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Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

theregister.com

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Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#261

Post by omnimus »

pjerem wrote: post #55
atmosx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 sove…

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).

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#262

Post by ArtTimeInvestor »

alibarber wrote: post #99
ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #47

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 Te…

How much of the stuff that is under control of the US cloud companies has any need for being in an ‘AI’ datacentre? Does a store of healthcare records need AI? The state portal for renewing passports? The tax administration? I seemed to be able to use all of these things online before the latest boom in AI came along.

AI will be involved in all processing of data. Everything that is human work today will be done by AI tomorrow.

So if Europe will rely on US AI infrastructure, nothing is won by moving the old CPU bound processes off of US cloud infrastructure.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#263

Post by andsoitis »

202508042147 wrote: post #58

Last week I migrated our db away from AWS RDS to a European cloud provider. Everything runs fine and we also have it cheaper! One of our domains is due for renewal in a couple of months. I'm setting up the transfer to a EU registrar for it next week. This all takes time and it's not the most important thing for the bottom line, but on the long run I'm sure I'll look back and say it was a great investment.

> Last week I migrated our db away from AWS RDS to a European cloud provider. Everything runs fine and we also have it cheaper!

If I may ask, why didn't you choose the cheaper option before? What do you think you're trading off, if anything?

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#264

Post by SkiFire13 »

blell wrote: post #67
preisschild wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

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)

By that logic the president of the USA is also "not elected"

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#265

Post by Etheryte »

tryauuum wrote: post #93
atmosx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

when you compare IT stuff to cars, the discussion pivots to discussing cars, please think twice before using any analogies / comparisons with the physical world

But discussing cars is great, just like the Porsche 964 Carrera 4 Jubilee.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#266

Post by Nextgrid »

vachina wrote: post #172
ExoticPearTree wrote: post #169

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…

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.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#267

Post by arter45 »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #173
bambax wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Ok, I'll bite. Why is it not a cloud provider? Most importantly, what is a cloud provider in your definition?

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#268

Post by EinigeKreise »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #66
nullsanity wrote: post #33

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…

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.

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?

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#269

Post by pjmlp »

dumbfounder wrote: post #254
pjmlp wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My solution is that sustainable companies are more worthwhile to society, than late scale capitalism companies that always lay off employees when the exponential growth targets set by their C suites aren't met.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#270

Post by Epa095 »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #255
armcat wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

> 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 solut…

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.

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