaper European alternative would never even make it to the comparison. That is changing now though.
This poses a fundamental problem for many SaaS providers. How can you guarantee client data aren't sent across the pond when all the app state is held server-side?
The answer is obvious with native apps, where it's standard practice to provide server endpoint details, so client-verified data locality is simple.
I don't really know how this is practically possible in SaaS web apps.
Can’t wait until any European vendor gets 400 POPs around the globe with tier1 backbone and the same time has an API, can issue top tier certificates and has some of the features that for example Cloudfront has.
I am working on a high availability postgres self-hosting solution that works with hetzner ,just for the Eu market. Fingers crossed, lots of work ahead.
Americans are absolutely not a fan of this administration and it will be severely neutered after the midterms. The Supreme Court is already doing some of that.
Americans are not your enemy, Washington (state), California, Illinois, etc (AKA the states with real economic power and all the tech companies) did not vote for this. We still believe in the rule of law and our friendships with our allies.
what a strange game of chicken, why xan’t amzn, msft, et al just contain their infra within euro borders and call it a day? after all the word multi in multinational does not oblige companies to stop selling in Europe, or?
You need a doctor's note to get a gym membership in Italy. In the Netherlands, you need a prescription to get contact lens solution. The rot of regulation is deep within the European psyche.
When SaaS was emerging I was always advocating for not putting all our eggs into one basket, everyone always suggested was suggesting I was just paranoid. It's just a basic tenet of resilient systems to diversify depenendencies and not outsource all basic knowhow and abilities, even if its more costly. The reason is that institutional knowledge is difficult to build and easy to throw away. Its for the same reason I was hesitant about supporting all those big free trade agreements, for which I was actually called a "national communist" a few times, lol. Funnily enough nowadays I'm the one more open to those free trade blocks in my social circles and everyone has always been against it. I wonder what the consensus will be twenty years from now.
can't wait for my european incorporated company to run on my european cloud servers so I can run my european language models (which will run inference on european english)
EU countries are just vassal states of the USA in practice, anyway. If Uncle Sam wants that data, he's getting it, either by asking politely or by taking it. And the EU countries can't and won't retaliate.
Europe will never have competitive offerings until they pay their employees the equivalent of what FAANGs pay.
If you work for GCP or AWS in Europe, you'll easily get twice as much income as if you do the exact same job for Hetzner or OVH.
You can't build equivalents to GCP and AWS without paying the same. I work for a FAANG right now in Europe and I wouldn't consider even a single second any European cloud provider as potential employers.
> Europe will never have competitive offerings until they pay their employees the equivalent of what FAANGs pay.
Stop focusing on the absolute number of "$/year", and things will make more sense. Seemingly you'll be able to live a more lavish life in Spain given 1/4 of the salary compared to FAANG, yet your life is better and you can afford more.
Higher salaries aren't always better, especially when you're almost willfully ignoring more important things like purchasing power and quality of life.
> Higher salaries aren't always better, especially when you're almost willfully ignoring more important things like purchasing power and quality of life.
Senior SWE salaries I'm finding in a quick google search in Spain are 80k eur. According to levels.fyi [1] Google (and presumably the other clouds) are paying 170k eur. The comparison isn't even "is 4x the salary better in the US?" it's "is 2x the salary better in the same place?" which is obviously yes.
Again, by focusing solely on the salary you're missing the bigger picture. I know y'all are conditioned to just focusing on the salary, but there is so much more to life.
I don't think I am. Spanish employees of Google benefit just as much from Spanish employment law as Jose's Web Dev Shop. It's the purest comparison considering it's within the exact same country.
While this sounds like great philosophical advice, in practice big salaries do attract employees regardless. If you want to solve the "brain drain to American companies" problem, ignoring the fact that they pay better isn't likely to help.
But you still won't get with 170k in the Bay Area, what you get in Paris, Madrid, Nantes or Barcelona with 80k.
In France, if you get 80k net, you do actually get ~160k, half of which is collected/distributed before by your employer to various mutualised funds (health, retirement, unemployment, state taxes, employee benefits, etc.).
And the mechanism is somewhat similar in other EU countries.
80k net is 6.6k. If you're getting 80k (which is the very upper end of the range) it's likely you are in Paris, where you're gonna give at least 2k of that on rent for a shitty damp place, and double that for something decent.
Trust me I would love to quit consulting and be able to have a chill permanent job that can afford me a good flat and lifestyle. I'm still searching. Spain situation is very similar last time I ran the numbers.
Definitely no fucking way I'm helping anyone build a cloud provider (a cash cow considering the margins in there) for such pay. If I want to sell my soul to the devil, the one across the pond is gonna give me twice as many bucks for it.
2k for a rent in Paris gets you nice places if you have the time to spend to look for it. Cooking your own food at home definitely makes a huge difference every month.
As a SRE, I got 65k in Nantes before I quit, and I've never had to think about any single expense at all, not once (having kids, house, dog, car, garden). That would still have been quite confortable in Paris (swapping the house for a smaller flat, and without the car/dog/garden though).
As an American these numbers are super depressing, haha. Big city US vs Europe cost of living & wages are almost like an order of magnitude different at this point.
Big house & garden 30min from Manhattan center in practice does not even exist due to the sprawl and poor transit here.
As crazy as this sounds, 65k is the wage paid here now to a doorman/concierge at the type of apartment building an NYC SRE/SWE lives in.
If you want big house & garden that looks like the listings at your link, they are maybe 45-60min commute and 2x the price.
Dining out in NYC ends up like 2X+ as expensive as London/Paris or 4X+ Madrid due to labor/real estate costs. Maybe worse, I just looked up Michelin star 5 course menus in Paris and these are like regular Thursday night 2 course dinner prices in NYC.
So in many ways we collect a much higher gross wage here to then spend it all for a lower quality of life.
> But you still won't get with 170k in the Bay Area, what you get in Paris, Madrid, Nantes or Barcelona with 80k.
Note the 170k eur is in Spain -- not the bay area. I compared salaries of Google in Spain to the average salary of a senior SWE in Spain. The point isn't that the big tech pay more in the bay area compared to Spain. The point is the big tech companies pay more in Spain compared to other Spanish companies.
And 170k eur in Spain is much more than 80k eur in Spain.
I'm not comparing European salaries with American ones, I'm comparing salaries paid by American cloud providers IN EUROPE with salaries paid by European cloud providers.
I upvoted you. That’s absolutely true for other roles as well. Like hardware design engineers. At US company in Germany one gets real salary. At German big company one will make 2/3 of that salary. People are not stupid, why choose fraction of the salary when one can take it all. There are outliers, but majority will want to work for more than less money.
If they can get top talent for half the salary they won't suddenly start paying more.
There is only one solution: EU governments heavily subsidize those European cloud providers which enables them to offer top salaries and therefore attract top talent.
It would also help not taxing those incomes at 60%.
Every time I look at a permanent role in Europe, if I didn't already close the tab based on the offered salary, I plug the number into a take-home calculator and then I close the tab for sure.
Everyone talking about rules and regulations being a blocker to EU software sovereignty is completely clueless. Unfortunately a lot of these people are actually European but they've drank the decades of US koolaid.
There are about 200 countries in this world. 195 of them are as of today reliant on foreign-controlled software to a similar degree, which is "completely and utterly in every facet, across consumer, business and government levels".
Let's talk about the other 4 then (excluding the US), with varying degrees. One of them has magnitudes more government interference than the EU. Another one also has both more government interference and stricter rules and regulations, both in terms of labor laws and things like data privacy - even stricter than GDPR. The third one has less of this, but still much more of it than the US, and has the lowest sovereignty level out of the four.
I've talked about three, that leaves the fourth. The fourth one is Russia.
You're completely right, I mistakenly left out the US so I'm going to edit it in. If you include the US, it's five. The first two are of course trivially correct. I'm leaving them unnamed in the hope that those who write all-knowingly about this topic yet can't instantly name them might realize they don't know much about software sovereignty in the first place.
The third one is definitely a notch lower than the others, as I noted. But still IMO noticeably higher than the other 196. The point still stands if you don't count them.
Many European companies are already struggling financially, especially the large traditional businesses which form the backbone of the European economy at large.
Now you demand that these companies should rip out decades of the IT systems they have built up, which form the backbone of their day to day operations and replace them with third rate alternatives, nowhere near in capability, support and coverage?
Yes, I love open source and I wish to see it succeed, but this proposal is suicidal. Even if a superior and less costly alternative did exist (and it does not, just to be clear), just the effort of switching over would ruin these companies.
As an European, I see no point in swapping one dictator for another, or one IT giant for another. What we need is to mandate FLOSS, push for an interconnected Desktop model rather than cloud+mobile, force ISPs to adopt IPv6 with a static global per host, and incentivize domain name purchases while promoting affordable home servers and declarative solutions that are accessible enough to most people so they can deploy their own services independently.
It makes no sense whatsoever to switch from Company A to Company B, you're still just a customer at the vendor's mercy.
There are certain things that would be a pain to do as the platforms we use gives us so much more than just hosting. It means a lot more operational work in our case and loss of certain functionality that has to be reimplemented using some other stack. I don't see it as feasible in the short term, nor cost effective.
Also, Europe loves to impose its draconian internet laws on the rest of the world, if mutual respect for sovereignty is what they want, then they can now learn to accept the constraints of another nation’s cloud environment. Sucks doesn’t it?
States need to sponsor open source to the tune of tens of billions.
Ss the reg points out it's now national security in a deglobalization world.
I got mocked on this site for suggesting it.
But both the EU and the non aligned superpowers need open source hardware and software stacks.
It's all there already. The people did 90% of the work. Llms are here to close feature gaps, identify security issues, port code. They are great at cloning and iterative improvement.
You don't need some radical new idea. And stand up to American companies
And oh jeez, you might get a functioning tech sector of companies. That would be horrible wouldn't it EU.
Proprietary software and hardware/firmware is a weapon these days. This is a US issue as well.
Open source is the key for the entire economic stack of fabrication of computing devices in a weaponized low trust deglobalized multipolar world.
It enabled cooperation, export, multinational companies to make money worldwide
Why EU-native rather than nation-native ? If you are French, your sensitive stuff must be French-native, just like Switzerland does, not "EU-native whatever that means".
There is no EU, each country has very strong different interests, on some topics, some will decide to stay close to the US, on some other topics, some will seek proximity with the BRICS, etc, etc. Constantly being in an in-between is what has destroyed Europe.
Many EU countries have bought US fighter jets (Denmark for instance). Many EU countries still make it clear that they want US technology (Poland for instance). Germany is sending extremely mixed signals.
So, when it's "EU sovereignity", which is it, the Polish flavored one, or the French-flavored one ?
No. "Stronger together" is a hoax, and is only true if all participants are in agreement, otherwise you are "weaker together". 20 years of failed projects (apart from the law saying that bottles should have their cap attached) show that it is impossible to reach consensus with 27 participants.
Put 27 people in a room, all wanting something different, nothing comes out.
Every country in EU is materially better in the bloc, and the only country that left it is much worse for it.
Brexit was such a monumental disaster for the UK that even far right morons in other EU countries had to massively tone down if not abandon any "exit" rhetoric. Now their strategy is to "reform" the EU (i.e.: weaken it).
> 20 years of failed projects (apart from the law saying that bottles should have their cap attached)
This alone shows you are unwilling to engage with the idea of the EU in good faith, thus this conversation with you is a massive waste of my time.
The EU is not perfect (and in fact the expectation of unanimous decisions via veto powers is one if its main weaknesses). But every country, including my own, would be much worse without it.
I will not reply any further, feel free to have the last word.
If China can and will do it, it is naive to assume other superpowers with their own interests, especially when they have convenient access to your data, would not do the same. More likely in country when business is so tightly interconnected with politics.
europe is doing well enough to hinders freedom. we don't need america for that. just at the moment in france they voted law to restrict social media from teenagers. that will require ID for loging onto websites. one can already guess whats the next step. the minister in charge of this already mentionned trying to ban VPN like in north korea.
European governements WILL take your data from "sovereign" clouds
The Europeans have already cooperated with Americans so that each could read each other's citizens' private messaging which would be illegal for the locals.
Keeping the data overseas by design would just make this easier.
If you are in France you may benefit from having your data outside of France unless it's really safe stuff (e.g. a website about your dog) and no user-generated content.
Because, if they seize your server for a case A, and they see evidence for case B, they can charge you for B, C, D, E...
Of course the government, public policy, police and intelligence folks are going to tell you:
"yes yes don't worry, bring your data here, it'll be safer with us. Don't put it in countries like Russia or China where they do not cooperate."
We talk about the country (France!) which already requires you to give your ID card or take a selfie of your face to be permitted to look at porn sites.
In a few months you will have to give your ID to access Discord, Meta, X, etc, and in September 2026 giving ID will be mandatory to subscribe to VPNs.
(and yes technically these services can't be blocked, but once they'll threaten you or the operators of such services with jail and big fines it will be difficult to resist).
If your server is in Russia or China, well, good luck, so many traps during the procedure that unless it is really important, the French authorities are going to give up.
Russia doesn't care about non-Russian stuff, China the same, if you own a small clone of X for example, you are much safer there, and it is easier to operate.
The only thing is that you have to make more frequent backups, as the things are less reliable there, so you can move somewhere else.
But sadly, it feels like pigs will be singing Handel's Messiah before Europe's leaders get off their fat asses and actually do anything about their problems.
Why should they do something about it? They are not IT people. If you want to switch, do it today. Plenty of options exist.
If you designed yourself into a corner by utilizing function as a service to program agains ta proprietary API, then you can just as well start from scratch or quit and join a company that knows how to avoid lock-in.
Sure, but how many people/companies are perfectly served by serverless functions + queues + gateway + database + file service? I'd guess >90%. How much of that remaining 10% can be adequately patched by lauching virtual servers?
Scaleway and OVHCloud both provide all of that. The problem is more about marketing and a modern variant of the good old "nobody got fired for buying IBM".
If Europe wants to reach digital independence it really has to look at thew big picture.
1. European banks mostly sell debt and Nasdaq/Magnificent 7 stocks to their clients. This is what EU citizen invest in.
2. Data centers run on semiconductors made in Asia and cheap energy. Software is almost "the easy part".
3. The whole migration to "the Cloud" (aka MS/AWS/Google), CAPEX to OPEX transition during the ZIRP era was a scam sold by the same ruling class that now tell you need to revert to the previous model.
4. Human capital has to be considered. Having big consulting shops making banks on exploiting foreigners is not a sustainable path to build digital independence (see the content of the recent trade deal with India, an US and Russia ally).
incompetent people, making decisions they should have made a decade ago, that will take more than a decade to implement, and will by then probably be just as outdated as this decision is now
> I'm an eighth-generation American, and let me tell you, I wouldn't trust my data, secrets, or services to a US company these days for love or money. Under our current government, we're simply not trustworthy.
Thank you Redditor, you must have forgotten about the Patriot Act and how every President since has only worsened Privacy at home and abroad (we could easily go back to the 60s, and beyond). Remember CableGate, Prism, FISA Courts, or 3 dozen other Privacy violating programs?
Yes it all started with Trumpoldemort, lest we say his name.
IMHO Europe has one choice, and it may already be too late, and that is to adopt the China model or to descend into fascism and neoliberal economic collapse.
Europe needs to be responsible for its own security and needs its own versions of all the big American tech companies. This administration has done more to destroy American soft power than any other in history and it's not even close. The US has shown itself to be an unreliable partner.
China now has a record of decades of long-term planning and choosing the interests of its populace over corporate interests. It's not problem free by any means but the food is cheap and plentiful, the priority for housing is availability rather than treating it purely as an investment vehicle, infrastructure such as robust public transit is a priority and from the beginning of the Internet age, China has decided not to be beholden to American tech companies so there are Chinese versions of everything.
One may question Europe's ability to innovate in tech given the comparative lack of unicorns produced (vs the US) but that's irrelevant here, for two reasons:
1. Europe doesn't need to innovate. It just needs to copy; and
2. Forcing EU governments and companies to use European platforms will create a captive market.
Thus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data than not having the US have access to EU data. Also it’s not like it’s impossible to encrypt things when you store them? This article is more political than logical or technical, it’s unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive.
„Cloud“ ist a lot more than blob storage where encryption can help. As soon as you use a service that sees plain text (eg a database saas) encryption doesn’t save you from the service provider (and by extension foreign government). But as the article points out, data exfiltration is one problem, the other, imo bigger, problem is dependence on a foreign nation for critical infrastructure. The US government can decide to shut down almost all European IT and there is nothing Europe can do about it right now.
> unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive
I don't think most Europeans want a laissez faire-style "anything goes" market, we want corporations and people to have responsibility for what they do and the effect they have. With a little bit of nuance, some government control and intervention is needed in a healthy society, because we don't want to end up in the same situation the US currently finds itself in.
> Also it’s not like it’s impossible to encrypt things when you store them?
Apart from Signal, do you know of an actual US service where things are E2E encrypted, including metadata, that also allows several people working on the same thing at the same time?
> not having the US have access to EU data
It is a great deal about not having US access EU data.
It is also about the US not having the power to cut the EU from essential services.
> This article is more political than logical or technical
Of course this is 100% a political matter (rather than technical). This is not a bad thing. Technical stuff doesn't live in a politic-free vacuum.
> it’s unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive.
I wonder if someone could make a foss frontend for Google Drive/Dropbox/<insert product here> that transparently encrypts files on your device before uploading them, that would certainly make me worry less about those services.
> Thus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data than not having the US have access to EU data.
The EU governments do not have free access to data in a non-transparent way. That's the main difference between EU and American laws.
> Also it’s not like it’s impossible to encrypt things when you store them?
The GDPR lets you store any data in a third country, so long as it's impossible for that country to decrypt the data. E.g. it has to be encrypted before it's transferred.
It just severely limits what you can build, to a degree where it's probably easier to just use a cloud that can be trusted to follow the GDPR.
I work in energy now, and we host stuff in AWS. So far so normal.
However, with the tubthumping about invading greenland, We see that america is willing to evaporate any system that gets in the way of the sun king's world view. Sure, he says now that "we were never going to invade" but given the way you've all just given up your 1st, 4th, 10th and now 2nd amendment, we're not really that sure.
This means that when the next recession happens and the EU is busy competing, he'll ask "hey we subsidies the EU by getting them to pay for AWS, why don't we turn it off?" I mean that sounds far fetched, but so did unrelated personally controlled federal militia roving around states disappearing US citizens without trial.
tldr: you're damn right its about politics. He threatened to invade an ally, we aint hanging around to find out whats next.
Exactly - it's about availability. If someone with remote access could knock out your business operations, how long would it take to adapt? How much economic cost could that incur, perhaps at a critical time?
> Thus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data than not having the US have access to EU data
It's more about not being subjected to the whims of the US. High dependency on US vendors means high leverage for the US administration (export control, sanction, etc.).
IMHO, this is the EU using current events to push for more power and control for itself over member states in many areas, including new areas like defence. Apparently member states and people are fine with that or even driving it... Turkeys voting for Christmas comes to mind.
> This isn't just compliance theater; it's a straight‑up national economic security play.
The woes of LLM contrasts…
In all seriousness, the points made ring true not only for European companies and should make everyone consider the implications of the current situation, as dreary as they are.
Yeah, human brain is amazing. After I reading many AI replies, this kind style just stands out, even though I can't precisely describe it.
To me it is simply good writing, the kind that is found in literature, but feels a bit out of place in discussions on the internet. What makes it stand out is that real English speaker on the internet are way more casual in their writing. I’ve also noticed that non native English speaker are sometimes mistaken for LLMs due to these less casual sentences structure.
We’re the blade runners of this generation, spotting the replicants in the posts.
“This isn’t x,
it’s y.”
Described it pretty well|succinctly the last time I saw it being referenced.
It's not just big, it's large
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pr8xnNi7OM
Same with:
> The kicker? Fully 61 percent of European CIOs and tech leaders say...
Russian and China are already getting rid of Microsoft.
> Russian and China are already getting rid of Microsoft.
I don't know what you mean by China "getting rid of Microsoft" in the context of cloud providers. I mean, Azure is already present in China's internet, and just like any cloud provider present in China it's presence is a partnership with local cloud providers.
Russia is getting rid of Microsoft not because it has a choice. They are subjected to sanctions due to their invasion of Ukraine, and that essentially cut their access to all tech services. By that measuring stick, Russia is also getting rid of Boeing and Airbus.
The most interesting part is that they do not rely on Western software solutions (Russia still needs hardware, China may reach full autonomy soon enough). If they could do it relatively quickly, EU can do it too. And EU now has exactly the same incentives.
AWS in China doesn't have KMS
While they ditch Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle: we still use Linux, Sel4, ASML and ARM.
There's lots of interesting stuff to watch out for.
What's wrong in using Linux. It is an open source project with origins in Finland and still lead by a Fin.
…who lives in Oregon, in the US.
Hey, we'd break away if we could.
I spend a month in Oregon every year mushroom hunting and elk hunting.
Once you're away from a few key cities, Oregonians are more conservative and hardcore than even central Californians.
I think you underestimate your state if you think they're anti American.
They are a pretty small part of the population though.
What is wrong with using Linux?
Linus Torvalds is very pro–corporate, pro–tivoization, he thinks GPL3 was a terrible mistake.
Is he pro-tivoization, or is he not against it?
I heard him talk about GPLv3 someday, and what he said was that it was a mistake to call it "GPLv3", as if it was the evolution of GPLv2, because for him it should have been a totally different licence.
Which I find fair: there are different kinds of copyleft (like MPL vs GPL), it makes sense to say that GPLv2 is a different concept than GPLv3. Whereas I don't know if anyone should use GPLv1 because GPLv2 sounds like it fixed GPLv1 without changing its spirit.
He is against the "GPLv3 or later clause" because the FSF could change the license terms if it gets hijacked.
He is against the GPLv3 itself. He's ideologically opposed to converting the kernel to GPLv3, even if it was possible.
Isn’t Sel4 Australian?
All of the things OP mentioned are non-US tech. I think the OP was speaking from a US perspective, though it’s not clear.
what's wrong with using european stuff? (ARM, ASML)
:P
Isn’t ARM owned by Softbank? (Japanese)
totally missed this, yep major stake is by Softbank. We europeans like to talk about sovereignty but we sell our stuff pretty easily :D
True but obv. Only lunatics would use a Russian cloud service. The interesting part is whether and what extent China is different. Also, why Europe should start treating us like Russians.
> The interesting part is whether and what extent China is different
Much worse for the EU, both strategically and economically. You’ll be able to buy Chinese services and give them your data and money, but you won’t be able to operate in their market. Germany is feeling the pain there. [1] Strategically they’re a Russian ally and are actively supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine and further aims against the EU.
Something like Russia -> China -> US as worst to least worst partners.
The EU should invest in technical and military capabilities and divest from reliance on other countries and echos the US American position very closely.
[1] For example https://www.autoblog.com/features/germanys-auto-industry-is-...
> why Europe should start treating us like Russians.
I don't know, maybe because your president is a dangerous lunatic? I really enjoy these "are we the baddies?" moments.
I’m not sure he’s getting it yet. Maybe he’s just not personally affected yet.
Was that not an imperative statement agreeing with your cathartic comment? A little weird there isn't an explicit "this is why", but asking questions with a poorly conjugated why along with bad punctuation isn't usually a native speakers habit.
They said in a follow-up comment that they intentionally wrote something ambiguous, so… I don’t know, I wouldn’t waste too many cycles on comments that are deliberately unclear.
Are you asking a rhetorical question or making a statement?
Ambiguity is a thing.
I was asking for the other commenters, to clear that up.
