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

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

#271

Post by Juliate »

mgh95 wrote: post #94
embedding-shape wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wil…

> 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 t…

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.

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

#272

Post by mark_l_watson »

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…

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?

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

#273

Post by Nextgrid »

jeffrallen wrote: post #72
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.

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…

Offer just half of the typical AWS cloud bill and you'll magically have lots of candidates! But greed often doesn't let companies pay any more than "market rate" even if it means paying twice that to AWS or a vendor instead.

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

#274

Post by lillecarl »

embedding-shape wrote: post #117
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.

> to a EU registrar Which one? I've been using DNSimple for so long, been trying to find something equally developer friendly who is based in Europe but haven't had much success. Used to use Gandi before DNSimple but it's obviously down the drain today.

I use Scaleway as my registrar, I don't know if i can automate domain registration but I don't have to. They have APIs for managing records if you choose to host DNS there too.

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

#276

Post by [deleted] »

Nextgrid wrote: post #257
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…

> 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 equival…

[deleted]

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

#277

Post by daneel_w »

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.

> 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?

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

#278

Post by 202508042147 »

tmtvl wrote: post #158
202508042147 wrote: post #49

As a European, I am glad that this is finally discussed in the open! I have made multiple comments in the last weeks that one of the most important things, for me, is an alternative to the Visa/Mastercard duopoly. And yes, I can use an app to pay, but whenever I rent a car or purchase something online, I still use one of these two American companies. Why isn't the European Commission mandating these app payments in d…

> yes, I can use an app to pay So you move the power from two American companies (Visa and Mastercard) to two American companies (Apple and Google)? What's that supposed to solve? Also, fuck apps. I had to set up an app for my mother to recharge her new hybrid car and I am not joking: at one point I had to create a log in for her and was greeted by a screen with two options: Log In (blue button, white text), and Log…

> So you move the power from two American companies (Visa and Mastercard) to two American companies (Apple and Google)? What's that supposed to solve?

Unsure what you mean, but for context I use an app developed by a consortium of local banks and it works by scanning a QR code. Indeed, I use an Android phone but my next one will be a de-googled one like a Fairphone with /e/OS. Hopefully the same app will work there...

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

#279

Post by skywal_l »

Epa095 wrote: post #270
ExoticPearTree wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ne…

Yes, we need a posix of productivity tool. You want to work with a EU government, you have to use this and that open standards. This is the way to break that particular monopoly.

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

#280

Post by dariosalvi78 »

buckwheatmilk wrote: post #210
202508042147 wrote: post #49

As a European, I am glad that this is finally discussed in the open! I have made multiple comments in the last weeks that one of the most important things, for me, is an alternative to the Visa/Mastercard duopoly. And yes, I can use an app to pay, but whenever I rent a car or purchase something online, I still use one of these two American companies. Why isn't the European Commission mandating these app payments in d…

It just plainly makes sense for central bank to offer a digital payments solution. Right now if I want to pay for something without 3rd party taking a cut is to mail the money in an envelope as if EU Central Bank denies existence of digital economy.

they're working on it, but it'll take time: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
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