Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by esskay » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 1:30 PM UTC

202508042147 wrote: post #161

rookonaut wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you disclose which European cloud provider you chose?

We went with Hetzner as we already had good experiences with their VPSes. For this particular db migration, a resonably sized VPS with volumes does the job for us. We don't have planet scale operations so the lowish IOPS is not an issue atm. Also, with this experience at hand, I am confident that we'll manage another migration if need be.

Did the exact same thing for a client who's ops we managed on AWS. I was pretty against ditching RDS and a load balanced setup for hetzners load balancer and 3 instances (2 web, 1 db) but honestly, it's been pretty smooth sailing. The sites faster, and costs dropped massively, saving the client approx €900/mo for a better service.

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

#202

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 1:31 PM UTC

UltraSane wrote: post #174

albert_e wrote: post #171

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 cur…

Can any AWS data center really be immune from US national security letters?

[deleted]

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

#203

Post by abdelhousni » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 1:31 PM UTC

First, Europeans must change their mindset and be really willing to become free.

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

#204

Post by bborud » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 1:31 PM UTC

Etheryte wrote: post #85

niemandhier wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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

#205

Post by shaky-carrousel » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 1:32 PM UTC

202508042147 wrote: post #135

627467 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People tend to fixate about cutting edge technology, but my naïve intuition says the problem in Europe is not in lack of some secret sauce: it is hidden in plain sight lack of energy to run the DC - and worse - lack of long term desire to make the tough choices to get that energy

I would also add lack of technical competence at C level. In my previous job, I have dealt with quite a few European CEOs whos only background was an MBA. Unlike the US where a lot of CEOs have a deep technical background...

Of course. One only has to take a look at Microsoft, Apple, or Google, to notice that they're run by CEOs with a "deep" technical background. No MBA whatsoever...

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

#206

Post by 9dev » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 1:32 PM UTC

Black616Angel wrote: post #104

9dev wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 manag…

But you can rent on-prem servers in some datacenter near you where all that is done for you.

First off, servers on someone else's premises are by definition not on-prem; and second, it still leaves you with a lot of the maintenance, management, and documentation overhead that comes with operating infrastructure equipment.

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

#207

Post by the_real_cher » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 1:32 PM UTC

albert_e wrote: post #185

vachina wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consumers are domestic EU so you don’t really need the reach and availability of the big 3.

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…

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?

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

#208

Post by thibaut_barrere » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 1:32 PM UTC

albert_e wrote: post #185

vachina wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consumers are domestic EU so you don’t really need the reach and availability of the big 3.

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…

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.

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

#209

Post by convolvatron » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 1:34 PM UTC

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…

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.

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

#210

Post by buckwheatmilk » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 1:34 PM UTC

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.