> why Europe should start treating us like Russians
Because your CEOs have become power players in your politics and that’s generally a Russian/Oligarch thing.
Like Apple trying to wiggle their way out of the DMA and when their bs arguments fail in court they send peach daddy with tariffs and what not.
Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own. We used to live in a world converging toward maximal international trade, when in fact it was exploiting underdeveloped nations. As we progress globally, and as the development gap shrinks, we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way.
So now what? How do we preserve a lot of the efficiencies of the past, while strengthening the resilience and redundancy. How can multiple nations create policy which drives business on partially compatible protocols?
If I allow myself to be optimistic, I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements. Protectionism is natural, but taken too far, isolationism is a death sentence.
> we have noticed power dynamics which weren't well guarded against in the old way
The clearest example is a dependency on a single wealthy nation for military and world policing. It's a good thing for individual countries to be able to project their own foreign policy goals like containing Russia without having to rely on the whims of another country's politics. Even here in Canada we should be able to defend their own arctic border reliably and be able to project power to China/India beyond strongly worded letters.
> I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements.
Ignoring the US's recent moves there does seem to be more trade deals than ever between 'middle powers'.
> isolationism is a death sentence
The best way to maintain global relationships is to offer tons of value. Similar to how China can get good trade deals and influence simply because they have so much to offer economically. This isn't just issues of diplomacy.
Well said.
One of the USA's greatest exports is intelligence and higher education, and what has been happening with that and the general anti-intellectual atmosphere is to me the most concerning as an american. Ironically, public education in america has been pretty bad for a while. But I'm going to start rambling here... way too many problems, and no damn leadership.
>"like containing Russia"
I think at the moment Canada faces way bigger problems from the south.
> I think at the moment Canada faces way bigger problems from the south.
Exactly. Not only there's the absurd campaign from the Trump administration on how Canada should be a state but there are also the recent treasonous talks between representatives from the Trump administration and the Alberta separatists.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/eby-alberta-separatism-9.70...
Putin's regime might be a cancer of humanity, but Canadians have far more reasons to feel threatened by the Trump admin than from Putin, even if Trump is a proxy for Putin.
>"Putin's regime might be a cancer of humanity"
It will go away at some point unless global west will start behaving in the same manner.
> like containing Russia without having to rely on the whims of another country's politics
That's true, but at the same time it was probably already the case before invasion of Ukraine, and it is definitely the case now.
The main issue is political fragmentation: would Paris and Berlin risk lives of French and German people (soldiers and civilians due to retaliation) to save Vilnius?
But if the answer is true (as obligated by the Treaty of Maastricht, independently of NATO) then Russia stands no chance with conventional weapons against the whole Western Europe, the balance of military, demographic and industrial power is ridiculously lopsided (involving nuclear weapons would also raise the same political question about the French willingness to nuke Russia in retaliation to Russia nuking Poland but if the answer is yes, Russia cannot win a nuclear war either (which everyone would lose)).
The answer is always going to be "maybe", but hopefully enough of a maybe to deter hostile actions. That puts everything in an uncomfortable state of uncertainty.
Better uncomfortable state of uncertainty than comfortable state of war. Nuclear or conventional.
"…comfortable state of war."
No war is "comfortable", it's a distaster for all involved participants—even the victors.
> The main issue is political fragmentation: would Paris and Berlin risk lives of French and German people (soldiers and civilians due to retaliation) to save Vilnius?
This is a wrong question. If one day Russia feels brave enough to attack any NATO country, the right question to ask is, "Do we want to fight this war on someone else's soil or on ours?". This is the reason why Europe is so focused on helping Ukraine BTW.
> Do we want to fight this war on someone else's soil or on ours?
Russia thought so too.
What do you mean? There was never any question of attacking Russia and fighting any war on their soil. Nobody in their right mind would attack a country with the 2nd largest army and nuclear weapons. The war in Ukraine definitely made this army still very weak, but, except Ukraine defending itself, I don't see anyone rushing to attack Russia anytime soon. It makes no sense now and made no sense before they invaded Ukraine. There is nothing to win by attacking Russia and a lot to lose.
The best way to 'attack' Russia is to undermine its economic and political systems then let unrest amongst its citizenry do the dirty work. 1917 showed Russia's proletariat was very effective at achieving regime change.
How do you undermine the economic and political system of a country? The economic one can be undermined by sanctions, and they happened only because the war - before that the West was happy to send billions to Russia. The political one seems quite stable, Putin had a few decades to cement it and make sure nobody takes it to the streets, and if someone is brave enough to do it, they will be quickly pacified. He is switching the internet on and off and there is no sign of Russians reacting like Iranians.
I thought Iran situation is more about sharia than youtube cat videos.
It's not, the current protests are mainly about economic harshness.
> with the 2nd largest army
By what metric?
Global Firepower maintains a database and is a popular reference: https://www.globalfirepower.com/country-military-strength-de...
But I saw several people criticizing their relatively high position on this chart given high incompetence and losses.
EDIT: Apparently this website doesn't follow any rigorous methodology. So basically the only thing their army is 2nd in the world is the nominal number of nukes (hopefully most of them don't work).
> This is the reason why Europe is so focused on helping Ukraine BTW.
We aren't that focused actually. France produced close to zero 155mm shells in 2023 because the producer (les forges de Tarbes) couldn't pay its suppliers due to liquidity issues. That could have been solved by a phone call to the national investment bank (BPI) but lasted 9 months because we don't take things too seriously.
Another example is how negligible was the war in Ukraine in the debate about the government budget for the past two years. If we were serious about helping Ukraine we should be spending so much money it would become a priority topic in budget debates, but it's not the case at all.
I'm deeply disappointed about how complacent we have been for the past 4 years.
>would Paris and Berlin risk lives of French and German people (soldiers and civilians due to retaliation) to save Vilnius?
Yes very much.
Absolutely:
https://www.bundeswehr.de/en/news/eastern-flank-new-brigade-...
Right. Aggression can only be tolerated up to a point before it triggers a response. Remember, on 1 September 1939 the Nazis invaded Poland and two days later both the UK and France declared war on Germany.
“and two days later both the UK and France decided not to intervene and just set up defensive position in Belgium and eastern France” is what actually happened. With the terrible results we known for France (the defensive position being hammered on its weakest point, leading to the complete collapse of the French army in less than a month.
I wouldn't be so categorical about France. Pro-russian/ “anti-war” political parties earned the majority of votes (but not seats) in the last elections, and the personality of Macron is so divisive (he has had record low approval for most of his tenure) it really impairs support for war.
> Just as America would like to reduce its dependence on external production, so to do other countries want to reduce their own.
If anything, I'd say for other countries it's more urgent.
If China embargoes deliveries of light bulbs to Europe, all the light bulbs already in place keep working. The pain would grow over time - giving a grace period, to ramp up local production.
If America embargoes AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft? The pain would be instant and severe.
That would be as close to a declaration of war as you can get without firing a bullet.
The immediate and obvious response would be for the foreign branches of those companies to be declared "of national interest", nationalized and forced to keep operating.
>"nationalized and forced to keep operating."
Assuming there is no some kill switch which would render a whole infra including hardware inoperable.
I'd imagine the government would be in talks with the highest ranking local Amazon employees long before, but I can't imagine a country trusting the hardware or wanting to manage the jank.
It's called us-east-1?
AWS China is a completely separate partition under separate Chinese management, with no dependencies on us-east-1. It also greatly lags in feature deployments as a result.
We saw the damage crowdstrike caused in a few hours
In case of war AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft and others would be immediately directed by government to adopt its war strategy—like it or not—just as US manufacturing was forced to retool for war production during WWII.
I'm absolutely not an expert, but critical things for power and food production not to mention medical supplies and emergency equipment are also tied up pretty deeply in international trade.
The world would break pretty quickly if we all just stopped trading with each other.
Sure, but many products can be sourced from a load of countries.
If you can't get natural gas from Russia you can get it shipped from America or Australia or Qatar - it's expensive as hell, and you might need to quickly build new regasification plants, but your economy keeps running. And there's no remote kill switch that disables the gas you already have in-country.
That's not the case for the services provided by AWS, Google, Apple and Microsoft though - the 'competition' is one US provider vs another.
Self hosted ms installations have no instant kill switch, only a slow one.
It is risky to believe that the development gap alone makes for higher economic efficiency when manufacturing things in China. There are very real structural differences in how various industries are organized. Not least in terms of geography.
This is an aspect the west seems to have missed entirely as there are no attempts to learn from it or emulate it.
Everyone knows about Shenzhen. Not everyone knows that this is how every major manufacturing industry is clustered in China in various cities and regions.
The US did this with automobile and steel industries concentrated around the Great Lakes. It's not some kind of profound insight on the part of the Chinese.
The downside is that it decimates entire regions if/when the demand for what they produce drops.
Yes, it has its risk, but that isn’t why the US or Europe don’t cluster industry to create higher efficiency. The risk can be mitigated. The political willingness and ability to do it deliberately just isn’t there.
My point was that the development gap is what lead to the current situation, not that it's just cheap labor that makes Chinese stuff cheap.
My point about maintaining higher economic efficiency is actually the same point you're making. How can the globe (not just the west vs the east) learn from the past and build for the future. We live in a magical world with translation services available to billions of people, how can we empower them to organize around the right ideas. How can we preserve culture and art while flooding ourselves with technologies developed globally? Who pays for security and research? Intellectual property law in general?
So many big issues and questions still need a lot of work.
I think Congress is actually the biggest obstacle to efficient manufacturing in the US. It is a body where the primary motivation of representatives centers around what they can get for their constituents, not what makes sense nationally. So any government spending (eg procurement) will actually tend to drive fragmentation as representatives fight for their states.
Take for instance the space sector. It is fragmented by design. By Congress. Not only is it spread all over the country, making collaboration expensive, time-consuming and clumsy: there are essentially six different federal space agencies of which NASA is just one. This is terribly inefficient.
I remember when reading about the Apollo missions it was astonishing just how much time they lost by different parts being built all over the US and then shipped across the country to be integrated. Utter engineering madness that was only made to work because one could pour immense amount of cash on it.
This is why companies like SpaceX was able to run more efficiently: they do a lot more in vastly fewer locations. Ditto for Lockheed during their golden years: Skunk Works was famous for having "everyone under one roof and within walking distance of each other". (That Skunk Works neither exists anymore, nor can it exist, but that's a longer story which is also about extreme inefficiency).
It is reasonable to assume that Europe wouldn't do any better. Or any setup where politicians are inclined to optimize for regional gain. You'd probably end up with the same political fights over who gets what if the EU were to push towards more of the kinds of manufacturing that you find in China.
We know we're inefficient and we have some idea of why. We like to blame factors that are easy to politicise or evoke emotion (environment, exploitation of the poor etc), but I don't think they are as important as people tend to think.
We just don't want to change. And there are legitimate reasons for that. Chief among them that we're uncomfortable with strong central control. (Well, we used to be. It only took a majority of republicans about a decade to turn 180 degrees on that question and prefer an all-controlling federal government dominated by the executive branch)
I think Susan Collins is a great example of this. Her support of Kristi Noem is based on deals she finds acceptable for Maine residents. The fact that other states suffer at the hands of ICE doesn't effect her decision's. Collins feels she only is responsible for Maine and not humans that live outside of Maine.
I find this sort of compartmentalization offensive to the common good.
That's representative democracy for you. Heck, even China faces the same issue, but they get to make it a competition between provinces, on who can win the favor of the emperor. Helps for them that the emperor has supreme authority though.
No, that's the incentive this specific system creates. There are democratic systems which do not suffer from such hyper localism. Such as the German mixed member proportional system.
Can you describe how the German system works around this issue?
Sounds like a narrow interpretation for representative democracy:) Maybe I'm stretching/mangling the golden rule but "do unto others as one would like others to do onto Mainers."
"It is fragmented by design. By Congress.…"
That's only in peacetime. During WWII the Government directed US industry to gear up for war production and the transformation was not only remarkably swift but also the largest retooling effort in history.
In these fraught times it's worth revisiting that history to remind ourselves of what's actually possible. By today's standards, the US's industrial response to war was truly remarkable.
> How do we preserve a lot of the efficiencies of the past, while strengthening the resilience and redundancy.
Open source with clear international governance and maintainer/contributor base, in such a way that a geopolitical rift leaves both sides with working software.
That works for tech and the infrastructure, of course, but not for the corporations built upon them.
> more international lawyers
I don't see that as a significant source of safety in our current world.
> isolationism is a death sentence.
The current US admin isn't isolationist, it's merely reverting back to 19th century imperialism.
> If I allow myself to be optimistic, I'd be hoping for more international lawyers and trade agreements.
One of the issues with the current system is that the WTO appellate body, which is effectively the court of world trade, requires USA approval for any appointments, which both Trump and Biden have refused to give. This effectively makes the WTO completely impotent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellate_Body
Didn't the rest of the world form their own WTO without the USA in it?
Which seems completely pointless if they don't also revoke the USA's "Most favoured nation" status.
Trade agreements, the WTO, its rules and appellant system, only work if nations are at peace and that peace is sustainable. We've just lived through a remarkably stable period of 80 years (since WWII) without which WHO, free trade and trade agreements could not have existed as we've known them. That era is seemingly now over, and the WTO is falling into irrelevancy.
Unfortunately, in the decades since the 1970s laissez faire economics/capitalism with its immediate need for quick profits, short-termism, a penchant for deregulation and ignoring traditional business ethics has meant that governments have ignored their long-term strategic interests. Despite the dangers of these policies being blatantly obvious dangers from the outset many Western governments encouraged such practices. Now it's payback time, and it'll be expensive—likely more than if the old order had been retained.
Anyone with a sense of history could see the headlong rush to deregulatate markets, indiscriminate reductions in tariffs and free (and indiscriminate) trade, would ultimately result in leaving many countries strategically vulnerable and open to exploitation by others.
We're now witnessing the true cost of these policies and what it means to have lost critical industrial infrastructure, loss of production know-how along with the loss of skilled workers, and an ongoing deskilling of the workforce all of which took decades if not centuries to build up.
With more nuanced policies much of the pain could have been avoided.
Rebuilding a strategic manufacturing infrastructure to insure resilience and independence in an increasingly uncertain and divided world will be costly and difficult.
>"but taken too far, isolationism is a death sentence"
I would argue that few large countries have everything to be self sufficient. For the rest - they would have to band together to avoid being at the mercy of their bigger overlords.
As for efficiencies of the past: I think they lead to a complete monopoly / near monopoly in few critical areas. The result - the monopoly power becoming a political weapon and or critical vulnerability.
Last week I migrated our db away from AWS RDS to a European cloud provider. Everything runs fine and we also have it cheaper!
One of our domains is due for renewal in a couple of months. I'm setting up the transfer to a EU registrar for it next week.
This all takes time and it's not the most important thing for the bottom line, but on the long run I'm sure I'll look back and say it was a great investment.
> Last week I migrated our db away from AWS RDS to a European cloud provider. Everything runs fine and we also have it cheaper!
If I may ask, why didn't you choose the cheaper option before? What do you think you're trading off, if anything?
Going with the default, we were already using other services from them.
So you still have other stuff with AWS?
I think they meant it the other way around. They mostly used AWS and had already some stuff on Hetzner, which made switching over to Hetzner easier.
> to a EU registrar
Which one? I've been using DNSimple for so long, been trying to find something equally developer friendly who is based in Europe but haven't had much success. Used to use Gandi before DNSimple but it's obviously down the drain today.
I've been using DNSimple for ages and I'm looking to switch; not because of geopolitical reasons (I'm American), but they're just damn expensive for the simple dns and domain management stuff I use them for.
Are there other good ones with such a nice API?
Good question! Ironically I want to use their API to migrate somewhere else, but it'd need to have a good API to complete the migration :P
I use Scaleway as my registrar, I don't know if i can automate domain registration but I don't have to. They have APIs for managing records if you choose to host DNS there too.
netim.com has been reliable over the years for me
What about OVH?
OVH is awful. The UI is slow and buggy, operations often fail and you need slow contact with support.
Worse, closing an OVH account is very hard. Every domain you host there they sign you up to several services, and you need to manually disable each one before they let you close the account. This then often gets stuck, because of the broken UI, and you end up needing to badger support over and over until they'll fix it
Never again
They're working on a new manager UI that should solve most pain points:
https://x.com/i/status/2002765582073274826
https://x.com/i/status/2015829450764513753
They have Fido 2FA too!
But their web UI looks and feels like it was pieced together by hamsters. It doesn't leave me feeling confident in their technical abilities in any way.
Best would be to research a local one where you live. Support your community while you're at it!
I live in a town with 10K other folks, I feel like I'd know if there was a local DNS registrar here :)
But maybe I should be the change I wanna see!
This is happening in the US firms too. Yesterday, our CTO asked us to look into multi-cloud solutions. We know it is politically motivated decision with no cost savings or benefit.
Can you disclose which European cloud provider you chose?
We went with Hetzner as we already had good experiences with their VPSes. For this particular db migration, a resonably sized VPS with volumes does the job for us. We don't have planet scale operations so the lowish IOPS is not an issue atm. Also, with this experience at hand, I am confident that we'll manage another migration if need be.
Did the exact same thing for a client who's ops we managed on AWS. I was pretty against ditching RDS and a load balanced setup for hetzners load balancer and 3 instances (2 web, 1 db) but honestly, it's been pretty smooth sailing. The sites faster, and costs dropped massively, saving the client approx €900/mo for a better service.
Afaik Hetzner has a couple of server locations in the USA. Is it correct to say that Hetzner has to comply to US CLOUD Act and therefore give away any data requested?
Depends on which data center you're hosted.
The one under US jurisdiction operated by Hetzner US LLC must comply, while the German ones are operating under the GDPR, which has extraterritorial clauses can can deny or challenge the request.
It's not that guaranteed.
The reality is that if you have any interest, company or employees in the US you can be coerced to do anything the US government wants.
Either legally through courts, or through business influence, or through harassment (e.g. hardcore checks from the IRS).
Sorry, Stripe rejects you now because you are high-risk (you have to explain why you refuse to help in criminal cases, though there is a court requesting you).
You don't like to comply to US requests and protect terrorists ?
https://support.stripe.com/questions/how-to-resolve-blocks-o...
Still don't comply ?
You are added to sanctions list, end of the game.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0185
Even Microsoft acknowledges that these cross-border requests cannot be avoided.
https://www.convotis.com/es/en/news/microsoft-access-eu-data
The same way that EU can force fetching data from the US entity.
Now on the EU side:
GDPR fine of 4% of your worldwide income. Well, too bad, your US entity refused, we will have to punish your EU entity very strongly.
If small provider, oh right you refuse ? Well, we will notify your bank that you do not respect the court orders, etc.
The law is one of the way of enforcement, but there are multiple stages of pressure.
Still refuse ? Well, let's come to you at 6am then.
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2020/07/10/57...
There are EU alternatives to Stripe.
I know what you meant, but I think that there are alternatives, even if they are maybe not as good as the ones made in US.
Also, if the goal is to go all in on data sovereignty, so be it - put the companies in the sanctions list. It will only grow.
Any company opting for building digital sovereign systems should build a redundant and decentralized organization so that in worst case the company can split up its operations geographically to avoid being in the crosshairs of any host countries government.
Absolutely, but imagine, Zuckerberg creates a new company:
Now, an US court, requests data from that project to protect an imminent attack where people are going to die.He refuses, his company refuses, everybody refuses.
Do you think he can evade US justice even if the company is incorporated in the EU ?
Collaborating is the path of least resistance, and as long as you can claim somewhat "we didn't have any choice, we were coerced" then you are fine. This is also why Apple, Google, Meta, NordVPN, etc, are all collaborating with the infamous FBI DITU group.
do you use FDE on your hetzner instances? I couldn't find a guarantee that they properly dispose of block storage so I ended up developing a utility for this https://github.com/mvelbaum/hetzner-fde-toolkit
OVH in my case
As a European, I am glad that this is finally discussed in the open! I have made multiple comments in the last weeks that one of the most important things, for me, is an alternative to the Visa/Mastercard duopoly. And yes, I can use an app to pay, but whenever I rent a car or purchase something online, I still use one of these two American companies. Why isn't the European Commission mandating these app payments in different EU countries to connect with each other? Wouldn't that go faster than the digital euro, that is set to come no earlier than 2029?
It just plainly makes sense for central bank to offer a digital payments solution. Right now if I want to pay for something without 3rd party taking a cut is to mail the money in an envelope as if EU Central Bank denies existence of digital economy.
they're working on it, but it'll take time: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
Take a look here: https://wero-wallet.eu/
Looking forward having this in the country where I live and in the countries I mostly travel to! Well, actually all over EU.
What is unclear to me atm, is it possible to rent a car using wero? Also, can I pay online with it?
Well, there is good news on that front [1]. It seems it's being planned.
[1] https://thepaypers.com/payments/news/eu-considers-developing...
Europe almost had in once ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard
> yes, I can use an app to pay
So you move the power from two American companies (Visa and Mastercard) to two American companies (Apple and Google)? What's that supposed to solve?
Also, fuck apps. I had to set up an app for my mother to recharge her new hybrid car and I am not joking: at one point I had to create a log in for her and was greeted by a screen with two options: Log In (blue button, white text), and Log In (white button, blue text). I would rather use cash than an app (and I'm in Belgium, carrying around cash is like herding sheep through coyote territory).
> So you move the power from two American companies (Visa and Mastercard) to two American companies (Apple and Google)? What's that supposed to solve?
Unsure what you mean, but for context I use an app developed by a consortium of local banks and it works by scanning a QR code. Indeed, I use an Android phone but my next one will be a de-googled one like a Fairphone with /e/OS. Hopefully the same app will work there...
> Hopefully the same app will work there...
That's the problem: currently many of those banking apps in the EU require having a phone with Google Play services and other "security" stuff that makes you reliant on American companies, like the post you're replying to claims.
Now that the cat is out of the bag, I am confident that those banking apps will (eventually) work without the likes of Google Play Services. Additionally, what i really want is an alternative to Visa/Mastercard, meaning I can use it for renting a car or paying online.
>>As a European, I am glad that this is finally discussed in the open! I have made multiple comments in the last weeks that one of the most important things, for me, is an alternative to the Visa/Mastercard duopoly.
The main reason we don't have an alternative to Visa/Mastercard duopoly is protectionism of EU countries. There are local alternatives that do pretty well (BLIK in Poland, Revolut Pay in countries where it's popular) but entering more markets is like pulling teeth because EU throws regulatory obstacles at every step.
>> Why isn't the European Commission mandating these app payments in different EU countries to connect with each other? Wouldn't that go faster than the digital euro, that is set to come no earlier than 2029?
It would but then their non-local alternative could win which they really don't want to happen.
> because EU throws regulatory obstacles at every step.
No, the gatekeeping is done by local banks and governments to protect their oligopolies/cartels.
There are many instant-pay apps across Europe and they are intentionally not interoperable outside of local markets. Each local banking oligopoly is trying to fence off competition. The main fear is from smaller neo-banks.
>>No, the gatekeeping is done by local banks and governments to protect their oligopolies/cartels.
If you are pointing the distinction between gatekeeping at the EU level and country level I am not contesting that. It's clear though that the gatekeeping is the problem here (and in many other industries in EU).
How dare you point that out on a discussion about gatekeeping being treated like a good thing.
> The main reason we don't have an alternative to Visa/Mastercard duopoly is protectionism of EU countries. There are local alternatives that do pretty well (BLIK in Poland, Revolut Pay in countries where it's popular) but entering more markets is like pulling teeth because EU throws regulatory obstacles at every step.
That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense? How did Visa & Mastercard manage to go through the "protectionism of EU countries" then?
