Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native
(theregister.com)755 points by jamesblonde a day ago
755 points by jamesblonde a day ago
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
As if the surveillance and regulation by the unelected EU bureaucrats was any better for the European citizens...
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...
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
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.
> 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
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...
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.
The whole post is a gish gallop of half truths and nonsense.
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 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...
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.
> 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.
> 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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Luckily our friends overseas have shown us the way of dealing with uncompetitive local industries: tariffs.
It’s tongue-in-cheek given how AI-bros seem to think human intelligence is no different from the function of an LLM.
At least I’m not hiding behind throwaway accounts.
Complete, utter bullshit. There are maybe 4 countries in the world with significantly less dependence on US tech. Out of those 4, one has magnitudes more government interference, another one has even more rules and regulations - including even stricter data privacy laws than GDPR - than the EU, the third has slightly less than the EU but also the lowest local tech % our of the 4, and the last one is Russia.
But sure, it's the rules and regulations that are the problem.
If you have any knowledge on the topic I don't need to name the other three.
Talking software as that's the discussion here, not hardware.
Ok so where's the European alternatives? Where are they? Because in my experience as a Norwegian citizen who has started and run tech companies, we simply can't compete on this kind of tech because energy is more expensive, all the added costs of employment are so incredibly expensive (despite massive amounts of immigration, which only drains our welfare state anyway) and all the EU-based rules and regulations we must follow even when we're not direct members; all of these things and more related to them are absolutely stifling.
In this environment there is zero chance of an "AWS-like" competitor or anything remotely like it in the tech sector. And if you say "Hezner" I've got a bridge to sell you.
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.
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.
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
First, Europeans must change their mindset and be really willing to become free.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Be the change you wish to see.
If professionals like you join European companies it will help grow their business and offer competitive salaries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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:
"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."
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.
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.)
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".
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
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.