Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native
(theregister.com)746 points by jamesblonde a day ago
746 points by jamesblonde a day ago
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
> 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 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?
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.
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 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?
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.
> 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 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.
> 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.
>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.
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 )
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.
scaleway, ionos, hechner, ovcloud.
They may not have every single thing that AWS has but you can build solid infrastructure on top of those.
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 :)
> 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".
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.
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.
But you can rent on-prem servers in some datacenter near you where all that is done for you.
Most European "cloud" providers sell "wood": https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/dear-hosting-providers-you...
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
+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?
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).
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.
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:
Amazon: $100B
Alphabet: $90B
Microsoft: $80B
Meta: $70B
Tesla: $20B
Deutsche Telekom: $1BHow 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.