> How did Visa & Mastercard manage...
I'd bet a combination of:
- Got through before the red tape ramparts were nearly as thick as today
- Ungentle arm-twisting by the US Gov't... at Visa & Mastercard's behest
- Amply greased palms... which can't be traced to Visa or Mastercard. At least not in any jurisdiction which would do anything about it.
You forgot the part where there is a bootstrap problem for any fintech.
You need the appropriate license to make money, but you can only get that license if you already have enough money.
On top of that is a requirement that basically demands that you have employees in charge that have worked and gained job experience at the established businesses.
This is good for stability, but it also means that innovation gets nibbed in the bud.
???
Neither my comment, nor the prior one, had anything to do with fintech.
Concerning "innovation" in financial systems, done by relative outsiders, with little experience or incentive to keep the system stable: Given the track record, I'd argue that such innovations should either be outright banned, or limited to some tiny percentage of the relevant financial market. The world does not need more FTX's.
We have UPI in India and it's pretty Robust.
My brother actually was part of deal in talks to have UPI pilots as a project within London as a project within his college and I remember him talking about how UPI (India) is in talks with other European countries too.
With the mother of all deals recently signed between EU and India. I sincerely hope that UPI can have access within EU markets too.
If you ever come to India, you can witness the astronomical rise of UPI. From street vendors to literally everybody now has UPI and it has 0 fees and is really great/one of the best.
As for our brazillian friends, I have heard that pix is great too and I have respect to pix as well plus its open source as well. Both Pix and UPI are really great.
Yes, there are local alternatives like Pix here as well, but they only work in the same country. I need something that works across EU countries, like wero. I also need something that works on every site when I buy online and I can also use it when renting a car. So a real Visa/Mastercard alternative.
Using card is much much easier and better UX.
I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer. And if you are a start-up and you want to grow, the situation is even more dire.
And without a few hundreds of billions of EUR invested _today_ there will still be at least a decade until basic infrastructure will be somewhat on par with current day hyperscalers from the US.
And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.
Today, if for political reasons some EU companies will switch to whatever Europe has to offer in terms of cloud computing, they will need to spend a significant amount of money to retool their day to day pipelines and invest into developing or replacing cloud services with alternatives from the new provider or self-host if there is no native offering.
There’s a chance that the current situation will start to resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however that might look.
I dislike the idea that if a cloud provider can not provide every service it's not even worth considering. Where is the problem solving. Maybe don't lock yourself into a single vendor and shop around for solutions. Apart from that the cloud offerings of companies like OVH and Scaleway are constantly expanding.
This takes time and effort, thus, lost opportunity cost. The thing that makes these providers worth it, is that it lets the business focus on their core competencies and just add-on as they scale without worrying about complexity. A business owner who hyper-optimizes for every contract is unlikely to be focusing on growing their business, even if their business is more efficient on paper.
It would make me very uneasy to have my company be 100% dependent on another company. It sure is easy and convenient to just go to AWS/Azure/GCP pick all the components I want and plug them together but I'd say leading a company is not always choosing the easiest but sometimes the most sensible option.
Let’s say there’s a balance between the two, and maybe optimising a bit more is currently a good idea for various reasons…
> This takes time and effort, thus, lost opportunity cost.
Why should we assume this for every type of business.
> The thing that makes these providers worth it, is that it lets the business focus on their core competencies and just add-on as they scale without worrying about complexity.
Since when? Mastering the complexity and implementation of infrastructure from US cloud providers is a skill that takes time in itself. Personally I don’t see how Scaleway does not provide the same for example.
At some point we have to question are we choosing AWS, GCP, or Azure out of brand name, convenience, and marketability. Our if they actually enable faster business execution, higher availability, security, and regional compliance that alternatives don’t…
Europe managed the first ~60 years of computing without the cloud just fine, and (as per greybeard HN-style comment) one can in fact wonder how much of the past 15 years of innovation has actually brought us for "your average org".
Also: there may be _a_ chance that the situation will improve, but as the Dutch say "Trust Arrives on Foot, but Leaves on Horseback" and your even given your "even if" the trust thrown away in the past year will take literal decades to repair.
You don't need hundreds of services. Give me virtual machines, reliable block storage, file storage and object storage, networking, dns, managed kubernetes, and it will cover the majority of workloads in Europe that run on Openshift or Openstack today.
> Give me
Companies have this risk adversity when it comes to trusting all their infrastructure to a person that knows it all and can do it on three physical servers.
I am old enough to have set up services on bare metal servers with what was virtualization or containerization back then (vserver), but today no one wants to know how to tweak Postfix because some emails are not coming through or whatnot.
> Companies have this risk adversity when it comes to trusting all their infrastructure to a person that knows it all and can do it on three physical servers.
A person that knows it all and can do it all on AWS, on the other hand...
Sure, but let's say you do EKS, you set it up once and then it's mostly done, including security, etc. You set up your own, then you upgrade every 6 months manually.... this is a cascading cost.
When we designed the (by now largely self-hosted) stack for our production enviroment, we had that discussion. And honestly, on the persistence side, most people agreed that PostgreSQL, S3 and a file system for some special services is plenty. Maybe add some async queueing as well. Add some container scheduling, the usual TLS/Edge loadbalancing, some monitoring and you have a fairly narrow stack that can run a lot of applications with different purposes and customers..
We (10 people) run this + CI on just a VM + storage provider, mostly VSphere from our sister team of 6 (and yes it hurts, and we have no time to move it), Hetzner and some legacy things on AWS.
Though that's currently the problem -- there is a somewhat steep minimal invest of time into this. But that's good, because this means there could be value for European cloud providers to build up this narrow stack managed and get paid for it. We will see.
> Give me virtual machines, reliable block storage, file storage and object storage, networking, dns, managed kubernetes, [...]
But managers wants to _buy_ these services, not be directly responsible for them. That's where the problem lies, as I see it.
If those managers currently sold on The Cloud, can instead be sold on how much money they'd save not being on The Cloud, then corporate can do what it does best and change policy hard enough to give the staff whiplash.
I don't know what managers have been reading/hearing, but for the last decade or so as a developer what I've mostly been hearing is that the only people who actually benefit from Big Data architectures are FAANG, that it's much cheaper to run on a single small self-hosted system that's done right, that the complexity of managing the cloud is even higher than a local solution.
This matches my own experience of what people needed to serve millions of users 20 years ago. If you can't handle a chat system or a simple sales system with 100k-1M customers on a server made out of one single modern mobile phone, you're either just not trying hard enough or have too many layers of abstraction between business logic and bare metal. Even for something a bit more challenging than that, you should still be thinking thousands of users on a phone and 10k-100k on a single device that's actually meant to work as a server.
You might save 100k in server fees, but now you have to hire three full time people to manage your own servers. And you won’t get the redundancy or the security of having the experts do it across three data centres for you.
> If those managers currently sold on The Cloud, can instead be sold on how much money they'd save not being on The Cloud...
This is more than a theory, it's a trend that is already underway. The cloud remains supremely capital efficient for startups, but pricing has crept up and some customers are falling off the other side of the table.
> But managers wants to _buy_ these services, not be directly responsible for them. That's where the problem lies, as I see it.
Why won't they be able to buy them from EU providers?
They don't want to necessarily buy it, but they want to hedge their options from "my $guy can do everything" to "on which cloud platform can I find a competent operator tomorrow".
Marketplace offers can go a long way to fill these void in official managed services.
And a replicated postgres with backups
Note that once you have virtual machines, those other things can be provided using that same virtual machine interface. Layering and standards are really useful. Spin up your own storage cluster? if you want...pay a managed service from a third party on the same cloud? whatever makes sense to you. I find it appalling that because money was so cheap, people got used to just throwing it at the hyperscalers 'rich offerings', and now we have multiple generations of people that think RDS is some magic box that would take billions in investment to replicate.
This matches my experience. I run a pay-per-use VM service (shellbox.dev) entirely on Hetzner auction servers with Firecracker microVMs. Sub-second boot, full Linux environment, SSH-only interface. The entire "cloud" layer is Firecracker + Btrfs reflinks for instant copy-on-write cloning. No managed Kubernetes, no proprietary orchestrators.
The total cost of that stack is remarkably low — cheap enough to offer VMs at $0.02/hr running and $0.50/mo stopped, which undercuts most hyperscalers for bursty workloads. The "billions in investment" framing is exactly the problem. Most of what hyperscalers sell is convenience wrappers around commodity compute, and the lock-in is the product.
Wrote up the economics here if anyone's curious: https://shellbox.dev/blog/race-to-the-bottom.html
We didn’t do it because money was cheap we did it because there are tons of benefits to not having to inventory your own compute. Everything from elastic scaling to financial engineering was improved via the hyper scalar options and it’s ridiculous to act like those options aren’t valuable post hoc because Europe doesn’t have a native one.
I think the Heztners and their ilk are coming along nicely and probably can support a lot of Europes cloud computing needs, but they aren’t in the same league as the hyper scalars when it comes to capabilities currently. It would be great if they got there for everyone though.
there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer
That's true right now, yes. But things are changing rapidly, e.g. there is evroc [1], Mimer [2] and others are popping up too.
it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering
I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard benchmark, things in principle can be done much faster if you are smaller, nimbler and more focused. The solution to EUs problems is less paperwork and meetings, and more smaller bespoke companies that are laser focused on solving a specific sub-problem. Can they do it? Probably not if they try to create their Google or Microsoft.
[1] https://evroc.com/ [2] https://mimer-ai.eu/
Getting Google Docs to be a Word alternative was an order of magnitude easier than getting GCP to be an AWS competitor.
Now that AWS has two serious competitors (and some non serious ones), privately funding another one just seems impossible to me. Who is gonna chip in tens of billions of dollars to fund "that, but European, and 15 years from now"?
I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is some combination of:
1. EU intervention (nasty regulations and expensive subsidies).
2. People using non-equivalent products (Europeans have to use lower-level infra and do a lot more ops in-house). This part would have its upsides anyway TBH.
> I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is some combination of
Just mandate EU countries' public administration to rely exclusively on EU cloud solutions. That doesn't need to be done at once.
This would create enough of a captive market to start the homegrown industry.
> Europeans have to use lower-level infra and do a lot more ops in-house
To be honest, every large enough company would benefit from doing a little bit of that.
> Just mandate EU countries' public administration to rely exclusively on EU cloud solutions.
This happens already in some areas and it is not cheaper or better. The EU funds national clouds where public institutions use them. What does it mean? VMware with Tanzu or OpenStack. And then some services thrown in to offer some S3 like buckets and that's it. The rest has to be built by the beneficiaries. Servers? Brand names like Lenovo/HP/Dell. Storage? Brand names like NetApp, HP, Dell, Lenovo, 3Par, IBM and the list goes on. Networking? Cisco (mostly), HP/Juniper. Firewalls? Cisco/Fortinet/PaloAlto/CheckPoint/etc.
Basically an enterprise setup masquerading as a cloud offering.
And even if there would be EU wide offerings for such cloud, there's too much money at stake to let institutions from one country buy services from another.
> not cheaper or better
Yeah. The EuroCloud will always be dramatically more expensive and much much worse. Anyone who's claiming otherwise is living a fantasy. The only argument that makes sense is "but it's worth it".
(One detail: it will be much worse at the margins where current clouds actually compete. But actually I suspect only a small number of our customers actually exist at that margin. I think a lot of people are just massively overpaying for their cloud platform and so they might be fine with a EuroCloud anyway. This is why you hear stories today like "we switched to Hetzner, halved our bill, and it works exactly as well as the AWS products we used to use).
> And then some services thrown in to offer some S3 like buckets and that's it. The rest has to be built by the beneficiaries.
Ditto, a fully featured EuroCloud is not gonna happen. Again, it has to be worth this cost.
> Brand names like NetApp, HP, Dell, Lenovo, 3Par, IBM and the list goes on.
This is the only part where I disagree. I think it's OK if the EuroCloud is built out of US hardware (like how the AmeriCloud is very far from free of Chinese hardware). Obviously presents a significant risk re supply chain security but still, the _really_ important thing is actually sovereign operations. The most important thing is who has the keys to the DC.
> This happens already in some areas and it is not cheaper or better.
The goal is not for it to be cheaper or better. The goal is to have money spent on domestic actors. Will some of them provide a dogshit service? Sure. Just like it happened in the US. Time will sort things out.
> What does it mean? VMware with Tanzu or OpenStack. And then some services thrown in to offer some S3 like buckets and that's it. The rest has to be built by the beneficiaries. Servers? Brand names like Lenovo/HP/Dell. Storage? Brand names like NetApp, HP, Dell, Lenovo, 3Par, IBM and the list goes on. Networking? Cisco (mostly), HP/Juniper. Firewalls? Cisco/Fortinet/PaloAlto/CheckPoint/etc.
You need to cut this purity bullshit where Europe must own all the stack from the foundry, or do nothing. What you're building is an unwinnable battle.
And it's all basically US tech made in China. The irony.
> Who is gonna chip in tens of billions of dollars to fund "that, but European, and 15 years from now"?
Dieter Schwarz might. At least he has the money and is trying 'something' with stackit. But he probably won't see the result in 15 years.
> I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard benchmark
My point was that even with Google's money, they're still not on par with MS even if the Office files format has been standardized for a number of years. And if you extrapolate that to any other technology, you will find out very fast that it is very expensive to come up with a replacement solution that will actually be embraced by potential customers.
On the other hand, there is not much office work which could not have been done almost as effective in office 97.
I don't think the right explanation of MS monopoly is technical superiority, but rather the natural forces of monopoly. They are extremely hard to break with free market competition, but can definitely be broken with legislation.
I am convinced that 99% of office use can be replaced with competitors if needed, and it would work out OK.
Yes, we need a posix of productivity tool. You want to work with a EU government, you have to use this and that open standards. This is the way to break that particular monopoly.
> My point was that even with Google's money, they're still not on par with MS even if the Office files format has been standardized for a number of years.
The counterpoint is that they don't need to be on par :-/ The problem is that individual procurement decision-makers are incentivised to go with the Microsoft suite, not that the alternatives aren't a good enough replacement.
I'd say they are incentivized to go with the suite that offers the most compatibility with their clients and partners.
> I'd say they are incentivized to go with the suite that offers the most compatibility with their clients and partners.
If that were true, they'd have ditched Microsoft already. Since they didn't, I'm skeptical that that is their incentive.
> There’s a chance that the current situation will start to resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however that might look.
There is almost no chance for that, as lost trust does not return instantly.
In politics things work differently: you have people that "spat on each other" today and tomorrow they'll act like they are brothers and the spitting never happened.
It is a bit more than "spitting on each other" which now is between the USA and its former allies. I seriously doubt that we will just go back to normal the moment there is a US president from the Democratic party. Possibly in some areas of politics and economy, in others (real) trust is more essential.
I believe at the moment it's still in the "spitting on each other" phase. Had Trump actually invaded Greenland* (and likewise if he does so in the future), that's where the Rubicon gets crossed and there's no going back.
I kinda do want it to have passed that point, but not as much as I'm glad he TACOed.
* There's other metaphorical Rubicons available, this is just the one most in my mind given I live in the EU
Trump and his team repeatedly saying they have no problems using force against Greenland and Canada were the red lines and they have already been crossed.
I want those actions to have been the red line, and wish my representatives to treat it so if they are not yet. It is important to keep separate what I want to be and what is.
They are the red lines. There is no going back. The USA is too dangerous to rely on, that's quite clear.
People don't quite realize how big a deal "invading" Greenland would have been. That's literally an act of war! What's next, occupying France? Saying that it's at all a possibility is far beyond any red line that the EU thought it would have to deal with.
Not only would the rest of the world ditch the USA, but the Democrats themselves would take the opportunity to publically announce that they do not recognize Donald Trump's government.
> People don't quite realize how big a deal "invading" Greenland would have been. That's literally an act of war! What's next, occupying France? Saying that it's at all a possibility is far beyond any red line that the EU thought it would have to deal with.
Yes, absolutely, I agree.
Thing is, in the end he backed off, so the result was all talk. He TACOed.
For everyone's sake (including Americans'), I absolutely 100% want the EU to disentangle as much as possible and as fast as possible from the US so that we don't even feel the need to be polite to Trump in the future: he obviously sees the world as only predators to be scared of and prey to consume, so it's better for us (everyone, not just the EU) to become big and scary really fast so he doesn't even try anything.
If he were to invade (anywhere, not just Greenland), that place and their allies basically have two options: fight or die.
> Not only would the rest of the world ditch the USA, but the Democrats themselves would take the opportunity to publically announce that they do not recognize Donald Trump's government.
I wish, but humans aren't like that.
The Democrat leadership keep pulling defeat from the jaws of victory, and people are the same everywhere so an external threat is more likely to pull everyone together than to split them apart (same for everyone else is why the EU and Canada are warming, or at least thawing, their relationships with the rest of the world).
What might have happened before an invasion was enough Republicans finally kicking him out (with Democrat support), or a US military coup (I'd say 50% if it got that far, but with high uncertainty).
A military coup would also be a crossed Rubicon.
But the military don't like traitors, and betraying an ally by invading it is an act of treachery.
> Thing is, in the end he backed off, so the result was all talk. He TACOed.
But for a few days (and probably still now), many people considered it was a real possibility.
I don't think it matters whether the US meant it or not. What matters is whether the Europeans believed it or not. Trust is about belief.
I agree.
I think I'm being misunderstood here.
All the stuff you said, that's why I want to make sure we (Europeans) *don't* go "phew!"
I think some of us might be doing that, which I think is bad for us.
No, the Democrats would do it precisely because of cynical human interest (they are like that). Donald Trump Republicans invading a Western nation plays right into their hands. They may as well just hand Gavin Newsom the next election. The overwhelming majority of US citizens do not approve of USA invading Greenland.
I'll bite.
Nothing would have come of it. Ehe EU would have been upset for 3-6 months, then it would have got onboard with the idea that Greenland is now a US territory and that's that.
France has a too good of a cuisine to be invaded. I think Germany would be next, they are running their mouth more than they should and they suck at food.
Unless the mid-terms change the political majority in the US, the Democrats can wine all they want and recognize or not recognize whoever they want as president. It will not change the actual situation.
This is some top notch r/ShitAmericansSay material, especially Germany "running their mouth" and having bad food. Add in democrats "wining" and I'm pretty sure this post belongs on a Confederate cooking blog rather than HN.
> This is some top notch r/ShitAmericansSay material, especially Germany "running their mouth" and having bad food.
I'm not American and please, please, please tell me about a german dish that is actually on par with what the French make.
Europe can’t defend itself without the US. That’s not the Us saying it that is coming from Europe itself.
All this stuff is mostly grandstanding
> Europe can’t defend itself without the US.
It depends on what exactly Europe needs to defend itself against.
And Europe is quite rightly starting to regard this US-dependence as a problem to be solved without further delay, rather than an eternal and immutable fact of the world.
Except that he might be right... if you think there is no chance he's right, you aren't paying attention. These are strange times.
Mm.
One of the criticisms I hear of Merz is that he's not tough enough on Trump; therefore the choice to target Germany at this time, matches a pattern of the target being painted on whoever wants to play nice.
All of that is why I want Europe to take it seriously, even though I think they might be cooling off now that Trump has backed off.
We (both of my "we"s given I'm a British citizen but live in the EU) sent in tripwire forces to defend Greenland. Their purpose is that getting shot is a casus belli for us to go to war with the USA.
Also remember: NATO has two other nuclear powers besides the USA, and the biggest flaw with one of those nuclear arsenals is how when the UK test-fired the missiles it bought from the USA, they went the wrong way or didn't launch properly at all.
I don't know what the order of events would have been given how heavily tied together EU and US (and UK) economies are, but essentially the EU banning the purchase of new US treasuries by itself would cause something in the order of US inflation going to 10% for several years; this, plus any economic departure (I'm thinking emigration more than internment camps like Japanese-Americans in WW2, much worse if that) from all the European migrants on visas (and some or all of the naturalised ones, but that number will be less… unless Trump also strips that like he's been suggesting), the US could loose 2-5 million people's worth of useful economic labour from the workforce. (Even if they're put in work camps, they're not getting good work out of them).
In the other direction, if the US cuts off cloud computing today, the EU is almost immediately screwed. Hence article.
But if the EU's screwed, then we don't have the money to buy the US treasuries, so screwing us also screws the US. That 10% inflation I mentioned, that's just from not buying T-bills; screwing the EU like this would also mean no more trade with the EU, which basically doubles the US unemployment rate on top of that, budget deficit goes to $3T/year, and costs the US 5% GDP relative to the baseline (i.e. what it would have been without invading) forever. Without a shot fired. But France has enough nukes that even if the USA's anti-missile defences can stop 80% of them, it could by itself destroy every US state capital and still have several left over.
And if you're worried about Russia taking over Greenland, oh boy you should worry about what they do to a catastrophically weakened Europe that isn't just a hard-to-mine sheet of ice supporting a population that wouldn't even half-fill these seats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Narendra_Modi_Stadium_vie...
Sorry but you're just wrong. This isn't a situation to be upset about. Its war. There's no universe where the USA invasion of Greenland doesn't end in disaster for Trump.
There's already been articles in Politico where USA lawmakers admit that there would have been a War Measures Act passed if Trump invaded Greenland. Unlike Venezuela.
It would definitely change the political situation if the state governments of California, New York et al stopped recognizing the federal government.
This isn't politicking though. This is national security. In matters of national security, you take no chances. There's no going back to the relationship the world had with the USA.
What's different this time is that the US has an extensive system of checks and balances that nearly everyone thought would make the current situation impossible, and now we are learning that they aren't nearly as effective as we thought.
No matter how reasonable the next few administrations are it is hard to see anyone else trusting the US nearly as much as they did before 2024.
This has been creeping up on us for some time. For my entire life, the US executive branch has done nothing but accumulate powers and slowly undermine constitutional checks and balances. It’s all fun and games while your guy does it, but it’s inevitable that you’ll get someone in power who you don’t want. That’s the entire point of the checks and balances, but few seemed to care until now. Even if we get a “normal” president after this, I’d bet a lot of money that he/she won’t do anything to reduce the power of the executive.
> and tomorrow they'll act like they are brothers
That's mostly how it was during the last US presidential term. The president even said that "America is back" (1)
The fact is, it didn't last. America going away was not a one-off. It happened a second time, worse. The lesson that the USA just is a country that does this from time to time. People in the rest of the world who learn that lesson will prepare for the next time.
As another US president accurately said: "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice ... you can't get fooled again."
1) https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/250909...
> And if you are a start-up and you want to grow, the situation is even more dire.
I worked for/with several European startups. They really didn't need nor aim for planet scale operations.
There are also quite a lot of articles about how startups (in any country) focus needlesly on large scalability when they only really have a few customers. It's exactly the same false issue here.
> They really didn't need nor aim for planet scale operations.
It depends on the market they're operating in. Planet scale operations can mean have the site load as fast as possible in every country on the planet, because this is how we make money.
Working within a smaller geography I guess you can "host" your services anywhere in Europe and be pretty snappy.
I could mention the fact that EU based startups don't dream big and this is costing them a lot of revenue from markets they don't wish to operate in because they think Europe is big enough. But we're gonna start a discussion not meant for this thread.
> There are also quite a lot of articles about how startups (in any country) focus needlesly on large scalability when they only really have a few customers. It's exactly the same false issue here.
Large companies do that as well
Offers such as Scaleway should be sufficient "feature-wise" for startups. Even if they don't have feature parity with AWS (I mean AWS is huge) it has, kubernets and serverless deployment options (functions, containers), S3 compatible object storage, managed databases, queues, llm hosted models, terraform provider.
Those should most of what startups need for deployment; at least what I've seen working with many over the last few years.
For those with pragmatic Linux Ops experience on the team, nothing will beat self-hosted on Hetzner dedicated servers, at a great price.
P.S. can't vouch for all Scaleway services, used it for a couple of VMs and hosted LLMs only. Happy to hear the experience of other users, no matter how few of those are here.
Free credits for startups are a different aspect of incentive, which is not negligible.
We've been using Scaleway's compute, RDS and S3 offerings for Ente[1]'s cloud offering for over 5 years now.
RDS backups and retrivals from cold storage[2] are both a lot slower than AWS. The "high-availablity" instances for RDS are in the same DC, so the feature is cosmetic. Ignoring these, our experience has been pretty good. Quality of support is great.
--
While linking to [2] I realised that Scaleway's own website is behind Cloudflare, which is disappointing given they have their own DDoS protection[3].
[1]: https://github.com/ente-io/ente
[2]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/glacier-cold-storage/
[3]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/dedibox/ddos-protection/
The real issue with Scaleway seems to be the lack of governance. I am more familiar with Azure and features like Entra and polices seems to be missing.
How about we start creating well optimized software again that doesn't need ridiculous amounts of compute and money?
If your customers want features that require compute and money, and your competitor offers them, then you don't really have a choice if you want to stay in business.
That's up to you (and the customers) to understand that the location where the compute/data is happening is as important a criteria to consider. As it is today.
What if your customers disagree?
Businesses generally shouldn't be trying to fight ideological battles, they should just be trying to meet their customers' needs. As long as they're not doing anything immoral/illegal like engaging in discrimination or dumping toxic waste.
Totally.
Risk = (probability of it happening) x (cost when it happens)
That a man/administration decides to cut off, or take hostage, or tax, online services because they are hosted on their premises, but benefits to/operates for "once good friends but now very unfriendly, bad, incompetent, the worst people", this is definitely not a law of nature.
But, that he/they decide to trigger absurd actions with long-lasting damaging consequences, while not a law of nature, that happened more often than not in the past 12 months than in the whole century before. Or, granted, maybe not "absurd", but definitely "not in line with a century of rather predictable behaviour".
So... you'd be rational to consider that the risk has moved from "low" to "med high" or "high" category in a lot of areas you do not control.
If the customer disagrees, fine: their business, not mine. My duty stops at notifying and documenting the risk.
Not everyone needs Web scale.
As proven by Huawei, ingenuity can go a great way when friendships go sour.
So is your solution that Europe only creates small companies?
If this is in reference to the parent's mention of Hauwei (200,000 employees, ~$120 billion annual revenue), then I'm not sure we all share your idea of a small company
Small company can mean different things to different people. Considering that some larger Chinese companies have north of 2 million employees, 200k is quite a small number actually. Go figure.
Except nobody considers 200k employees a small company.
You have to create small companies in order to build big ones
My solution is that sustainable companies are more worthwhile to society, than late scale capitalism companies that always lay off employees when the exponential growth targets set by their C suites aren't met.
The only reason companies exist is to make money for the founders and/or shareholders. Everything else is a pipe dream.
Only in capitalist minds.
Companies are nothing without their employees.
Naturally shareholders would rather have robots.
and yet, there are obviously some companies that are better than others.
Some people do think so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43156785
MS advantage over Google docs was exactly what US cloud providers have over everyone else: lock-in.
I mentioned MS because OOXML is now an open standard, albeit a 6000 pages one, but still open. And a similar sized competitor - Google, is still trying to deliver the same functionality.
The point I'm trying to make is that going from zero to hero, even with basically "infinite" money like Google has is very very very hard.
I’m not sure it’s necessary. Office is bloated with features that very few people use on rare occasion. A much simpler word processor would do, and the next Google Docs doesn’t need to invent a lot of this stuff from scratch.
The tricky part is how many organizations have an enormous amount of business logic programmed into excel sheets.
I think you're underestimating the features used within Office. Offices isn't bloated because they wanted to add fluff. It's bloated because of the large number of customers that have differing but overlapping needs.
The Engineers: Word processor with basic features is fine
Management and Execs: Comments, Review, Multi-user editing, History, Tables, change tracking.
Marketing: Image placement and alignment, layers, embedding, templates, shapes
Research/Doc Writers: Table of contents, page numbering, cross-referencing, formula insertion, citations, figure tables, export to pdf
All customers (at some point): Layout, margins, padding, spellcheck
As engineers we tend to think "just deliver a simple word processor". For who?
My theory is that 80% of workloads on AWS/GCP/Azure are pure waste. They sell complexity-as-a-service. 80% of startups and enterprises could run on a single beefy baremetal server (or two). AWS/GCP/Azure are the result of hype bubbles and VC-funded waste culture, it's not necessary for Europe to recreate that to compete.
I once had a working program, running on a 4 GB RAM virtual server with MongoDB. Everything was fast and testing and deploying a new version took me some minutes usually. Existing users were happy as far as I could tell.
But then some corporate IT guy mandated everything had to be using managed AWS services in some three tier dev-test-production setup, despite having no prior experience with that on either side. Cost went up at least 25-fold, the development sucked, new deployments took 30? minutes minimum (because now everything has to run through some build-system I did not control and I had to manually copy keys around every time). I left the company, but I think the product exists to this day with less than 1000 customers. Nothing my 4 GB VS could handle...
AWS is often unnecessary but I do hope you had some kind of pre-prod environment in your original setup
> Cost went up at least 25-fold,
I would love to write an email that start with "I can reduce cost 25 times by doing thing X" (the tricky part is hiding the fact that "X" is what you were doing before.)
This is an uncomfortable truth on this site, because many of us work for a FAANG company or FAANG partner. If the cloud hadn't grown that much in the last decade or so, the software industry would be relatively unpretentious.
The truth no one wants to hear
Standard Hardware became so powerful over the last 10-15 years, even hightraffic sites from 2010 can be served today with one/two beefy machines.
Thank you. The AWS spaghetti is a trap of unnecessary complexity for most cases. You'd be shocked how far you can scale with a few good baremetal servers running something like Rails and Postgres.
And most (not all) of these workloads are custom software that try to fully reproduce/plumb functionalities that already mostly exist in Unix tools, with worse performance, instead of using/plugging into them.
> no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer
I guess we must be living on different planets. I have recently deployed a Django application for a client of mine on Scaleway (due to an existing partnership we preferred using them over other infrastructure). Scaleway right now (you can signup and check it out) offers:
* container registry - build an push your containers there
* ECS/Fargate equivalent - tell it to run N instances of your aforementioned container
* Managed Postgres & Redis with failover/replication
* VPC - put your managed DBs and containers there so they can talk over a private network
* S3-compatible object storage
What more do you need exactly? That's essentially all I would use from the incumbent cloud providers anyway.
> What more do you need exactly? That's essentially all I would use from the incumbent cloud providers anyway.
Pub/Sub, Dataflow, CDN, GLB to name a few. I could go on with the list of services currently used by the people that pay to push buttons.
Not to sound offensive, but others have more than a Django app that they need to run.
> I could go on with the list of services currently used by the people that pay to push buttons
I too can build an engineering playground where every ingress byte traverses as many AWS services as I can find. But if you're building a business application, how many of these do you actually need?
Once you have the basic primitives you can fill in the gaps yourself if needed. But in the list you provided, Pub/Sub, CDN and GLB is already covered actually.
I'm sure in due time other services will be covered if there's enough demand, but to claim there is no EU alternative while the basics (app server + DB + S3, aka the most difficult to scale/operate yourself) are covered is a bit misleading I think.
> I too can build an engineering playground where every ingress byte traverses as many AWS services as I can find. But if you're building a business application, how many of these do you actually need?
I gave a real list, and all of them have real reasons for being used. I don't know from where you got the idea that apps are built just by chaining cloud services aimlessly.
A company has more than one application or need.
My point is that you can go very far and solve real-world problems with the basic primitives alone.
While I’m sure there are legitimate uses for the services you mentioned, I’ve also witnessed plenty of engineering playgrounds where complexity was a feature and services were used for the sake of it rather than due to a specific need.
I bet 90% of AWS customers could be served by something like 10% of their services.
Having to roll each of those by your lonesome is still preferable over having some asshole cut you off from the services that you pay for on a whim. And that sort of thing is definitely on the table. Trump came within a hair of starting a shooting war with Europe, that sort of thing tends to cause people to re-evaluate their relationships.
It didn't make sense to have a Tier 1 cloud providers. EU using US tech and services was the social contract for the ally level cooperation. The moment this relationship goes towards the adversary level Tier 1 cloud and the rest of dependencies (and defense/ will be developed in house, no matter if the future administration is a Dems one. The point to take away is the change of direction in the EU as slow and as costly as that might be. Now it's a security issue.
I think it depends, honestly. As a startup you could be using civo or katapult as clouds and be getting almost everything you need. I think the main issue is actually network effect; easy to hire people who know AWS, easy to explain AWS architecture to a auditor who's seen it 100x before and it's easy to explain to customers that you use AWS like them, so easy to do VPC peering, or BYOC with them if needed..
If you just want dedicated servers/VPS the choice is much wider still and plenty of providers on comparison sites and so on.
The consumers are domestic EU so you don’t really need the reach and availability of the big 3.
Availability ain't worth shit unless the compensation for missing said availability is anywhere near the business losses caused by it. "Credit on your bill" doesn't count (and you're not even likely to get that since they can just lie on their status page and pretend everything is fine).
Cloud is convenient but don't expect any kind of availability you can actually rely on. If you actually need that, you're gonna have to go multi-cloud or self-managed bare-metal at multiple providers anyway.
You go multi-region. Multi-cloud is extremely expensive, both in terms of data and functional equivalence.
Bare metal is pretty much the same story: you can host it at different providers, but scaling that and maintaining coherence between data centers is not an easy feat as it might sound.
And seriously now, no sane provider is willing to cover your losses if they go do down. On the other hand, it's not a secret this is not happening and you can take this into account in your risk management strategy.
After years and years, Amazon now has an offering to shield you from when us-east-1 goes down. Funny, no?
If you’re going to go multi-region and take the latency hit may as well go multi-provider no?
Multi-region within the same provider won’t shield you against unknown shared dependencies on a single point of failure (AWS console auth still relies on credentials being checked in a single region if I remember right).
And yes fully agreed that maintaining consistency between active-active regions (whether cloud or bare-metal) is super hard and not worth it for most deployments. Active-standby with point-in-time-recovery and an acceptable data loss window is much easier - when one region is confirmed down, someone throws a switch and the standby becomes active.
> no sane provider is willing to cover your losses
Agreed, but thats why all those who justify the 10-90x premium of the cloud over bare-metal are full of it - that premium is not actually worth it.
> it's not a secret this is not happening
Maybe for you it’s not a secret? Literally every thread tries to justify cloud reliability and their resulting markups. Well if it’s that reliable they’d put their money where their mouth is.
> If you’re going to go multi-region and take the latency hit may as well go multi-provider no?
No. If you go multi-region, you use the same tooling, same terraform modules and logic and so on. There's little plumbing needed to make it work. And latency wise this is not an issue in most cases, since most of the requests are covered by the CDN anyway. And you don't have to duplicate everything.
If you go multi-cloud you need to learn a whole new set of systems. And that is expensive. Both in terms of operating and people - because you will need more.
> Agreed, but thats why all those who justify the 10-90x premium of the cloud over bare-metal are full of it - that premium is not actually worth it.
You get charged a premium for convenience. And a high enough chance you don't have downtime.
> Maybe for you it’s not a secret? Literally every thread tries to justify cloud reliability and their resulting markups.
Cloud is reliable if you are willing to spend some money to benefit from that reliability and convenience.
---
Besides this, another thing where cloud saves you money is compliance. They have all the right attestations in place to make your audits go easy. If you self-host on bare metal, you're going to spend a lot of time to be compliant with various regulations. Maybe if you're a small company, you don't have that much compliance you need to do. But once you grow a little, those immutable Stackdriver logs are a godsend when you're asked to prove logs have not been tampered with.
> If you go multi-cloud you need to learn a whole new set of systems.
Isn't the whole point of Kubernetes that you don't need to do this? Also, if you want to know for certain that you aren't "vendor locked", running on two clouds is a constant test of that fact. That is to say, have a stack that can deploy to Kubernetes then have two clusters in separate clouds.
> Isn't the whole point of Kubernetes that you don't need to do this?
In theory.
In practice, all managed K8s offerings use different APIs to provision, monitor and so on. Then you have all kinds of ingresses that are offered by each cloud provider (setting up an ALB on AWS is quite different than setting up a GLB on GCP).
And you really don't want to run your own k8s cluster(s).
The only thing that is somewhat vanilla in all of this are how you run the pods of your app.
And K8s is not "the cloud", it is just an orchestration system for containers.
It's not just geographic regions around the globe.
It is also the wide array of services -- well integrated into their primitives of security, authentication, governance, monitoring and logging, etc
Is there a EU cloud provider that provides -- even if limited to EU geography -- the equivalent of Blob Storage + Azure Data Lake Storage + Azure Data Factory or Fabric + Microsoft Foundry with native access to OpenAI and Anthropic models?
Having used both worlds: a lot of the provided features come with strong vendor lock-in, and in most cases that not, with slightly stronger “local” engineering you can reach the same targets and needs locally.
The more I work (started coding 40 years ago, and data engineering 25 years ago), the more I favor designs that are less coupled to cloud features.
If you do so, the offering in the EU just as it is now is well enough to scale.
In short: more computer science, less delegating to cloud operators, stronger designs.
The irony is that EU education is still broader and more grounded in fundamentals, compared to US one that has become increasingly skills-oriented.
I also prefer to design solutions that are portable and platform independent, cloud providers simplify and hide something to you, it has a cost (not just money) that you cannot quantify on long term and that's clear for who has experience in both worlds.
This is sane advice but maintaining strong internal engineering and IT teams is not everone's cup of tea; even organizations gthat intend and try to do this cannot achieve it -- and furthermore the big cloud operators have spent millions of dollars spreading the gospel that the only correct way to survive and build is to migrate to cloud and use their lego building blocks.
A lot of the justification for moving away from own datacenters and heavy in-house engineering teams actually makes sense to organizations of many shapes and sizes. If the core business is not technology -- it is hard to stay invested in a in-house cloud-agnostic engineeringc capability.
The world has more or less accepted this reality and adopted the services like S3 and managed databases, and tight integration with the likes of Microsoft Entra/Purview/Sharepoint/O365 etc for ready-to-use business integrations. Prying organizations away from taht convenience is going to be hard. But the current environment cretaed due to lack of trust in US could the strongest motivator ever to push businesses and nations in that direction. I reckon it will be a long and painful process though.
How about not limiting yourself to specific services? If you've built your product around specific cloud providers services then that is the problem not the fact that there aren't alternatives to those seevices.
Until two years ago, I did not need Google Dataflow as a very specific example. But then new business requirements came in and there were two options:
- develop something internally and support it
- use a cloud provider offering, fire it up and forget about it
The choice was pretty straightforward.
You don't need to tick all boxes from a cloud vendor.
Boring technology goes a long way.
You can get all of that in the EU via scaleway, Ionos etc. for example.
I don't know what you mean by native access to frontier models. Who has native access to these frontier models?
What are Scaleway and OVH missing? Many of their products are even AWS compatible.
I hosted all our stuff in Europe at the last startup. The 2 providers above were much cheaper than our GCP stuff one the free credits ran out. It’ll have been the 4th place I’ve worked where Big Cloud wasn’t the default.
Other decent office suites exist, not to mention not all documents need to be cloud-based.
I find your statement lacks context, otherwise it doesn’t seem rooted in reality.
> And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.
AJAX did so much heavy lifting here.
Ok, so the notion that one can spin up and down resources and be billed by the time unit without having to source components and provide power and cooling and hands on is an unqualified win.
but the resulting 'hyperscaler' systems are built around lockin and loss of sovereignty. rather than bemoan the cost of replicating the US environment, wouldn't it make sense to come with a different spin? maybe one thats not so tightly integrated and siloed? isn't AWS just a mirror the the same US dominance that you're trying to avoid?
for example, despite the amount of snark thrown towards the development of open standards, wouldn't it be really quite useful is there weren't 3-4 hyperscalers with different APIs for the same basic services? couldn't we design an EC2-lite that allowed for real commoditization and competition?
ignoring that, consider the value of rethinking things a little bit so that the important part - easy and incremental access to compute are preserved and all the sleazy business practices aren't.
> I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer.
You don't need all of that. You can go a long way with the basics, and those are well covered.
> And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.
WTF would it need to match? It only needs to be as good as Office 97, but online.
I am no expert but making an office suite seems like a joke compared to getting the hardware to replicate the cloud providers, which should be imo the first priority.
I wonder if we can tariff digital services. EU is behind partially because US eats all investment. Protectionism is an option.
I wouldn't go this way, at least not now. But the European Commission should mandate the usage of EU based software for every public institution in the EU, at all levels. That means from the European Parliament all the way down to municipalities. So no more Windows, Office, Azure, AWS etc. in public institutions all across the EU.
And in education, please. Very important in the long term.
Yes, some of us have been sighing as companies lock themselves into aws etc.
We now have a generation of people who have no idea how to use computers, just how to operate aws.
> I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer.
But there is also no requirement for... most of their specific offering to start an online business.
Some people seem to miss this in the picture: you _can_ build without them, outside of them, and fund equivalent technology development while staying outside of them.
It's a matter of strategy and of choice.
It's also a matter of "how easy is to find people that are good with X, Y, Z" where X, Y, Z are some niche technologies or offerings compared to the more wildly used ones.
You can start a business in your laundry room if you know how to set up servers and get internet and stuff. But that's gonna be you and maybe a few "hobbyists" that might want to join on that endeavor, but the rest of developers or admins will want to stay far away from that.
Optimizing your business for how is easy is to find talent is also a matter of strategy.
I definitely hire talent that can grow the business, and grow with it.
And that means knowing your 0's and 1's better than knowing how to operate the latest trendy calculator: it's easier to understand the calculator, when you know what it's made of; harder to work your way backwards, although doable.
Yes, finding people that master PostgreSQL clustering (and SLA/RTO tradeoffs) is harder than finding AWS-certified folks, but that deeper knowledge definitely pays off: you understand the tradeoffs why, before you migrate, not after. When you know the fundamentals, you learn their implementation way faster.
The "wildly used", locked-in services are more often than not, built with/over the "niche", no-strings-attached ones.
> There’s a chance that the current situation will start to resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however that might look.
I don't think it can - dependence on US digital infrastructure grew at a time where American stability was taken as ground truth.
How can an EU leader sit across the negotiating table from a country that can delete (if not read/alter) all of their data, and a willingness to exercise that access?
Even if Trumpism goes away, to know for a certainty that Americans won't do it again one election cycle seems like it will take a long time to establish.
It is not that bleak, but yeah. Current solutions leave a lot be desired especially int terms of scalability and redundancy design.
>And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.
And yet they _still_ don't have a desktop client for hotkey-driven and very fast-paced workflows, meaning that any serious professional spreadsheet work is still a Microsoft monopoly. If even the US market with all its favorable conditions can't deliver a competing product after years of trying, a fragmented, brain-drained, overregulated and high-tax continent attempting the same is just hopes and dreams.
Wrong point. Nothing wrong with browser based clients. Even if they build some desktop client, by the time google (or anyone) does that compatibility Microsoft will change their formats. MS even removed their apps from ChromeOS to make it so. The issue is you can't fix MS. regulators are just too rich to care.
It is even the same as Office for Mac is not 100% compatible with office for windows (or so called CoPilot AI whatever)
I still can't write a Word document in Markdown, but I can do so using Google Docs.
The difference between us is that I know I'm within 0,1% of people that actually cases about this specific use case.
What hotkey-driven and fast-paced workflows are you referring to? I used to be an Office user, now G Docs, and I hardly miss anything. Hotkeys do exist, and more complex stuff can be automated quite well with AppsScript.
Maybe I'm not enough of a power user, but these things often sound to me like the 0.1% productivity boosts that are nice to have, but often hardly relevant in the grand scheme of things.
I've seen US citizen swich in mass to cryptpad and protondoc over ICE being in their town and then wanting to deliver grocery to their neighbors.
Proton seems to have stick. It's far less feature full than google doc but I started to receive link to proton doc outside of a immigration context.
Also, I do spreadsheet for a living and my last two job were not providing a office licence ( no need )
Theres tons of good cloud providers in the EU.
Name some. Some that match those kinds of services mentioned that people need from AWS.
If you use AWS virtual machines https://european-alternatives.eu/category/vps-virtual-privat... (some of these also do managed load balancers, managed databases)
If you use AWS for object storage: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/object-storage-pro...
If you use SES: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/transactional-emai... (but hosting your own is also a viable option)
CDNs: https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cdn-content-delive...
There isn't any single provider that can match each and every AWS service. But for subsets of services there are options.
If there's a specific AWS service that you cannot get anywhere else but do absolutely need, that's vendor lock-in. Would it be fair to blame EU companies for your bad decisions?
https://european-alternatives.eu/
Based on your comment you probably aren't gonna discuss in good faith but move the goalposts each time.
Yeah this is just circular reasoning. You don't go from zero to AWS the same way AWS didn't go from zero to what it is today. They started with a few basic features and built up from there. There are plenty of EU alternatives that have those same basic features AWS had a while ago, but until it makes economic sense to replicate all of it, no EU company is going to do so.
Whether you can switch from AWS to an EU alternative depends solely on how deep down the rabbit hole you are. If you're just looking for basics to host your stuff, you can. If you want to never have to touch Linux but to rely solely on proprietary abstractions on top of Linux, you can't.
What makes you think I'll move the goalpost - the original question was pretty clear; EU cloud providers who offer services like AWS does.
What you've linked to is a broad scope site listing a multitude of EU based products and services, making it look like you cant even list ONE let alone a few .
Don't pull the 'moving the goalpost' nonsense, the original post you replied to made it very clear they were talking about an AWS comparison, and a cursory glance at the 'cloud providers' section of that site shows a bunch of EU hosting providers offering general VPS hosting, which isn't remotely close to being the same kind of thing.
“you offer managed databases, but RDS supports x”.
I can see it coming already, no point in extending this thread
Ok let me try this, because I can assure you my intent is not to throw some sort of "gotcha" in here. I'm thinking about this purely from my own personal usecase, and right now as far as I'm aware theres no AWS alternative in the EU that can do all this for me. Nothing I am using here relies on some sort of obscure feature of each service at all.
My usecase is:
- MySQL (using Aurora but really dont need to), hands off like it is on RDS so yeah a managed service would be preferred.
- 2x VM instances with internal networking and an EFS drive connecting the two (The efs drive is critical for a ton of applications)
- Load balancer
- S3 + Cloudfront for CDN
And a few more bits I appreciate are very niche to my usecase but would be nice to keep under the same vpc:
- SQS queue workers (can switch to something redis based if needed)
- SES mail service (again can switch to another 3rd party as i doubt many people offer this)
- Lambda for some app specific background processing
Hopefully this kinda explains my position. Yes, I can split a lot of this out into multiple individual providers who specialise in just that one thing. And perhaps that's the way to go. But I dont think you can deny it's a heck of a lot more convenient to have all of it in one place.
Scaleway has all of that except EFS which should be solved another way anyway realistically, and the CDN.
Object Storage as a replacement for EFS, or CIFS if its a legacy server app, or if you hate yourself: NFS.
Theres options here, but thats the only real snag.
For the CDN, I’d go with Bunny, its not in the same suite but its actually better than AWS CDN anyway.
Combell is a popular choice on my country ( small - Belgium) because it's actively managed
scaleway, ionos, hechner, ovcloud.
They may not have every single thing that AWS has but you can build solid infrastructure on top of those.
online.net is quite close.
Why not just say Scaleway?
Thanks. I meant to say, but it's always been online.net for me. Can't get used to Scaleway.
> it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering
Jesus Crist and all the saints!
How bad it was before getting in par with MS then?!
If it is now as bad as MS?
People do not realize how dire the current economic situation is. Many of the large traditional businesses are on the verge of becoming unprofitable.
The monumental task of ripping out the IT systems they have built up over the last few decades, to move away from the US will actively threaten the existence of some of these companies.
People are living in a fantasy land where e.g. Germany has an enormous automotive industry which can be arbitrarily regulated and still be profitable enough to keep the German economy afloat. This is non longer the case and many EU companies are currently struggling for their existence.
> [...] but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer.
This is FUD, 1990s Micro$oft style. I guess nothing particular changed on this front.
At my company we use scaleway, and while it doesn't have yet all the products offered by AWS etc. it still has almost everything we need, and can be managed by terraform. I think it has already a nice offering, and is much closer to AWS etc. than 15 years
I mean, once you have managed SQL, managed k8s, serverless, object storage, private networks, kafka, sqs, sns, glacier, and IaC support, you can already be happy as a startup
I kind of share the opinion of the FSF Europe that it is less important where software comes from compared to whether it’s libre, but for cloud hardware I really hope that we manage to create competitive European offerings. Maybe we’re lucky and this European initiative will produce more than five Fraunhofer institutes and a gift to SAP.
I would say there’s even less chance nowadays to generate a fully private set of European alternatives to American cloud offerings.
Europes bureaucratization and the growth of the size of states has increased the last 10 years. I have less and less hope that we’re able to set the right free market conditions for real competition to happen.
That doesn’t mean that won’t be alternatives to American offerings, but most probably will come from somewhere else (Singapore, China, Taiwan…)
> set the right free market conditions for real competition to happen
Just as a curiosity, what exactly are those "right free market conditions" and where have those been successfully implemented before? Because I think most of us (Europeans) are desperately trying to avoid replicating the American experiment, so if that's the "right free market conditions" I think we're trying to avoid those on purpose.
But maybe you're thinking of some other place, then I'm eager ears to hear what worked elsewhere :)
If the size of state and bureaucratisation are the main issues, one wonders how China got so far :-)
No one wonders that if they have any actual knowledge. Chinese government spending as a % of GDP is much less than say France. :-)
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...
Bureaucratisation in the realm of business is much smaller in most relevant ways for most enterprises in China as well.
In what sense is china bureaucratic when it comes to business?
Tax breaks, operations of state owned industry, other incentives etc are guided by five year plans implemented by a party bureaucracy.
"You can't do X" is a much different experience from "you can do X, but you need to spend a year and thousands of man-hours of paperwork applying for permission to do it".
In China, if the five-year plan prioritizes something, businesses will be up and running in months. In France, if the French parliament enacts a law prioritizing something, businesses still have to fight individual departments or local governments that have their own ideas about how they should regulate it.
Don't confuse bureaucracy for authoritarianism.
How is any of that a bureaucratic burden for domestic private companies in China?
I can't believe we're talking about China in the context of a Cloud sovereignty issue and this is even a question.
Having worked for these Cloud providers China has consistently used bureaucracy to exfiltrate Cloud technologies and to tip the scales of effectiveness of offerings through levers with China Telecom/Unicom. Analyzing the backbone, you could see it in real time.
China basically offsets its bureaucracy by doing the one thing Europe has not done so far in this space: overtly hurt foreign competitors. It doesn't matter how superior your offerings are if the end customers end up throttled creating a less desirable experience than the less-featured, stable domestic competitor.
Unfortunately - the elephant in the room is China got to where it was by being overtly adversarial with the US from the jump after 2010 which translated to a number of anti-competitive measures. The EU's in a spot because it's mostly responding to Trump and a poorly written US law. The US and EU are weird friends in that we could both exfiltrate each other's tech, patents, and industrial assets and move on with business but that's not actually what either side actually wants.
China weaponizing bureaucracy towards foreign companies isn’t really relevant though.
AFAIK domestic companies operating in China don’t have to endure anywhere near the amount of red tape that EU companies typically do when operating in the EU.
Contradictory regulations is one of the symptoms of overregulation.
I.e., complying to GDPR means you can’t comply to cybersecurity laws.
US has less of those.
How exactly does GDPR prevent you from complying with cybersecurity laws?
For instance, one of GDPR's 6 lawful bases for processing data is in order to comply with legal obligations.
If you're going to make strong claims like that, the onus really is on you to give specific examples.
I wonder is the GP is referring to the CLOUD Act, as it is true that US companies cannot be compliant with both the GDPR and the CLOUD Act, but it doesn't weaken the case for European tech sovereignty.
Sounds like a broad blanket statement, have any specifics about this?
GDPR and cybersecurity laws are designed to be compatible, not mutually exclusive, but I'm sure there are edge-cases. Still, what exact situation did you find yourself in here in order to believe they're mutually exclusive?
All US companies selling to European customers have to comply with GDPR. European companies selling only to non-European customers don’t have to comply with GDPR. It’s all about who your users are. Not where your company is registered.
> European companies selling only to non-European customers don’t have to comply with GDPR.
Usually they do. European company processing personal data of non-EU customers falls with article 3(1) "This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data in the context of the activities of an establishment of a controller or a processor in the Union, regardless of whether the processing takes place in the Union or not."
Of course if they do not process any personal data then it wouldn't apply but that's pretty unlikely (and if that was the case the EU customers data wouldn't fall within GDPR either).
I think what OP means is that a US company cannot simultaneously comply with the CLOUD act and the GDPR. That case has also been made by some courts in the EU, that US law and practice are incompatible with the requirements of the GDPR. US companies who claim to process data in accordance with the GDPR seem to be deceiving their customers. Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me that companies in the EU who rely on US services, corporations in the US, and even governments themselves keep quit about this unpleasant truth. It means that Microsoft Windows violates the GDPR, Google violates it, every US social network violates it, etc.
Of course, as someone else mentioned, that is not an argument against EU sovereignty but rather one of its motors.
> Europes bureaucratization and the growth of the size of states has increased the last 10 years.
None of these things matter. They're trivially set aside. All that matters is how many insane threats the US Gov keeps making. Hopefully as many as possible. This is what creates demand, and from demand, everything else follows automatically.
Like, how can you not see this based on recent events? I'm willing to bet a house that in Feb 2026 there will be much more relative movement from US to EU clouds than in Feb 2015. Despite all of that "increased bureaucracy".
Ok, but it's not like nothing was done after Draghi report - EU formed at least 5 committees and commissioned multiple think-tanks to develop reports about possible development of the pathway to the programme that will work on bureaucracy and overregulation.
You mean late scale capitalism that treats employees like serfs?
We already have excellent cloud providers in Europe. But most importantly, most businesses using the cloud would be better off with simple on-prem solutions. So much cheaper to operate and control.
> So much cheaper to operate and control.
Until you factor in the salaries of the new employees you have to hire now, the cost of that hiring process, the compliance and security implications of operating servers on your premises, the ongoing maintenance of the software and operating systems, the new infrastructure to maintain, including but not limited to backup power supply and overall redundancy, the need to manage the lifecycle of the new hard- and software, the documentation for all of this… I could go on for a while.
It's not like these cloud solutions are just solving laziness.
A lot of this could be standardized and packaged into a product, a modern take on the 'server appliance.' Unpack some gear, plug it together according to a nice diagram, connect to a management console that feels familiar to anyone who's deployed to the cloud.
That's essentially the bet of https://oxide.computer
Yeah, this seems like a big opportunity for that business model.
Listened to a story about a fairly large company that switched to cloud and then back to on-premise. When they went cloud they quickly found out that they needed employees to manage the cloud infrastructure. The employee costs were similar for both setup.
Compliance and security testing does not go away just because you use cloud. The steps and questions will be different, but regulations like NIS and GDPR have extensive requirements regardless if you implement it yourself or buy it from an external supplier.
I would also not recommend to go with a single cloud solution with no backup solution and overall redundancy, unless a $5 voucher is good enough compensation for the service being down a whole day. The general recommendation after the latest waves of outages was for cloud users to use multiple cloud providers and multiple backup solution. It is just like how on-premise solutions need off-premise backups.
> Compliance and security testing does not go away just because you use cloud. The steps and questions will be different, but regulations like NIS and GDPR have extensive requirements regardless if you implement it yourself or buy it from an external supplier.
That’s a bit disingenuous. If I don’t operate a physical server rack, I also do not need to take care of physical access control, fire suppression policies, camera monitoring, key handling, and a wide range of other measures I would be otherwise obliged to take care of under GDPR. You can absolutely outsource classes of problems. What’s true is that that doesn’t lift the responsibility from you to check your cloud provider fulfils these obligations, but that’s very different from having to fulfil them yourself.
Go through a security review. It not as simple as just saying "we outsource that so we have no idea what they do or how they manage the data". It is disingenuous to claim that people can just outsource the whole problem and not care.
This would be part of the responsibility of the cloud managers, which need to be hired, paid and trained, on top of the cost of paying the cloud providers. There is no free lunch.
I am responsible for security reviews. I never claimed it was that simple, nor that there was free lunch. I said it is easier to outsource it than to handle it yourself to an equal level of what a cloud provider is able to do, from a legal and operational perspective.
Easier is a very subjective measurement. Lets compare two solutions with different hires. One hire system administrators that rent space in a serverhall. The other hire cloud managers that rent space in the cloud.
What can we definitive say about the difference be in salaries, training, and team size? Can we say anything specific about legal and operational perspective?
Sorry but I think it is indeed much easier to have a cloud provider take care of those things. That's partly how we came to the situation we are in: a lot of people outsourced this type of work to Microsoft or AWS, because it was easier.
I get what you are saying, that responsibility is still yours for making the correct choices, and to know what the cloud providers are doing. In the real world though hardly anybody cares, even though we have threats like the CLOUD act in place. So, yeah, people should care but ultimately they often don't.
Yes, it is true that no one ever got fired for buying IBM. It is also very common that people just use an AI for reviews and then deal with the fallout if anyone actually calls them on the bluff. Paying fines, if anyone do care, are just part of doing business.
However in the same way, it doesn't then matter much if you are using the cloud or not. The work needing to copy the output of an AI to fill in the forms takes similar amount of time.
But you can rent on-prem servers in some datacenter near you where all that is done for you.
First off, servers on someone else's premises are by definition not on-prem; and second, it still leaves you with a lot of the maintenance, management, and documentation overhead that comes with operating infrastructure equipment.
Do not forget that it is also cheaper. Main difference would be scalability which you do not inherently need. Not for ordinary bau.
Most European "cloud" providers sell "wood": https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/dear-hosting-providers-you...
Thanks for the link!
I'm not sure it will convince the "haters" nor they'll get it, but I'll keep it close to share with some people that are confused but open enough to understand the nuance.
No, most wouldn’t. Too much risk and overhead for most companies to do so… most companies should and do just focus on the business value they add, rather than the underlying physical infra
Exactly. People used to think that aws is somehow convenient(partially true) and much cheaper which it absolutely isn't. Hooking on anything trendy and pretending it solve all the issues is tech illness.
For example micro services. You do not need infrastructure heavy software paradigms for large majority of use cases but it was just blindly accepted as new standart which we are now, again, moving away.
Right, but have you tried recruiting someone recently who is capable of running a pair of local servers (including organizing redundant power feeds), upgrading the OS on them with no downtime, and arranging for off-site backups of the enterpris's data?
These used to be the skills of a generalist sysadmin for a small-site with on-prem services.
Those skills are no longer available on the market. Students in the local apprenticeship program have one class about hardware, and they don't even touch it, just talk about it.
Offer just half of the typical AWS cloud bill and you'll magically have lots of candidates! But greed often doesn't let companies pay any more than "market rate" even if it means paying twice that to AWS or a vendor instead.
Just hired a 45yo who excels and loves and thrives doing this stuff. Proxmox, local storage, local backups + offsite backups. 1Pb of data, colocation costs are 5k/month. Guess AWS costs for similar
They are not European. They are French, or Swiss, or Scandinavian, each of those countries who may sooner or later not align anymore with your strategic interests. Countries should only trust themselves for sensitive stuff.
I mean, the Euro-zone is way more interconnected than that..
Why stop at countries? /s
> We already have excellent cloud providers in Europe.
Please provide a list, no sarcasm. And please don’t put Hetzner on it, as it is not a cloud provider.
> Please provide a list, no sarcasm. And please don’t put Hetzner on it, as it is not a cloud provider.
In what way are they not a "cloud" provider? Because their managed services portfolio isn't as wide as AWS or Azure? What about Scaleway's services then?
Hetzner has no managed services except for the S3-compatible object storage. Scaleway is much better in that regard.
The implied question was what OP's idea of "the cloud" is, where they draw the line between "cloud" and server host. It's possible they simply aren't familiar with the Iaas/PaaS terminology.
I posted a link to what most cloud-native developers understand to be "cloud" a few times already. If IaaS is the only offering on the table, it's not cloud.
Ok, I'll bite. Why is it not a cloud provider? Most importantly, what is a cloud provider in your definition?
In my book a cloud provider is a provider where you can spin up VMs at scale, offers multiple geographic regions across the world, offers managed complementary services such as S3, CDN, GLB, IAM, Managed Databases, backup & restore, FaaS, container registry, managed K8s or another container orchestration platform, PoPs around the world.
Hetzner has an S3 compatible offering, a VPS offering and that's it. Their core business is renting physical servers. And I see lately they offer a load balancing service.
You know, we used to have a single tech company providing essentially an entire tech stack to its customers. Its core enterprise pricing provided a platform with impressive compute capabilities, high redundancy, global support, strong backward compatibility and the backing of a company providing consulting and an ecosystem made of a lot of other software products. That company is still alive and well, although that product is probably less appealing now to new customers.
I'm talking about IBM mainframes.
Eventually, as the Internet (networking) and open source technologies (like Git and Linux) become more and more widespread, people realized they could build their services by combining products from different vendors (not to mention FOSS). I'm talking about the 1990s-2000s.
Now, after 20-30 years, we're thinking that the same company must provide the entire tech stack or lose relevancy as a provider.
To be clear, AWS and mainframes are pretty different from a technical standpoint, but I do wonder if we're kinda repeating the same cycle over and over. Asking the same company to provide everything and then build stuff with different products, to then find a new company which can provide everything and so on.
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/dear-hosting-providers-you...
Not sure I follow.
It's one thing to say that a lot of AWS/Azure/Google users take advantage of many managed services.
But saying something is not a cloud provider because they don't provide a specific SaaS is kinda weird, especially if you read the NIST definition of cloud computing or when you consider that not every AWS user is using more than a handful of services (does that make AWS a cloud provider only for more "advanced" users?).
Sure, smaller cloud providers don't usually have all those services, but this doesn't mean they are not cloud providers. They cannot attract users who are more familiar with specific managed services, but they can probably satisfy the needs of other users who are more than happy with a smaller feature set.
Also, limiting yourself to a smaller portion of AWS/Azure/GCP services can facilitate migrations to other cloud platforms (think AWS -> Azure or viceversa), because you're less tied to specific proprietary tooling.
> because they don't provide a specific SaaS is kinda weird
I think for most business stakeholders it's not about the number of services but rather the coverage of business-critical needs. When you have access to Azure Entra, you know that you can cover 90%+ of your auth needs with that service. If you have access to AWS S3, you know that your various storage needs would be possible to cover with that. If a managed Postgres is available, you know that most of the IT systems you run would be able to take advantage of that. You look at Azure their IAM/audit/observability offerings and it's the same.
When you look at Hetzner as a business stakeholder, all you see are bare servers and and one object storage service that you are not sure of how battle-tested it is. And then you start thinking: "okay, I will need to run k8s or some other workload orchestration approach, my IT systems need Postgres/MySQL/SQL Server etc, I need auth, I need audit, I will need to build, operate, maintain all of that in-house". I am not saying that this is a wrong path for everyone, but Hetzner essentially leaves you no choice. And many business stakeholders who have been operating their own own-prem infra or colocated or rented IaaS plus a large dev team for decades and have since switched to one of the hyperscalers and reduced their dev/IT headcount - may not want to go back to the old model.
> limiting yourself to a smaller portion of AWS/Azure/GCP services can facilitate migrations to other cloud platforms.
Yes, which is why you insist (where possible/reasonable) on Postgres-compatible DBMS offerings, IdP solutions based on OIDC, observability on OpenTelemetry.
> Sure, smaller cloud providers don't usually have all those services, but this doesn't mean they are not cloud providers
Yes, it could mean that they are not cloud providers.
> but they can probably satisfy the needs of other users who are more than happy with a smaller feature set
Please see the linked article. This is essentially "users who are happy to build some of the furniture themselves".
I did read the article.
I agree that there is a difference between "wood" and "furniture".
Although maybe a more apt comparison is IKEA vs another furniture store.
With IKEA you have a relatively basic "style". You'd be hard to pressed a 1800 style table, for example, but if you are a student or someone who just wants to live in a new place, it's a pretty solid store to go. However, they give you the pieces (not just basic wood, already pre-made pieces) and you have to put them together.
Other furnitures have a lot more choices in terms of styles and they allow you to just buy stuff without any DIY needed.
Different offerings in the same space (no one in IKEA is asking you to cut wood and make your own chair legs or whatever), both valid.
Furniture metaphores aside, what I'm saying is that there is a subset of users which is completely fine with those services, which are still provided in a self-service, pay-per-use way without the need to have admin rights over the entire platform. That's a cloud provider. A more limited one, sure, but it can still be a cloud provider.
And when it comes to business stakeholders, coverage is important, but so are other concerns, including the ability to move out when needed (which still requires some sensible technical choice, because if you go "all in" you're complicating your exit strategy), or even concerns like the ones mentioned in the OP.
Obviously, each company has its own risk aversion and its own decision making process, and so far market share heavily favors the Big Three even outside of the US, but this doesn't mean alternative options should be dismissed as "not cloud providers" just because they don't provide all those services.
I thought I heard that hetzner was pretty cheap, haven't looked myself though...
I have used Hetzner off and on for years, nice products and services.
I don’t care what provider you use, if your business or app use case needs any sort of reliability have a plan for reinstalling code and data on alternate providers quickly as possible.
There are horror stories of people and companies being cut off because of pressure from the US government, or having one of the Google/Microsoft/Amazon tech giants cancelling accounts.
Really, in today’s world, why totally rely on anyone?
EDIT: it seems prudent to maintain a cloud account in Europe, US, and Asia and have a plan for moving application code and data around if required. Outside the US I have mostly only used Hetzner, but Alibaba has impressive looking services.
Price is probably not the only factor in competitiveness.
They are OK but I would not have them as my /only/ cloud.
Well Hetzner's support's phenomenal too.
Sure they might not have all the same offerings but they are really easy to abstract upon and personally I feel like hetzner is seriously one of the best cloud providers.
Hetzner is absolutely 10x more competitive than AWS. It's actually hard to match the competitiveness of hetzner with their scale actually. I seriously can't understate this enough but AWS being competitive is really somewhat of a mass delusion or maybe the fact that Companies don't know other alternatives exist but I genuinely find it absolutely strange.
Also, just go ahead and try hetzner and see their competitiveness out for yourself. Seriously, one of the best (netcup another german hosting is really great too and they can be even cheaper at times and its something I personally use and can vouch for both netcup/hetzner)
Without a viable MS Office/Google Docs alternative it's all rather performative. If those get blocked the entire bureaucratic machine stops dead. Hell block just excel and entire countries might actually collapse.
The dependence on US companies is deep and multifaceted. I don’t think we should attempt nothing until a perfect solution is available.
I have seen transitions from MS suite at universities and I don't think what you are saying is true.
First assumption is that there are no alternatives so you can't replace Excel as a software. Obvious ones for Excel - LibreOffice, Collabora, OnlyOffice or Grist (which i highly recommend). The paradoxical problem is there is no clear THE ONE so organizations get into decision paralysis and never move anywhere.
The other assumption is that even if there were alternatives people will not adopt them. In reality this is rarely issue. Turns out users/employees/students actually don't care much what software they have to use. They just use what is available or what they are told to use. So the reason why people use MS Office is actually because it's mandated from the top. Lawyers use it because state/gov/court communication requires it. Students use it because they need to submit thesis in MS Word. It's socially locked in.
I've been at a university which switched over the summer from MS Office to LibreOffice. The results were boring. 40k people just adopted it, no drama, some liked it more (works on linux yay), took some people few weeks to learn/adjust. People are used learning new things.
So can we stop with that story that 40 year old software which barely changed in last 20 years can't be replaced?
This whole digital sovereignty is i think extremely scary proposition for Microsoft because just as they are now mandated solution by most western world... they are one law away (all state/university communication must be with libre software) to be on the other side of their current mandate / lock in.
Well I hope you're right, the transitions I've seen proposed were mostly shot down because people refused to learn anything new and due to nebulous certification requirements that Microsoft of course has.
Speaking of OnlyOffice, I've seen it crop up more and more lately and apparently it's Latvian, so maybe that will be the one eventually. Though my experience with it has been that it's not very stable (lots of crashing around embedding video anyway) and has a smaller feature set.
That's the point though: there was never a particularly compelling reason to move so no one did. 5 years ago "what if America starts making threats?" would've been a ridiculous notion.
Rome wasn't built in a day.
Software is a challenge but try replacing hardware. There isn’t a replacement for AMD, Intel or nVidia.
Proton.
Also, Collabora office looks really great too.
Proton drive is fine, their docs service is usable but could use improvement. Their secure and private file and docs sharing with other Proton users could be a great feature, if you need it.
EDIT: I just re-tried Proton docs and spreadsheets - much improved docs, and I think the spreadsheets are a new feature; looks OK but I am on mobile right now so minimal testing.
Proton, only as transition technology.
Fucking Libre Office!
Yeah if only.
This already happened. Hetzner, OVH, and countless other local cloud companies exist. It is only the path of least resistancd and market inertia, that stops companies from switching.
I run on Hetzner and am saving big bucks compared to the ridiculously high priced AWS.
> I run on Hetzner and am saving big bucks compared to the ridiculously high priced AWS.
IMO even Americans should take a look at whether they need to be using the big cloud providers or not. They're so much more expensive compared to smaller hosts like Hetzner, Digital Ocean, Vultr, and so on. It depends on what you're doing, of course, but I'm American and moved off of Azure last year due to the price and the complexity it encourages.
Reposting my comment from another thread on the same topic a few days ago:
> This is why I moved off of Azure and over to Hetzner's US VPS's. For what I was deploying (a few dozen websites, some relatively complex .NET web apps, some automated scripts, etc.), the pricing on Azure just wasn't competitive. But worse for me was the complexity; I found that using Azure encouraged me to introduce more and more complex deployment pipelines, when all I really needed was Build the container -> SCP it into a blue/green deployment scheme on a VPS -> flip a switch after testing it.
Comparing EU cloud providers to AWS is like comparing a 1963 Zastava to 2025 high end BYD because both of them are cars and can drive from point A to point B.
Well, if the Zastava had 5-10x the amount of horsepower and storage space of the BYD for the same amount of money. Because that’s what is often the reality. Bare metal is unreasonably efficient compared to cloud services for not that much more know-how.
I do tech DD work for investment funds etc and one thing I often see are slow, complex and expensive AWS-heavy architectures that optimize for problems the company doesn’t have and often will never have. In theory to ensure stability and scalability. They are usually expensive and have nightmarish configuration complexity.
In practice complexity tends to lead to more outages and performance issues than if you had a much simpler (rented) bare metal setup with some spare capacity and better architecture design. More than half of serious outages I have seen documented in these reviews came from configuration mistakes or bugs in software that is supposed to manage your resources.
Nevermind that companies invest serious amounts of time in trying to manage complexity rather than remove it.
A few years ago I worked for a company that had two competing systems. One used AWS sparingly: just EC2, S3, RDS and load balancers. The other went berserk in the AWS candy shop and was this monstrosity that used 20-something different AWS services glued together by lambdas. This was touted as “the future”, and everyone who didn’t think it was a good idea was an idiot.
The simple solution cost about the same to run for a few thousand (business customers) as the complex one cost for ONE customer. The simple solution cost about 1/20 to develop. It also had about 1/2500 the latency on average because it wasn’t constantly enqueuing and dequeueing data through a slow SQS maze of queues.
And best of all: you could move the simpler solution to bare metal servers. In fact, we ran all the testing on clusters of 6 RPIs. The complex solution was stuck in AWS forever.
All aws is selling a web gui on top of free software. You still have to know ins and outs of the software to manage it properly.
Heck their support is shit too. I have talked to them to figure out an issue on their own in house software, they couldn’t help. My colleague happened to know what was wrong and fixed the issue with a switch of a checkbox.
Hetzner doesn't even have an RDS service. I've heard rumors for years but they haven't done it. Also, while I agree that leaning too much on the cloud leads to lock-in - this is an abstract concept that needs to be guarded against when managing technology, always, anyway - and vendor-driven hellish architectures, "vanilla cloud" offers other conveniences other than compute, bucket, storage managed and load balancers, like IAM, good CLIs, secrets management, etc. Only Scaleway or OVH seem to be timidly developing what I would consider "vanilla cloud".
Out of interest, what control plane do you use for a Hetzner/metal setup? Kubernetes ecosystem?
I use Coolify for side projects, haven’t investigated whether I’d want to use it for bigger/importanter stuff.
+1 for bare metal! I wish I could convince more C level people that that's what we need most of the time.
The Zastava doesn't have a bunch of superfluous computers that track you, is easy to service, and reliable?
when you compare IT stuff to cars, the discussion pivots to discussing cars, please think twice before using any analogies / comparisons with the physical world
But discussing cars is great, just like the Porsche 964 Carrera 4 Jubilee.
Or the Porsche 356 A. Or the Alfa Romeo Giulia sprint veloce.
But that is what people actually want.
I want a 1985 Mercedes that is build like a tank and outlives me.
I know that's not what you really meant, but as an unrelated tangent, modern cars are safer exactly because they're not built like tanks. The car crumpling up even at the smallest of crashes is good, because the more the car crumples, the less any of the impact is transferred to the passengers. It might mean the car is totaled and you need a new one, but that's better than someone in the car being totaled.
Yes, modern cars are superior when it comes to safety. But the daily experience is orthogonal to this since most people have serious accidents very infrequently. In your daily experience reliability and economy is more important.
And in computing, having a bit of downtime 1-2 times per year is often a price worth paying if avoiding it requires 90% more cost and effort. (Of course, people end up having downtime anyway because they have something so complex that they have 100x the number of ways something can fail).
Hm, equating AWS to a 1963 Zastava is pretty demeaning to the Zastava. At least the Zastava was cheap junk, not premium-priced junk.
Except 95% of companies have no need of ultra scalable super cloud.
If you are a very big SaaS company that is not Google or Apple, you are probably serving hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of unique users. AWS may be convenient, but you don't /need/ it, you can build an infrastructure that will handle such workload with any of the big european providers.
You'll just lose in comfort what you'll gain in data sovereignty and infrastructure costs.
I worked for a 7M€ MRR company that had maybe a million of users who used the software every day. The thing ran on a dozen of OVH servers, including multi-site redundancy.
Exactly. AWS proposition was much more alluring where compute was more expensive and it required yearly estimations and updates.
In times when one physical server can have 32, 64 or even 96 cores... you pack your own little datacenter right there and it's pretty cheap to simply overkill it, have one or two servers for redundancy and bye.
So many businesses will happily run from 4 core 10usd VPS (that would have been beefy server 20 years ago).
I think it’s more about the absolutely stripped model vs the loaded one.
The basic services are more or less the same, but the hyperscalers provide hundreds of services where smaller providers have only ten.
Some of those services are utter crap though..
This is just my opinion, but there are some services that just package software as VM and let's you spawn it with a fancy button, leaving you with a largely unmanaged instance.
There are other services like S3, BigQuery or SQS that feels like magic.
AWS is overrated junk, got it.
Well, isn’t it?
It is easy to argue that it is expensive and complex. Since it is. And lots of people have made that argument. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone argue in favor of AWS while skimming the threads here.
So this is your opportunity to make the case for AWS.
I am not arguing for AWS.
It _used_ to be great and free tier made it easy enough to migrate most personal use cases to their infrastructure. But they have enshittified the free tier to a point where it’s unusable without forking over obscene amounts of money.
Plus their support is non-existent unless you are one of those big corps.
Plus for a 1T+ company. You would think that their infrastructure would be top tier, never go done, best practices?
Nope. us-east1 continues to be dogshit and their typical response is to fork over more money for multi region and zone support.
And yes, the scale at which aws advertises is largely overkill for many companies. Even some Fortune 500.
But technology is driven by clueless C-level executives that get easily impressed by deck presentations from aws marketing.
Instead of investing in workforce. They invest in cLoUd.
It’s a huge joke.
I promise you, a person buying a vehicle for their business will be looking at ROI rather then smart features.
Computing at this scale is not marketed to flashy fanbois.
> Computing at this scale is not marketed to flashy fanbois.
Every vain CxO is a flashy fanboi at heart
Scaleway (maybe upcloud as well) are also great and atleast Scaleway from what I know has many many features and its really competitive with the offerings it provides in general and has many offerings.
Your point's a little moot.
Can Europe build AI datacenters though?
Europe has no wafer production and no companies that produce GPUs.
That means it is dependent on Taiwan for wafers and the USA for GPU design.
Then there is the question wether there is a will to invest. Gemini gives me this list of publicly traded companies in the US and what they invested in AI infrastructure in 2025:
For Europe, I get this list:How much of the stuff that is under control of the US cloud companies has any need for being in an ‘AI’ datacentre?
Does a store of healthcare records need AI? The state portal for renewing passports? The tax administration?
I seemed to be able to use all of these things online before the latest boom in AI came along.
AI will be involved in all processing of data. Everything that is human work today will be done by AI tomorrow.
So if Europe will rely on US AI infrastructure, nothing is won by moving the old CPU bound processes off of US cloud infrastructure.
Two out of three of these things are effectively fully automated already in my experience.
And I'm afraid I do not share your belief that the work done by a healthcare professional today will be done by AI tomorrow.
Isn't every AI datacenter chip manufacturer critically dependent on EU (ASML)?
Sure but the US isn’t vowing to eliminate all dependencies on EU goods. (Just burning all their good will.)
Do Europe need AI datacenters to survive? AI is immature technology that is not yet critical to anything.
Define 'survive'.
Given Europe's productivity gap with the US, they appear they are becoming even further a vassal. They will survive, but they further lose their leverage with each year. We see this in international politics as the US pivots away from Europe and towards Asia. (Although Russia's decline has also made it less necessary too)
If you want Europe to rejoin 'great powers', as 'survival', yes they need AI.
Productivity in producing slop? Because that's the only thing LLMs are good for so far. And by the time this change the GPUs installed today will become obsolete.
oof you are never gonna make it
Is there a use case for AI that open models can't solve ?
Are there really any customers who are demanding AI and threatening to leave if those AI features are missing in every tech adjacent product ?
I think the make or break situation of integrating cutting edge AI for any business is just the hype and fomo at leadership level.
People tend to fixate about cutting edge technology, but my naïve intuition says the problem in Europe is not in lack of some secret sauce: it is hidden in plain sight lack of energy to run the DC - and worse - lack of long term desire to make the tough choices to get that energy
I would also add lack of technical competence at C level. In my previous job, I have dealt with quite a few European CEOs whos only background was an MBA. Unlike the US where a lot of CEOs have a deep technical background...
Of course. One only has to take a look at Microsoft, Apple, or Google, to notice that they're run by CEOs with a "deep" technical background. No MBA whatsoever...
Google and (and more debatably Microsoft and Apple) were run by technical founders during the timeframe that they were achieving critical mass. The MBAs came later to run the machine and optimize the business. But, the machine was built and grown by technical leadership first.
I read years ago that Hetzner placed data centers near inexpensive power, but I understand that the EU’s energy situation has deteriorated. So you are correct, they have the larger energy problem to contend with.
> That means it is dependent on Taiwan for wafers and the USA for GPU design.
Both being dependant on ASML, that we're crippling to please our bully, the USA. We probably have more leverage that we want to admit, but that requires a lot of politic will and... planning the economy.
Well it is like Thiel said in a recent interview - European companies and investors are very risk-averse and will never be a vanguard like the ones in the US.
You'll never get here that kind of cash for any risky project, it usually is low risk + low margin.
Feels like people write that like it somehow is failure on investors side.
If you are investor on US market having 300M people speaking roughly the same language and then high possibility to easily spill over the world upsides on the bet are really high, burning cash to have a chance hitting jackpot are much much higher than in EU.
In EU you are starting in a single country so like 60M people and your payoff is capped from start at most likely scenario you go big in a single country and then you basically have clean start in next country.
That is the reality of game theory, not some failure of imagination or being scared to take risks - payoff is just not there, in US you have a shot at insane payoff in relatively short term.
> If you are investor on US market having 300M people speaking roughly the same language and then high possibility to easily spill over the world upsides on the bet are really high
The topic is cloud providers. Do you think it would be critical for a EU-based cloud provider to translate their admin GUI to Elfdalian, Basque and Romansh in order to succeed? Or perhaps there are some deeper underlying causes for European failure in modern computer tech that you can think of?
No one is going to start a new cloud provider there are already European cloud providers existing.
Hetzner, OVH, Aruba, Scaleway. Their earnings hang around 400 million euros.
That’s rounding error compared to earnings of AWS, GCP, Azure.
European ones have English interfaces, global CDN capabilities etc. They still are rounding error compared to US ones.
Maybe we don't need that kind of money for things like office software, email, reasonable sized databases, VPS etc.
Thiel recently called Greta Thunberg the anti - christ. Thiel is maybe crazy as Musk. at least he is not an authorative source.
Besides the soure what does he mean with all of Europe: Berlin? London? Paris? Estonia? Sweden? The start up eco system is fragmented / decentralised. I doubt Thiel is a good overview and he argues probably not in good faith anyway.
Zero to 1 was good.
But I generally have a hard time thinking any person's opinion is some sort of fact.
However, it kind of tracks with my understanding.
Yes, this is a core issue. Most datacenter investments in Europe come from American big tech. If AI is going to be half as huge as predicted (kind of a big if), then Europe would depend even more on the US for compute. The highest energy prices in the world coupled with conservative investment mentality means Europe is practically out of the AI race.
Wow you're so right, you did such a good job asking computer mommy to confirm your priors!
But actually, that's not the goal here. AI, at least the kind of products that need dedicated datacenters ie. generative, isn't critical infrastructure. The focus is on documents, collaboration tools, file servers, single-sign on, databases etc. that are seemingly monopolized by US providers.
> documents, collaboration tools, file servers, single-sign on, databases
All being (or soon to be) fed through LLM agents running on fibers and datacenters controlled by NOT European entieties. And if you build DC you'll be powering them with energy imports.
Software being built on library repositories also under foreign jurisdictions. Network infrastructure built on imported tech running whatever backdoors "partners" see fit.
Its like you didn't notice the snowden revelations, the shift from dependence on Russian Gas to US gas, nordstream sabotage, stuxnet, etc
Also to be honest, suppose EU uses kimi model which is open source. They can literally swap out one word from the provider and move from say American datacenter companies to European.
Quite frankly, there is literally 0 moat and its great to see EU focus on the real moat/lock-in issues.
If they wait a year or so, the new AI chips being used now in China will probably be available for LLM inference in Europe. It seems unfortunate for small and medium size countries, and also for the EU to be dependent on any IT infrastructure only from China or the USA, but perhaps being flexible enough to be able to switch venders or use both is safer?
exactly. in HPC we all understood that it was a tradeoff between money and time, and that the curve was exponential. if you wanted to race ahead of todays capabilities, you could, but you couldn't go very far without burning alot of cash.
because of the investment story about being first and building a moat, we have companies torching 100s of billions of dollars to see who can climb that exponential the furthest.
we have so much work to do, in infrastructure, and distributed computation models, and programmability, quantization, and information theory...just relax a little. you dont have to compete with OpenAI. OpenAI is just a giant waste of money. take your incremental gains and invest in research and I assure you we can get there without directing our entire economic output into buying the latest highest margin parts from Nvidia only to use them at 30%, if you're being generous.
This kind of reminds me of an old paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9912202
Of course, we are no longer in the clock speed doubling era, but computer does get faster still.
It's true that the progress on clock speeds has slowed. Now we have to address the parallelism problem in order to keep moving forward. And we haven't done a very good job. Progress on that front will get us back on the acceleration curve. Saedfly, the current framing of 'who buys the most hardware', while I providing a nice marketing story, isn't netting us that much progress except what Nvidia spends internally.
ASML & IMEC are European.
I mean, if after three years all we got is Mistral, it's obvious that EU is out of the current round of AI race.
It might even be a positive thing. If the AI 'bubble' bursts they might end up saving tons of money and can buy idle GPUs at a discount.
Yeah and we could run kimi. Th issue is energy, we should keep building nuclear reactor and renewable to power it.
Aren't Mali GPUs designed in Europe?
AI is as far away from useful and necessary as bitcoin and NFTs were. I'm sure society can survive without it
Strange to say it’s not useful, I personally get a lot of use out of it. It’s mostly replaced search engines for me, which is no small thing.
Agree that society can survive without it though, but seems a weird thing to just claim as useless.
I think reductionist opinions about the "Free market" and price competition being the only factor are naive. Culture and trust are major components of a project, and cultural sensibilities and development culture can be a part of procurement decisions.
I worked for a company that chose Tresorit over any other option because it gave them Data Sovereignty, E2E encryption, and most important, it was not American.
There is intrinsic value in being "Not made in America" and data sovereignty is a major issue for a lot of organizations. Just as an American company would be concerned about storing their data in China, the rest of the world is/should be concerned about storing their data in the US.
We are a little misled, on purpose, with the term "sovereignty", though. For instance, if you are a French entity then sovereignty means your data stay in France. Moving things to de facto EU control is the opposite of sovereignty.
I think Chomsky would have a lot to say about this and the broad manufacturing of consent taking place across Europe.
> For instance, if you are a French entity then sovereignty means your data stay in France. Moving things to de facto EU control is the opposite of sovereignty.
It’s something that crops up fairly often and I think most of the time from people who are profoundly misguided or just cannot understand that other people might see things differently. Germany is never going to annex parts of France while the EU is a thing. It’s on purpose. The whole construct is full of feedback mechanisms that make it physically impossible.
So yes, for a French company using Hetzner is a bit more risky than OVH, but not that much, and either of those are much better than Azure or AWS.
The big countries all have projects for national infrastructure for things like defense and taxes. In these cases everything needs to be directly controlled by the state and it makes sense to use a local company. Most of the time that would be companies you’ve never heard of.
For random users in the EU, it does not matter because all big service providers will be following the same regulations.
So if someone doesn't agree with the narrative and points out the obvious manipulation taking place they are wrong, misguided, or simply stupid... I mean, you couldn't prove my point any better, could you? And quite ironic, too about others seeing things differently...
What this means to most people is really independence from the US, whatever the wording. Could you expand on this "manufacturing of consent" part? Who's doing the manufacturing here and at the bidding of whom?
And for a lot of cases, that's ok. The world is a connected place, and it's more economically efficient for that. You work best when you trust your friends. You balance self reliance, according to your best judgment.
It's sure worrying to watch a good friend become an enemy. But you won't fix that by swearing off friends entirely.
This means exactly nothing in relation to my comment, but that and the bare downvotes are actually a good illustration of my point about manufacturing consent.
The same chomsky who claimed that Epstein is a "highly valued friend and regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation"?
In addition: the same chomsky who wanted to send Ukraine into oblivion?
Isn’t the more fundamental question why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to creating startups and how can you lower them and preserve the enviable European social model? Solve that and you’ll solve the problem of a native cloud.
In global economies, it is a general rule that different regions of the world specialise in their respective sectors. In the IT industry, we generally observe that early innovators can extend their advantage by binding customers to their technology platform. One example of how this also applies to Europe in the IT sector is SAP. Founded in 1972, they were one of the first companies to offer ERP solutions. Their founders initially worked at a German branch of IBM and took over a software product that IBM was no longer interested in. SAP's leading position in this market has been so strong ever since that no US company has been able to pose a threat to SAP. Oracle, for example, has tried.
You can see this mechanism at work in the USA itself. Microsoft tried to get into the mobil market, but gave up. Google tried to build its own social network, but gave up. All other cloud providers are stuggeling to catch up with AWS.
Brain drain to USA, lack of good VC / funding, Patents war / patents controlled by the USA, industry espionage, EU mentalities that don't favor innovation in the same direction than the USA, too diverse markets to serve, distributed controls / governments / decisions. The list can go on and on
> Isn’t the more fundamental question why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to creating startups and how can you lower them and preserve the enviable European social model? Solve that and you’ll solve the problem of a native cloud.
IMO here in the UK we are good at starting tech startups, we are just bad at not selling them to overseas investors early in their life, or having a tax framework that is advantageous to them growing in the UK.
In the UK see Google Deepmind, ARM, Deliveroo... Elevenlabs being incorporated in the USA, Dyson moving to singapore etc - Even outside of the tech space, Cadburys, Sainsbury's, Jaguar Land Rover... If the UK kept hold of everything that the UK created, we would be great!
Even our infrastructure we sell to the French, Chinese, Germans etc just for short-term gain, despite that we are cutting our nose off if we look forward 10 years.
I am just speculating, but Europe has let itself be very dependent on USA for many things - military/defence, technology etc. "We don't need weapons, USA builds them for us". There has been no need to try and compete.
This is changing now. So maybe the incentives will now appear more clearly.
You don’t have to, this ja the reason. There were multiple successful EU alternatives that were killed by the loads of money the US companies could muster to kill or hobble them. And Europe decided it was fine.
There isn’t even an European card brand that operates across the whole continent, the just accepted to use visa and Mastercard for everything. I hope they change it.
And several European countries had their own card systems. The banks have just decided that letting US companies do the work is more lucrative. It was definitely cheaper and it was necessary if they want to be part of US hegemony network and trade with Asian countries since many of them had bad relationships due to colonialism.
Let me start with saying I'm all for the European social model, which is sadly regressing. However, this model/system is often a hurdle for start-ups, or any small company for that matter. The rules are designed to regulate big companies also apply to start-ups, adding up a bug overhead in the initial years. I think agriculture specifically is outside most of these regulations, because European countries love their agriculture, i.e. rural votes coming from the farmers.
Talent pool in EU is large but not concentrated like in US. Combine this with every EU country having different rules, and not being able to hire across EU without incirporating in every country you want to hire, it's also challenging to access to the large talent pool.
The divergence of being many smaller countries with different regulations, primary languages, currencies etc have been a blocker, but progress is being made[1] and it seems like people are aware of the problem. It just takes a while when every plan needs to be approved by all countries.
1. https://tech.eu/2026/01/20/the-european-commission-launches-...
No need, it was much more comfortable to stay in known sectors such as banking, industry or tourism. Now there is a real need so I'm positive things will change.
Well, at the early stages, yes. But at the point where incumbent tech firms have an insurmountable advantage, just adding more startups probably isn't going to save you. Entrenched providers can use their market power to buy up/outcompete/destroy any smaller competitors. You really need both a native market and a startup scene.
China has a huge population that mostly speaks Mandarin. The US has a smaller, but relatively wealthy population that mostly speaks English. Europe is a hodgepodge of languages, cultures, and regulatory environments. That’s a beautiful thing, but it’s not an efficient thing from a business perspective.
> China has a huge population that mostly speaks Mandarin.
It's about incentives. The Chinese had to come up with their own solutions because of their firewall.
Maybe it's time for a European firewall?
In China government threatens and stop people selling companies outside.
In Europe people who sell out are the members of government. Without a terrible revolution, Europe won't change course.
> why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry
The EU trusted the US so it made sense to leverage US innovation and leadership.
But "Uncle Sam" is no longer an ally. Or a leader. And its recent innovations are toxic to society and democracy.
That was a good article, I don’t usually read The Register.
Even as a US citizen, I say: good for Europe!
The world is simply a better place when countries have independence and can be as self reliant as possible.
In the US media there is an ongoing rhetoric that everything in the US is wonderful and everything in the rest of the world is much worse. I am privileged to have travelled widely so I know what a mostly wonderful and friendly world we live in.
I just use a few EU tech products (Hetzner, Proton, Mistral) but they seem good enough to me.
> The world is simply a better place when countries have independence and can be as self reliant as possible.
I would tend to agree, but to take the other side: This also gives rise to massive wars. You don’t tend to go to war when your economy is so intertwined that war is the economic equivalent of a mass casualty event.
> You don’t tend to go to war when your economy is so intertwined that war is the economic equivalent of a mass casualty event.
That is after all the core motivation[1] behind what became[2] the European Union:
The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes, not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230516193200/http://aei.pitt.e...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Commun...
I can also agree with the ‘other side’ viewpoint as well. There are things to do to mitigate war though besides interlocking infrastructure: young people studying abroad, travel, friendships with people in other countries. Not too far off topic: a US war planner during world war 2 took Yokohama off the list of Japanese cities to be annihilated with bombing because he and his wife visited that city and loved it. Anything that fights against dehumanizing people in other countries during times of conflict is a good thing.
It's not practical IMHO to move out of US owned cloud companies at this point in time. It could become so over years.
However what is mostly practical is to avoid building on their proprietary layers and stick to relatively portable tech. Just treat it like highly flexible servers / generic services provisioned through APIs. It's a battle to stop "cloud experts" from cargo culting "best practices" which invariably involve everything they can find at the extreme end of the proprietary stack.
As if the surveillance and regulation by the unelected EU bureaucrats was any better for the European citizens...
Even if you are right and everything is the same regarding surveillance and regulation: there are other important aspects that make the move to move european data out of the US worthwhile.
> other important aspects
like what?
I will just provide 2 examples, but you can find a lot more.
If your data is in the hands of a nation that uses this to block you from your data you should do something about it. [1]
If your data is in the hands of a nation whose representatives are threatening your territorial integrity (greenland) you should find alternatives.
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Criminal-Court-Microsoft-s-emai...
Right, but next time your data may be threatened by some European idiot rather than one from the US.
To quote from my other comment:
> In my view, data can only be protected by its rightful owner. And for that, we need education, not regulation.
maybe, but education won‘t solve the issues I outlined above. So in interest of european security I‘m all for regulation of this.
European citizens have the right to shop around. If they choose a cloud provider from a European country with higher data protection than their home country, they can send a message to their own government.
Swiss data protection law is an example of this. An Italian municipality could choose to use Infomaniak or Exoscale and increase their sovereignty and privacy.
As a European citizen, I can assure you, my options are getting ever more limited. Several global companies have kicked me off their platforms recently due to all the regulations they can't be bothered with. Those that make an effort to comply are by default required to submit to the EU surveillance system. At the same time, I have no illusions that any of this would somehow protect my data from the NSA and the like.
In my view, data can only be protected by its rightful owner. And for that, we need education, not regulation.
"Unelected EU bureucrats"
Clearly shows you have absolutely zero idea about what you are talking about and just take your talking points from people like Elon Musk
I happen to live in the EU so I may have a slight clue what I'm talking about.
But if you want an authority on the subject, look up Yanis Varoufakis and how sovereignty and democracy worked out for Greece when shit hit the fan.
Greece took on more debt than they could serve. Do you expect the tax payers from other countries to just pay for that without significant changes to how Greece operates? If you can't pay your debts and you can't print your own currency, you lose some sovereignty. But I feel like Greece would have been worse off if they still had the drachma and tried to print their way out of the crisis.
Pretty much every single country in the world has taken on more debt than they can serve. And the 2008 crisis wasn't triggered by Greece either. The private creditors should have taken the loss. And that holds true for the rest of the world.
If a debtor can't pay their debt, you don't just get to wipe out the bond holders. There is some kind of negotiation to try to restructure the debt and see how much the bond holders can still get. Simply wiping out the debt would create a terrible precedent with terrible consequences for the credibility of the whole eurozone. Who would want to lend money to an EU country if they just get wiped out when things get bad? It would've also had bad consequences for the financial system and potentially caused some institutions to go belly up. The way that countries typically get rid of their debt is by printing money to serve it and thereby inflating it away. But that is obviously not popular among the remaining EU countries. It was always clear that the Euro comes with this constraint that you can't just inflate away your debt.
Europe was able to impose policies to Greece because Greece was requesting loans from Europe. Those loans were required because other investors were unhappy that Greece had hidden the real state of its finance in its reports.
Educate us, tell us when did we vote for the commission and the likes of von der Leyen. (If your answer is "you didn't vote for it, but you voted for someone who voted for someone who voted for it in a secret ballot" I am going to chuckle)
Do Americans vote for the supreme court or the chair of the fed?
And when did Americans vote for the director of FBI? Chair of the Fed? The local judge who can sign a warrant permitting the police to rummage your house?
> Educate us, tell us when did we vote for the commission and the likes of von der Leyen. (If your answer is "you didn't vote for it, but you voted for someone who voted for someone who voted for it in a secret ballot" I am going to chuckle)
Voters place their trust in representatives who then act on their behalf during the EP voting process and other legislative matters, such as electing the President of the European Commission
Even that would be wrong. Von der Leyen was strong armed into her position by Merkel and the other heads of states, overruling Timmermans nomination.
By that logic the president of the USA is also "not elected"
A story I read goes thus: A nicely dressed young man was waiting at a bus stop in a rural part of India. He need go to a nearby city. Suddenly clouds gathered and it started to pour down heavily. He took shelter in a chai (tea) shed beside the bus stop. The chaiwala (tea shop owner) announced that the bus is cancelled for the day as road was damaged due to the heavy rain. The young man looked worried and tried to go by walk in the rain. Chaiwala warned that rain would get only heavier. Young man returned and sat back. Other people ordered more chai. Due to more demand for chai, the chai jar (tea granules) got empty. Chaiwala commanded the worker boy to run to a shop that is half-mile away and get more chai packs. The boy sprinted out as if there was no rain. He came back in half hour, fully soaked, starry-eyed, with tea packs in his hand. Young man gets up and starts walking out. Chaiwala was shouting that winds and rain are going to persist the whole day. Young man didn't listen, and didn't feel the rain.
I'm missing something. What is the point of this story?
The point is, things are not that scary as the seller would like you to believe. Europe has or can build everything it needs,
I’d start with govs. Governments are mostly running Microsoft. Like your and your friends and family’s health, tax, ownership, pension and other data.
This! I'm Danish and everything in the government is Microsoft. USA is trying to make a hostile takeover of Greenland, a part of the Danish Kingdom, and meanwhile the parliament is migrating to Azure. I hope someone in the government wakes up soon before it's too late.
> 61 percent of European CIOs and tech leaders say they want to increase their use of local cloud providers.
Oof, the company I work for is proudly telling us we've just migrated from a local provider to Azure, and partnered with Google for "digital sovereignty" solutions. Glad to know that's not the trend everywhere.
>Google for "digital sovereignty" solutions.
Tell them about the Cloud Act and let those rusty wheels turn a bit. There is no sovereignty when working with a U.S.-based cloud company.
I think that Google has some partnership with Deutsche Telekom where they provide the software and Deutsche Telekom Runs it because Google doesn't have the encryption keys. In that case Google even if they want they cannot provide the data. Anyway that is still not digital sovereignity as Google might decide to stop providing updates or add a backdoor...
I'm personally very aware of that, and I wish Europeans dropped our collective tech-inferiority complex, but I'm currently a junior at a large corpo and that's not even my business branch; I can't steer it.
Aws Gcp Azure have overbuilt, you don't need most of those services to build scalable and reliable infra for large institutions
1. Europe doesn't have comparable offerings. The amount of money invested is below what a single hyperscaler spends per quarter. (StackIT might be on track to change that looking at the pure numbers)
2. European politicians still seem to believe it's about renting compute and storage; they seem to have little understanding of what "a cloud offering" really is; the EU has less than 5% of GPUs, supposedly
3. For healthcare, they already forced you years ago. This led to hosting on Telekom Cloud which runs on OpenStack by Huawei. (EU commision wants to ban Huawei from 5G but it's ok to use their software? 'Is open source and can be inspected' seems largely theoretical given the reality of cybersecurity)
4. If push comes to shove, the EU is critically dependent on the US in so many aspects (defense, lng to name two very important ones) that eventually, they would falter if the US wants your data in a specific case anyway
5. As a private citizen, given the incarcerations in the UK and Germany, it seems one should worry more about the EU getting your data than the other way around
That said, would be nice to have healthy competition, but after hearing this for 10++ years, it's getting really old. It might have been a good idea not to sleep on the AI trend, but, well...
True for the current situation, but something needs to happen before the thinking turns into acting. There's no better time than now, since most cloud services have become commodities. You don't need to be big-tech to have a competitive offering that. Naturally, the tech won't be as efficient and shiny as those of the big ones, but you have none of the corporate bloat and inefficiencies.
And don't forget about legislation. If there are new laws that set a limit to egress costs you can say goodbye to the walled garden of cloud empires.
After all, how many cloud services does the average company actually need? Most problems have been figured out by now, so such a project would be less like creating thought-leaders and more like a public infrastructure project. With exception of cutting-edge technologies, the cloud has become a commodity.
"5. As a private citizen, given the incarcerations in the UK and Germany, it seems one should worry more about the EU getting your data than the other way around"
As a private citizen given the cold blood murders of US citizens by ICE, it seems EU citizens should really be worried of what such an administration is willing to do and can do to their long time allies.
What incarcerations in Germany are you referring to?
This is surely not what OP was referring to, but: arguably worse than incarcerations, I strongly condemn EU sanctions against EU citizens and residents, such as Hüseyin Dogru, Jacques Baud, and Nathalie Yamb, merely for speech that is not aligned with EU foreign policy.
Note that I don't consider it at all relevant whether one agrees/disagrees with the content of their speech.
If this isn't what OP was referring to, why bring it up? I don't see how this is relevant, to the security of data from European companies, stored in European clouds.
It is a related complaint. Moving services to a jurisdiction where free speech is grossly violated (even the lower level of free speech that was prevalent in the EU compared to US).
In the past, protection of free speech in the EU might have been less absolute, than in the US. Given the actions of the current US administrations and the (in)action of the supreme court, free speech in the US currently doesn't even serve its most essential purpose of being able to criticize the government, without fear of repercussions (e.g. Kimmel, Colbert).
As such moving services to the EU jurisdiction is most likely also better, if you're concerned about free speech, at least for the moment.
The Hüseyin Dogru case is far worse to me.
I don't actually see what's stopping European firms from figuring this out in terms of hardware infrastructure.
Buildings full of computers aren't that difficult a problem to solve compared to things like semiconductor manufacturing or energy.
Perhaps the issue is more on the software and architecture side. Getting sucked into weird cloud products that don't translate clean to other premises is perhaps the more difficult aspect of this for larger firms. I've made a very strong point to only use EC2, Route53, S3 and Azure AD. Moving between environments is a lot easier when you stick with the VM as the unit of deployment. Getting out of something like a MSSQL hyper scale instance is simply not possible without switching to a different SQL provider or accepting new operational risks.
>OpenStack by Huawei
If you mean to say that OpenStack is made by Huawei, that is not true. They are a major contributor and a platinum member of that open source project, though.
OpenStack was created by NASA and Rackspace, both very American..
I may be wrong, but here's how I got the idea: "liefert Huawei mit dem Cloud-Betriebssystem Huawei OpenStack Distribution" So it appears to be a Huawei _distribution_ from https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/de/blog/vorteile/die-sich...
Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41350820
Europe doesn’t have similar offerings because they never had a chance to or need to compete Silicon Valley. Now that the cats out of the bag, offerings can simply materialize out of the really high demand for homegrown solutions, EU have a large population after all. US Tech really went off the rails in the last year or last few years, it simply cannot be trusted anymore. Even if such offerings may lag a little behind, they still look like a better proposition. EU is in a similar situation with respect to self defense, they have to step up to the plate and start building their own.
The Huawei ban in the European Union (EU) has been a gradual, uneven process, shifting from voluntary guidelines in 2020 to increasingly mandatory, country-specific, and EU-wide restrictions by 2025–2026.
Here is the timeline of Huawei's ban and restrictions in the EU and UK:
Phase 1: Initial Restrictions and Voluntary Guidelines (2019–2020) May 2019: The United States places Huawei on a trade blacklist, restricting access to key technologies (Google Android, US chips), which triggers security reviews across Europe.
January 2020: The European Commission launches its "5G Security Toolbox," encouraging EU member states to restrict or exclude "high-risk vendors" (HRV) like Huawei from critical core network infrastructure.
July 2020 (UK): The UK government announces a total ban on buying new Huawei 5G equipment after December 31, 2020, and orders the removal of all existing Huawei 5G gear by 2027.
October 2020 (Sweden): Sweden bans Huawei and ZTE from 5G networks and orders the removal of existing equipment by January 2025.
Phase 2: Implementation Hurdles (2021–2023) 2021-2022: Many EU nations slow-walk the implementation of the 5G toolbox, with only a small number of countries actively banning Huawei from core networks due to costs and dependence on its technology.
June 2023: EU officials express frustration that only one-third of EU countries have implemented restrictions on high-risk vendors.
Phase 3: Hardening Stance and National Bans (2024–2025) July 2024 (Germany): After years of delays, Germany announces an agreement with major operators to remove Huawei and ZTE critical components from 5G core networks by the end of 2026, and from access/transport networks by 2029.
August 2025 (Spain): Spain cancels a government contract with Telefonica involving Huawei equipment. November 2025 (EU-wide): The European Commission pushes for a binding, mandatory ban, threatening to make the 2020 voluntary guidelines legally required for all member states.
Phase 4: Proposed Mandatory EU-Wide Ban (2026) January 20, 2026: The European Commission unveils a new proposal aimed at forcing EU member states to remove Huawei and ZTE from their networks within three years of adoption.
January 2026: Reports indicate the EU may move to ban Huawei and ZTE from critical infrastructure, including fixed-line and fiber networks, not just 5G. Summary of Key Country Timelines
UK: New equipment banned (Dec 2020), full removal by 2027. Sweden: Full 5G ban, removal by Jan 2025. Germany: Core removal by end of 2026, RAN removal by 2029. EU (General): Proposed 3-year mandatory phase-out starting from 2026
Must say, tech that has held up for all that time, must be doing something right.
So this cloud ride, the possibility of a whole new paradigm in computing could happen before we see EU cloud centricity.
> given the incarcerations in the UK and Germany
Could you say a few more words on this - it sounds quite concerning.
> 1. Europe doesn't have comparable offerings.
I think you should pause for a moment. There are plenty of European cloud providers that allow you to run VMs in multiple points of presence across the world. Some even offer managed Kubernetes clusters.
It is true that most European cloud providers don't offer many high-level managed services such as function-as-a-service compute solutions, durable execution engines, etc. However, those are not exactly hard requirements. In fact, some cloud providers offer these services for reasons that are not in line with the customer's best interests, such as better hardware utilization and vendor lock-in.
So think about it for a second: if you can put together a Kubernetes cluster, what high-level service do you absolutely need to be able to put together a working service?
I can tell you right away: nothing.
> 2. European politicians still seem to believe it's about renting compute and storage;
I think you need to touch grass on this one. European companies require cloud services for the same reason any other company requires cloud services. If you take the time to learn about how cloud providers such as AWS market their services, you will learn that they firmly base their offering on the exact criteria you are arguing against: compute that scales, and reliability. To argue otherwise, you must argue against how US cloud providers market themselves, which would be baffling.
> 4. If push comes to shove, the EU is critically dependent (...)
There is no "if". We are already at that point. NATO is already running military exercises without the US, and since Trump took over support for Ukraine has been driven primarily by Europe. NATO has been very vocal in how France and the UK have been the primary providers of intelligence to Ukraine.
> 5. As a private citizen, given the incarcerations in the UK and Germany, it seems one should worry more about the EU getting your data than the other way around
You got to be joking. The US now demands access to your social media accounts as precondition to enter the country, and the US also outright disappears people out of the street.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dz0g2ykpeo
> So think about it for a second: if you can put together a Kubernetes cluster, what high-level service do you absolutely need to be able to put together a working service?
Agreed that K8s helps a lot. But let's say I want managed Redis or MongoDB Atlas, I can't get that, at least I couldn't when I last checked (I can them physically hosted in the EU of course, but on a hyperscaler)
> that they firmly base their offering on the exact criteria you are arguing against: compute that scales, and reliability
Sure these are central, but I can also get e.g. computer vision, distributed queues etc.; a lot of money has gone into the software, not just the hardware is my point.
I am in the middle of this - my audit committee just told me we need an exit plan "just in case".
I don't think this is practically possible. The governments are currently focusing on enabling sovereign clouds - there is real work in France and the Netherlands that I am familiar with.
However, almost any company uses a lot of SaaS stuff - also for very core capabilities such as IdP, employee productivity, not to mention the boring stuff - CRMs, ERPs, payment, etc.
Some (all, maybe?) have non-US variants, but as anyone who ever worked through an ERP upgrade or a CRM replacement - theoretically trivial exercises - this will be hell on earth.
And that does not begin to address the questions such as next gen productivity tools such as frontier models for coding. If Anthropic, Google and OpenAI decided to shut down the Europeans, we'd be screwed for a while.
On the positive side, the absolute toxic stuff that tech companies brought to the world - shorts, social media networks - would for a while be inaccessible too, so there is that.
I've carefully read this interesting discussion: some political, mostly about full cloud services (AWS) vs partial EU providers, or lock-in vs indipendence.
I think the problem is elsewhere. The real advantage of big cloud players isn't their individual services. It's seamless integration and simplicity. We need a service integration standard for infrastructure that enables:
- Service discovery
- Networking
- Observability
- Configuration
This benefits everyone: EU companies, US startups, enterprises anywhere avoiding vendor lock-in. A standard letting services integrate regardless of who provides them.
Not just container orchestration (Kubernetes), but something working across bare metal, VPS, containers, and remote machines.
We recently moved two companies from AWS to Scaleway which is the closest to AWS you find in EU AFAIK. It's like AWS 5-10 years ago, eg much fewer managed services and you don't have as much tooling, but it works great and it is also cheaper. You do get managed kubernetes, Postgres and Redis plug and play though.
A much better goal would be to ditch dependence on a single company and become, as much as possible, cloud provider agnostic. Not that I mind giving US big tech grief -- they earned it in spades.
But if you wrestle your technology chains from one evil master, do not willingly give it to another, even if he looks more benevolent today. My 2c.
AWS seems to have seen the writing on the wall and has already launched a European Soverign Cloud -- a separate partition like they have for GovCloud and China.
I am guessing other hyperscalers must be doing the same?
Are we seeing a strong aversion among EU companies to use these offerings from US firms (AWS, Google, Microsoft) and viable competition emerging from Europe?
The selling point of many offerings from current market leaders is that they have the widest array of services especially easy to expand into say datalake, BI or AI/ML experiments and production workloads starting from a core IaaS only setup one might have after migrating off own datacenter. I wonder if there are lesser known players positioning themselves in this space -- with managed services in platform/application space. Curious to know some examples.
Can any AWS data center really be immune from US national security letters?
Nope. They'd have to spin up the infra and sell the entire enterprise.
For most medium sized business or government agencies, the main reason for cloud providers is that you don’t need the in-house skill.
You can replicate most of their offerings for that target group with open source stuff easy enough, but you will need people to maintain that and those are more expensive.
The time for Great Firewall of Europe was 2005, when Friendster, Skype, Xing were still a thing. Probably too late now but effort still needs to be made. One upside of a sovereign European Internet is an ecosystem which may sustain thousands of well paying jobs
Great Firewall? Is that where you think we - Europeans, Americans, anyone living in what used to be called the 'free world' - should go, just follow the Chinese and North Korean and similar regimes in restricting access to whatever those in control deem to be appropriate? Do you even realise what you're proposing here?
We in what used to be called the 'free world' used to revel in our freedom of movement, our freedom of thought, freedom on conscience, religion and more. We used to look at places where such freedoms were not a given like they were and to a large extent still are here. The Chinese 'Great Firewall' was seen in the same light as the Berlin Wall: a means to keep an oppressive regime in power, to keep the citizenry of China unaware of anything the regime did not want them to know about so they could mow them down at Tienanmen Square without people outside of the area learning about it. Now there's some HN user claiming that Europe should also build one - why exactly? What is it that we Europeans should not be allowed to access? Why should the European Commission - maybe I should start calling them the European Commissars - have such power over Europeans?
I say no to any such proposal and will, just like the Chinese, find a way around any such tool of oppression.
Most of my European clients fall in two categories:
1. Ain't nobody got time/care to move out of AWS/azure but we can consider alternatives on new stuff.
2. We moving all to European cloud vendors and gonna mail them to ditch US hardware as well.
The first group is bigger than the second.
One wish to say trump has done damage, but he was voted and he's doing exactly what he said he would do so it's hard to treat this as "it's just trump", it's not, it's Americans treating others like enemies.
I keep seeing over and over how Europe should be self sufficient. I’d be happy for Europe to be self sufficient.
But the truth is that Europe does not have the infrastructure and offering to be self sufficient. Even looking at basic things like AWS SES, there is no European offering. Apart from scaleway, there are no competitions for big cloud providers. There are no alternative to office suites.
And I’m not even talking about hardware. What’s the point to build data centers if they run US made hardware.
So, as the saying goes: talk is cheap, show me the software.
Perhaps there should be an EU committee to draft a mandate for a working group tasked with identifying the necessary stakeholders for a preliminary report on digital infrastructure.
Perhaps instead there should be a president enriching himself and insulting citizens executed by his goons.
It's called the Cloud Act. If your business wants to keep its production secrets and personal data safe, think again. This has nothing to do with Trump.
Don't fall for the trick of using an AWS EU sovereignty cloud. Amazon is US-based and falls under the Cloud Act. Don't be tricked.
After Snowden's leaks don't we know the levels of spying that's already happening today? That was a decade ago, what has changed?
To really understand how complicated is this matter, put into the mix that before AI in Europe there was no shortage of knowledge to have all our cloud services (to the point that a decent part of key infrastructure software is developed in Europe or mainly by Europeans), social networks, ..., but yet it was never strongly wanted. To reach this point, something is really odd with the current US-EU tensions.
This is not just a sovereignty/security/privacy issue. I genuinely believe that ditching Big Tech will produce genuinely better technology for consumers. Once the monopolists lose their network effect advantage, startups should be forced to adopt more interoperable protocols and foster healthier competition. Big Tech is a cancer, same as any other monopoly.
This will happen automatically once an EU native cloud exists with comparable pricing. Get on it. No one will pay 10x to store data in Europe.
France cloud provider scalaway has great prices. In some services they are cheaper then AWS. So I think that devs just need to research a bit more.
Also Hetzner (germany) is super cheap when compared with US hosting providers.
You are missing one of Europes largest hoster: OVH (Originally from FR)
But those do exist and they are generally a lot cheaper; not more expensive.
BTW. it's all hosted in the EU if you use it in the EU. Amazon, Google and Azure have data centers all over Europe and using those is not optional for EU based companies. If that wasn't the case, they'd have no business here. Companies legally have to host in the EU and do business with US cloud providers through EU based subsidiaries (mostly based in Ireland. There's a bit of a murky situation with what level of access US intelligence agencies have exactly to all the data or who copies what where and when. But generally, data isn't supposed to leave the continent unless that's needed/required.
I work in Germany. We currently use Google Cloud. It's cheap and convenient enough. Our spend is only 300 euros/month or so. I could replace it. One of our customers insisted on Telekom Cloud; so we support that as well. I've used Hetzner in the past. There are a few other providers. It's not that big of a deal. But it's not a big/urgent issue for us.
However, Vms, object storage, elastic load balancers, managed databases, etc. are all commodities at this point. You don't need to pay AWS 2-3x for that. They aren't magically any better. They certainly aren't any faster. AWS squeezes hard on those VCPUs.
And there's a lot of exotic stuff that some people use. AWS is offering lots of that. But most of those things are a combination of a bit niche and very pricey and more aimed at enterprises than startups. When it comes to GPU hosting, AI stuff, etc. the premium options that Amazon offers really add up really quickly. I'm sure it's fantastic. But many people I talk to in Europe use alternative/cheaper solutions.
For bread and butter hosting, AWS is just expensive and overrated. Big companies don't seem to care much and are sensitive to big brands and the warm fuzzy feeling they get from expensive consultants telling them what to do. And AWS is very good at vendor lock-in. That's also why IBM still exists and why companies like Oracle still do a brisk business separating rich clueless enterprises from their cash. Vendor lock-in is all they have left at this point. But those are at this point the idiot option. AWS is increasingly like that. The times are gone that they are a sane solution for startups. Ten years ago they'd lure you in with "free" hosting for a year and then you'd be hooked for the life time of the startup. But it's not that obvious anymore that is a good choice for cash strapped startups.
Btw. Hetzner now operates in the US. It's a pretty good deal there as well. It's not like you have to give your money to Amazon.
'Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM (now Microsoft)' has been an important factor around my neck of the woods. A cheaper European alternative would never even make it to the comparison. That is changing now though.
What is the cost of storing data in Europe today?
Depends on the amount of traffic. 4TB with 4TB traffic a month cost roughly 27 Euros am month at Hetzner.
Luckily our friends overseas have shown us the way of dealing with uncompetitive local industries: tariffs.
At Hetzner 4 TB storage (S3 compatible) with 4 TB traffic cost 27.32 Euro/Month.
According to AWS calculator the same 4 TB cost 102 Euro/Month with their standard S3 tier.
So I gladly pay 0.3x to store data in Europe, with a European service.
US services sell your data for additional profit and damp prices. How are you supposed to compete with that?
If that's the issue, then EU will have to either allow this or subsidize alternatives that don't, otherwise they will not be able to compete.
The third (and the best) option is to outlaw private data exchage with no consent and strictly enforce this with fines. See: GDPR.
They certainly will if regulations are part of it.
US has their tariffs and last stage capitalism, we have our government enforcement laws.
This poses a fundamental problem for many SaaS providers. How can you guarantee client data aren't sent across the pond when all the app state is held server-side?
The answer is obvious with native apps, where it's standard practice to provide server endpoint details, so client-verified data locality is simple.
I don't really know how this is practically possible in SaaS web apps.
Good for the EU. This a a much needed wake-up call for data sovereignty.
Can’t wait until any European vendor gets 400 POPs around the globe with tier1 backbone and the same time has an API, can issue top tier certificates and has some of the features that for example Cloudfront has.
I really hope so.
I am working on a high availability postgres self-hosting solution that works with hetzner ,just for the Eu market. Fingers crossed, lots of work ahead.
Even if we get the data and an EU cloud we still need chips, operating system, devices.
Unless we’re all going to use. Raspberry Pi I’m not sure how this works.
American cloud companies will sell you a sovereign cloud solution but these are still pretty much make you a vassal state
Americans are absolutely not a fan of this administration and it will be severely neutered after the midterms. The Supreme Court is already doing some of that.
Americans are not your enemy, Washington (state), California, Illinois, etc (AKA the states with real economic power and all the tech companies) did not vote for this. We still believe in the rule of law and our friendships with our allies.
what a strange game of chicken, why xan’t amzn, msft, et al just contain their infra within euro borders and call it a day? after all the word multi in multinational does not oblige companies to stop selling in Europe, or?
They do, but the US can still force them to hand over data that's in EU. (This was confirmed by Microsoft France officials.)
Because that's not how US law works.
First, Europeans must change their mindset and be really willing to become free.
Done, thanks. Eagerly waiting the next 20 years.
You need a doctor's note to get a gym membership in Italy. In the Netherlands, you need a prescription to get contact lens solution. The rot of regulation is deep within the European psyche.
When SaaS was emerging I was always advocating for not putting all our eggs into one basket, everyone always suggested was suggesting I was just paranoid. It's just a basic tenet of resilient systems to diversify depenendencies and not outsource all basic knowhow and abilities, even if its more costly. The reason is that institutional knowledge is difficult to build and easy to throw away. Its for the same reason I was hesitant about supporting all those big free trade agreements, for which I was actually called a "national communist" a few times, lol. Funnily enough nowadays I'm the one more open to those free trade blocks in my social circles and everyone has always been against it. I wonder what the consensus will be twenty years from now.
can't wait for my european incorporated company to run on my european cloud servers so I can run my european language models (which will run inference on european english)
EU countries are just vassal states of the USA in practice, anyway. If Uncle Sam wants that data, he's getting it, either by asking politely or by taking it. And the EU countries can't and won't retaliate.
Whats the best Euro S3 alternative?
Hetzner S3 i would say
And move to the Lidl cloud?
Europe will never have competitive offerings until they pay their employees the equivalent of what FAANGs pay.
If you work for GCP or AWS in Europe, you'll easily get twice as much income as if you do the exact same job for Hetzner or OVH.
You can't build equivalents to GCP and AWS without paying the same. I work for a FAANG right now in Europe and I wouldn't consider even a single second any European cloud provider as potential employers.
> Europe will never have competitive offerings until they pay their employees the equivalent of what FAANGs pay.
Stop focusing on the absolute number of "$/year", and things will make more sense. Seemingly you'll be able to live a more lavish life in Spain given 1/4 of the salary compared to FAANG, yet your life is better and you can afford more.
Higher salaries aren't always better, especially when you're almost willfully ignoring more important things like purchasing power and quality of life.
> Higher salaries aren't always better, especially when you're almost willfully ignoring more important things like purchasing power and quality of life.
Senior SWE salaries I'm finding in a quick google search in Spain are 80k eur. According to levels.fyi [1] Google (and presumably the other clouds) are paying 170k eur. The comparison isn't even "is 4x the salary better in the US?" it's "is 2x the salary better in the same place?" which is obviously yes.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
Again, by focusing solely on the salary you're missing the bigger picture. I know y'all are conditioned to just focusing on the salary, but there is so much more to life.
I don't think I am. Spanish employees of Google benefit just as much from Spanish employment law as Jose's Web Dev Shop. It's the purest comparison considering it's within the exact same country.
Unfortunately my landlord does not agree and wants his payment in actual money, and so do a lot of services we rely on to live.
While this sounds like great philosophical advice, in practice big salaries do attract employees regardless. If you want to solve the "brain drain to American companies" problem, ignoring the fact that they pay better isn't likely to help.
But you still won't get with 170k in the Bay Area, what you get in Paris, Madrid, Nantes or Barcelona with 80k.
In France, if you get 80k net, you do actually get ~160k, half of which is collected/distributed before by your employer to various mutualised funds (health, retirement, unemployment, state taxes, employee benefits, etc.).
And the mechanism is somewhat similar in other EU countries.
80k net is 6.6k. If you're getting 80k (which is the very upper end of the range) it's likely you are in Paris, where you're gonna give at least 2k of that on rent for a shitty damp place, and double that for something decent.
Trust me I would love to quit consulting and be able to have a chill permanent job that can afford me a good flat and lifestyle. I'm still searching. Spain situation is very similar last time I ran the numbers.
Definitely no fucking way I'm helping anyone build a cloud provider (a cash cow considering the margins in there) for such pay. If I want to sell my soul to the devil, the one across the pond is gonna give me twice as many bucks for it.
2k for a rent in Paris gets you nice places if you have the time to spend to look for it. Cooking your own food at home definitely makes a huge difference every month.
The suburb is quite nice too, if you get a few home-office days. For 4k? you can have a big house+garden at 30min from Paris center (https://www.seloger.com/classified-search?distributionTypes=...)
As a SRE, I got 65k in Nantes before I quit, and I've never had to think about any single expense at all, not once (having kids, house, dog, car, garden). That would still have been quite confortable in Paris (swapping the house for a smaller flat, and without the car/dog/garden though).
As an American these numbers are super depressing, haha. Big city US vs Europe cost of living & wages are almost like an order of magnitude different at this point.
Big house & garden 30min from Manhattan center in practice does not even exist due to the sprawl and poor transit here.
As crazy as this sounds, 65k is the wage paid here now to a doorman/concierge at the type of apartment building an NYC SRE/SWE lives in.
If you want big house & garden that looks like the listings at your link, they are maybe 45-60min commute and 2x the price.
Dining out in NYC ends up like 2X+ as expensive as London/Paris or 4X+ Madrid due to labor/real estate costs. Maybe worse, I just looked up Michelin star 5 course menus in Paris and these are like regular Thursday night 2 course dinner prices in NYC.
So in many ways we collect a much higher gross wage here to then spend it all for a lower quality of life.
> But you still won't get with 170k in the Bay Area, what you get in Paris, Madrid, Nantes or Barcelona with 80k.
Note the 170k eur is in Spain -- not the bay area. I compared salaries of Google in Spain to the average salary of a senior SWE in Spain. The point isn't that the big tech pay more in the bay area compared to Spain. The point is the big tech companies pay more in Spain compared to other Spanish companies.
And 170k eur in Spain is much more than 80k eur in Spain.
Oh wow. If that's 170k as an employee (not a contractor), yes, that's definitely impressive.
I'm not comparing European salaries with American ones, I'm comparing salaries paid by American cloud providers IN EUROPE with salaries paid by European cloud providers.
I upvoted you. That’s absolutely true for other roles as well. Like hardware design engineers. At US company in Germany one gets real salary. At German big company one will make 2/3 of that salary. People are not stupid, why choose fraction of the salary when one can take it all. There are outliers, but majority will want to work for more than less money.
There's always money to be made from being a traitor. Maybe next time Yandex Cloud or Aramco Cloud offers you 50% more and off you go.
And yes, I've walked the talk, so I can say this.
Laughable hyperbole.
Be the change you wish to see.
If professionals like you join European companies it will help grow their business and offer competitive salaries.
~30% salary cut isn't a change many people wish to see.
There's a reason gambling companies end up paying more than market rates for the same roles, and it's not out of generosity.
That's absolutely not how any of this works.
If they can get top talent for half the salary they won't suddenly start paying more.
There is only one solution: EU governments heavily subsidize those European cloud providers which enables them to offer top salaries and therefore attract top talent.
It would also help not taxing those incomes at 60%.
Every time I look at a permanent role in Europe, if I didn't already close the tab based on the offered salary, I plug the number into a take-home calculator and then I close the tab for sure.
Sadly the EU leadership is a bunch of professional bureaucrats living in a comfy bubble completely disconnected with the people or reality.
As opposed to.. the harsh realities of the Bay Area tech scene?
I'm not happy with the upcoming techno-feudalism, but a bunch of (mostly) un-elected lawyers and economists have no clue on how to build cloud.
And it's not that they want to help EU citizens, they just want to be techno-feudal lords themselves. Or worse, more like CCP.
Everyone talking about rules and regulations being a blocker to EU software sovereignty is completely clueless. Unfortunately a lot of these people are actually European but they've drank the decades of US koolaid.
There are about 200 countries in this world. 195 of them are as of today reliant on foreign-controlled software to a similar degree, which is "completely and utterly in every facet, across consumer, business and government levels".
Let's talk about the other 4 then (excluding the US), with varying degrees. One of them has magnitudes more government interference than the EU. Another one also has both more government interference and stricter rules and regulations, both in terms of labor laws and things like data privacy - even stricter than GDPR. The third one has less of this, but still much more of it than the US, and has the lowest sovereignty level out of the four.
I've talked about three, that leaves the fourth. The fourth one is Russia.
I played this in my head a few times and don’t get it.
I assume we are talking
- China - maybe South Korea? - US (or is US not one of the 4?) - Russia (ok this is explicit)
I think there might be an interesting idea in here but there is some confusion that’s stopping it coming out
Can someone enlighten me?
You're completely right, I mistakenly left out the US so I'm going to edit it in. If you include the US, it's five. The first two are of course trivially correct. I'm leaving them unnamed in the hope that those who write all-knowingly about this topic yet can't instantly name them might realize they don't know much about software sovereignty in the first place.
The third one is definitely a notch lower than the others, as I noted. But still IMO noticeably higher than the other 196. The point still stands if you don't count them.
Many European companies are already struggling financially, especially the large traditional businesses which form the backbone of the European economy at large.
Now you demand that these companies should rip out decades of the IT systems they have built up, which form the backbone of their day to day operations and replace them with third rate alternatives, nowhere near in capability, support and coverage?
Yes, I love open source and I wish to see it succeed, but this proposal is suicidal. Even if a superior and less costly alternative did exist (and it does not, just to be clear), just the effort of switching over would ruin these companies.
As an European, I see no point in swapping one dictator for another, or one IT giant for another. What we need is to mandate FLOSS, push for an interconnected Desktop model rather than cloud+mobile, force ISPs to adopt IPv6 with a static global per host, and incentivize domain name purchases while promoting affordable home servers and declarative solutions that are accessible enough to most people so they can deploy their own services independently.
It makes no sense whatsoever to switch from Company A to Company B, you're still just a customer at the vendor's mercy.
There are certain things that would be a pain to do as the platforms we use gives us so much more than just hosting. It means a lot more operational work in our case and loss of certain functionality that has to be reimplemented using some other stack. I don't see it as feasible in the short term, nor cost effective.
I guess those million dollar bribes to the president's inauguration party were wasted
Globalism is dying. Unfortunately, peace goes hand in hand with it.
This is a pipe dream.
Also, Europe loves to impose its draconian internet laws on the rest of the world, if mutual respect for sovereignty is what they want, then they can now learn to accept the constraints of another nation’s cloud environment. Sucks doesn’t it?
States need to sponsor open source to the tune of tens of billions.
Ss the reg points out it's now national security in a deglobalization world.
I got mocked on this site for suggesting it.
But both the EU and the non aligned superpowers need open source hardware and software stacks.
It's all there already. The people did 90% of the work. Llms are here to close feature gaps, identify security issues, port code. They are great at cloning and iterative improvement.
You don't need some radical new idea. And stand up to American companies
And oh jeez, you might get a functioning tech sector of companies. That would be horrible wouldn't it EU.
Proprietary software and hardware/firmware is a weapon these days. This is a US issue as well.
Open source is the key for the entire economic stack of fabrication of computing devices in a weaponized low trust deglobalized multipolar world.
It enabled cooperation, export, multinational companies to make money worldwide
Will they also need to separate from the banking systems? As I understand it, almost every banking transaction goes through a US-based network.
Why EU-native rather than nation-native ? If you are French, your sensitive stuff must be French-native, just like Switzerland does, not "EU-native whatever that means".
There is no EU, each country has very strong different interests, on some topics, some will decide to stay close to the US, on some other topics, some will seek proximity with the BRICS, etc, etc. Constantly being in an in-between is what has destroyed Europe.
> There is no EU
> what has destroyed Europe.
Hyperbole much?
I think you completely misunderstand what the EU is, the position of its member states, etc.
It's hard to take any point you tried to make seriously given that.
Many EU countries have bought US fighter jets (Denmark for instance). Many EU countries still make it clear that they want US technology (Poland for instance). Germany is sending extremely mixed signals.
So, when it's "EU sovereignity", which is it, the Polish flavored one, or the French-flavored one ?
> Many EU countries have bought US fighter jets (Denmark for instance).
This is more related to NATO than to EU.
> So, when it's "EU sovereignity", which is it, the Polish flavored one, or the French-flavored one ?
EU is not a country. Each country within the EU has its own government, and sometimes they exist in tension and are redundant with the bloc.
It is actually a point in favor of a more federalized EU. Each individual country in isolation is too ineffective on its own.
No. "Stronger together" is a hoax, and is only true if all participants are in agreement, otherwise you are "weaker together". 20 years of failed projects (apart from the law saying that bottles should have their cap attached) show that it is impossible to reach consensus with 27 participants.
Put 27 people in a room, all wanting something different, nothing comes out.
You are wrong.
Every country in EU is materially better in the bloc, and the only country that left it is much worse for it.
Brexit was such a monumental disaster for the UK that even far right morons in other EU countries had to massively tone down if not abandon any "exit" rhetoric. Now their strategy is to "reform" the EU (i.e.: weaken it).
> 20 years of failed projects (apart from the law saying that bottles should have their cap attached)
This alone shows you are unwilling to engage with the idea of the EU in good faith, thus this conversation with you is a massive waste of my time.
The EU is not perfect (and in fact the expectation of unanimous decisions via veto powers is one if its main weaknesses). But every country, including my own, would be much worse without it.
I will not reply any further, feel free to have the last word.
If China can and will do it, it is naive to assume other superpowers with their own interests, especially when they have convenient access to your data, would not do the same. More likely in country when business is so tightly interconnected with politics.
europe is doing well enough to hinders freedom. we don't need america for that. just at the moment in france they voted law to restrict social media from teenagers. that will require ID for loging onto websites. one can already guess whats the next step. the minister in charge of this already mentionned trying to ban VPN like in north korea.
European governements WILL take your data from "sovereign" clouds
I see this differently.
For European citizens and companies the safest option will always be to have their data in the USA or anywhere where European rulers cannot touch it.
The same for Americans, their data should be safest far away from their government.
The Europeans have already cooperated with Americans so that each could read each other's citizens' private messaging which would be illegal for the locals.
Keeping the data overseas by design would just make this easier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield
Finally, this is the comment I was looking for.
If you are in France you may benefit from having your data outside of France unless it's really safe stuff (e.g. a website about your dog) and no user-generated content.
Because, if they seize your server for a case A, and they see evidence for case B, they can charge you for B, C, D, E...
Of course the government, public policy, police and intelligence folks are going to tell you:
We talk about the country (France!) which already requires you to give your ID card or take a selfie of your face to be permitted to look at porn sites.In a few months you will have to give your ID to access Discord, Meta, X, etc, and in September 2026 giving ID will be mandatory to subscribe to VPNs.
(and yes technically these services can't be blocked, but once they'll threaten you or the operators of such services with jail and big fines it will be difficult to resist).
If your server is in Russia or China, well, good luck, so many traps during the procedure that unless it is really important, the French authorities are going to give up.
Russia doesn't care about non-Russian stuff, China the same, if you own a small clone of X for example, you are much safer there, and it is easier to operate.
The only thing is that you have to make more frequent backups, as the things are less reliable there, so you can move somewhere else.
Yes, nice, true.
But sadly, it feels like pigs will be singing Handel's Messiah before Europe's leaders get off their fat asses and actually do anything about their problems.
Why should they do something about it? They are not IT people. If you want to switch, do it today. Plenty of options exist.
If you designed yourself into a corner by utilizing function as a service to program agains ta proprietary API, then you can just as well start from scratch or quit and join a company that knows how to avoid lock-in.
> The are not IT people.
They are not farmers - but it's their job to make sure that their countries have secure supplies of safe food, long-term.
They are not electricians - but it's their job to make sure that their countries have...
They are not soldiers - but it's their job to make sure...
The are not ...
...
(Yes, I suspect that we have rather different concepts of the role of gov't, and the responsibilities of gov't leaders.)
Good luck rebuilding AWS. It’s a massive undertaking if you want feature parity.
Sure, but how many people/companies are perfectly served by serverless functions + queues + gateway + database + file service? I'd guess >90%. How much of that remaining 10% can be adequately patched by lauching virtual servers?
Scaleway and OVHCloud both provide all of that. The problem is more about marketing and a modern variant of the good old "nobody got fired for buying IBM".
How about CloudFormation? CloudTrail? IAM? SSO?
If you want to make real money, you’ll need an endless amount of EE features, without which no E will commit.
You can’t survive on a few consumer features.
If Europe wants to reach digital independence it really has to look at thew big picture.
1. European banks mostly sell debt and Nasdaq/Magnificent 7 stocks to their clients. This is what EU citizen invest in.
2. Data centers run on semiconductors made in Asia and cheap energy. Software is almost "the easy part".
3. The whole migration to "the Cloud" (aka MS/AWS/Google), CAPEX to OPEX transition during the ZIRP era was a scam sold by the same ruling class that now tell you need to revert to the previous model.
4. Human capital has to be considered. Having big consulting shops making banks on exploiting foreigners is not a sustainable path to build digital independence (see the content of the recent trade deal with India, an US and Russia ally).
incompetent people, making decisions they should have made a decade ago, that will take more than a decade to implement, and will by then probably be just as outdated as this decision is now
> I'm an eighth-generation American, and let me tell you, I wouldn't trust my data, secrets, or services to a US company these days for love or money. Under our current government, we're simply not trustworthy.
Thank you Redditor, you must have forgotten about the Patriot Act and how every President since has only worsened Privacy at home and abroad (we could easily go back to the 60s, and beyond). Remember CableGate, Prism, FISA Courts, or 3 dozen other Privacy violating programs?
Yes it all started with Trumpoldemort, lest we say his name.
Why now? Why shouldn't have the world reduced its reliance on US tech platforms and services 20 years ago. Or why shouldn't they wait 20 more years.
What did happen?
IMHO Europe has one choice, and it may already be too late, and that is to adopt the China model or to descend into fascism and neoliberal economic collapse.
Europe needs to be responsible for its own security and needs its own versions of all the big American tech companies. This administration has done more to destroy American soft power than any other in history and it's not even close. The US has shown itself to be an unreliable partner.
China now has a record of decades of long-term planning and choosing the interests of its populace over corporate interests. It's not problem free by any means but the food is cheap and plentiful, the priority for housing is availability rather than treating it purely as an investment vehicle, infrastructure such as robust public transit is a priority and from the beginning of the Internet age, China has decided not to be beholden to American tech companies so there are Chinese versions of everything.
One may question Europe's ability to innovate in tech given the comparative lack of unicorns produced (vs the US) but that's irrelevant here, for two reasons:
1. Europe doesn't need to innovate. It just needs to copy; and
2. Forcing EU governments and companies to use European platforms will create a captive market.
Thus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data than not having the US have access to EU data. Also it’s not like it’s impossible to encrypt things when you store them? This article is more political than logical or technical, it’s unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive.
„Cloud“ ist a lot more than blob storage where encryption can help. As soon as you use a service that sees plain text (eg a database saas) encryption doesn’t save you from the service provider (and by extension foreign government). But as the article points out, data exfiltration is one problem, the other, imo bigger, problem is dependence on a foreign nation for critical infrastructure. The US government can decide to shut down almost all European IT and there is nothing Europe can do about it right now.
It is also about not having the US government cutting people off from their data on a whim, such as happened to the International Criminal Court.
> unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive
I don't think most Europeans want a laissez faire-style "anything goes" market, we want corporations and people to have responsibility for what they do and the effect they have. With a little bit of nuance, some government control and intervention is needed in a healthy society, because we don't want to end up in the same situation the US currently finds itself in.
I disagree on what’s needed for a ‘healthy society’ but maybe that’s subjective
It is obviously subjective, it is a political opinion.
> Also it’s not like it’s impossible to encrypt things when you store them?
Apart from Signal, do you know of an actual US service where things are E2E encrypted, including metadata, that also allows several people working on the same thing at the same time?
> not having the US have access to EU data
It is a great deal about not having US access EU data.
It is also about the US not having the power to cut the EU from essential services.
> This article is more political than logical or technical
Of course this is 100% a political matter (rather than technical). This is not a bad thing. Technical stuff doesn't live in a politic-free vacuum.
> it’s unfortunate that government control / intervention in the free market to this degree can be spun into something positive.
And this stance too.
Most blob storage is encrypted. S3 is by default.
This wouldn't address building an actual E2EE service. This is a hard issue.
CryptPad [1] does this but it has strong limitations inherent to a fully E2EE system.
(disclaimer: I work for the company which develop CryptPad, but I don't myself work on it)
[1] https://cryptpad.org
I wonder if someone could make a foss frontend for Google Drive/Dropbox/<insert product here> that transparently encrypts files on your device before uploading them, that would certainly make me worry less about those services.
https://github.com/cryptomator/cryptomator
Isn’t what Cryptomator stand for ? Am I missing something here ?
How about the metadata?
> Thus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data than not having the US have access to EU data.
The EU governments do not have free access to data in a non-transparent way. That's the main difference between EU and American laws.
> Also it’s not like it’s impossible to encrypt things when you store them?
The GDPR lets you store any data in a third country, so long as it's impossible for that country to decrypt the data. E.g. it has to be encrypted before it's transferred.
It just severely limits what you can build, to a degree where it's probably easier to just use a cloud that can be trusted to follow the GDPR.
Its past political.
I work in energy now, and we host stuff in AWS. So far so normal.
However, with the tubthumping about invading greenland, We see that america is willing to evaporate any system that gets in the way of the sun king's world view. Sure, he says now that "we were never going to invade" but given the way you've all just given up your 1st, 4th, 10th and now 2nd amendment, we're not really that sure.
This means that when the next recession happens and the EU is busy competing, he'll ask "hey we subsidies the EU by getting them to pay for AWS, why don't we turn it off?" I mean that sounds far fetched, but so did unrelated personally controlled federal militia roving around states disappearing US citizens without trial.
tldr: you're damn right its about politics. He threatened to invade an ally, we aint hanging around to find out whats next.
Also to your point: "can't we just encrypt it?"
Its someone else's computer. The TPM is controlled by someone else. You can't really process on a machine that has a compromised urandom/TPM
Also the bigger issue is having all your access revoked over night. Thats the bigger fear.
> You can't really process on a machine that has a compromised urandom/TPM
Naive question: does zero knowledge proof solutions help with this?
If you can process your stuff inside a zero knowledge wrapper then yeah. But most things can't be done like that sadly.
Exactly - it's about availability. If someone with remote access could knock out your business operations, how long would it take to adapt? How much economic cost could that incur, perhaps at a critical time?
What? Storing encrypted data doesn’t mean you have to encrypt it on hardware you don’t own
> Thus is probably more about the EU having access to eu data than not having the US have access to EU data
It's more about not being subjected to the whims of the US. High dependency on US vendors means high leverage for the US administration (export control, sanction, etc.).
They mean google docs/gmail or office365.
IMHO, this is the EU using current events to push for more power and control for itself over member states in many areas, including new areas like defence. Apparently member states and people are fine with that or even driving it... Turkeys voting for Christmas comes to mind.