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

#211

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

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)

> 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

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

#212

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

esskay wrote: post #191

the_real_cher wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theres tons of good cloud providers in the EU.

Name some. Some that match those kinds of services mentioned that people need from AWS.

scaleway, ionos, hechner, ovcloud.

They may not have every single thing that AWS has but you can build solid infrastructure on top of those.

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

#213

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

s_dev wrote: post #200

esskay wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name some. Some that match those kinds of services mentioned that people need from AWS.

https://european-alternatives.eu/ Based on your comment you probably aren't gonna discuss in good faith but move the goalposts each time.

What makes you think I'll move the goalpost - the original question was pretty clear; EU cloud providers who offer services like AWS does.

What you've linked to is a broad scope site listing a multitude of EU based products and services, making it look like you cant even list ONE let alone a few .

Don't pull the 'moving the goalpost' nonsense, the original post you replied to made it very clear they were talking about an AWS comparison, and a cursory glance at the 'cloud providers' section of that site shows a bunch of EU hosting providers offering general VPS hosting, which isn't remotely close to being the same kind of thing.

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

#214

Post by 4nonverbal-alit » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 1:34 PM UTC

bborud wrote: post #144

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.

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 do…

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.

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

#215

Post by armcat » 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…

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.

[1] https://evroc.com/ [2] https://mimer-ai.eu/

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

#216

Post by matt-p » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 1:36 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…

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.

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

#217

Post by dijit » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

esskay wrote: post #213

s_dev wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://european-alternatives.eu/ Based on your comment you probably aren't gonna discuss in good faith but move the goalposts each time.

What makes you think I'll move the goalpost - the original question was pretty clear; EU cloud providers who offer services like AWS does. What you've linked to is a broad scope site listing a multitude of EU based products and services, making it look like you cant even list ONE let alone a few . Don't pull the 'moving the goalpost' nonsense, the original post you replied to made it very clear they were talking abou…

“you offer managed databases, but RDS supports x”.

I can see it coming already, no point in extending this thread

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

#218

Post by input_sh » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

s_dev wrote: post #200

esskay wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name some. Some that match those kinds of services mentioned that people need from AWS.

https://european-alternatives.eu/ Based on your comment you probably aren't gonna discuss in good faith but move the goalposts each time.

Yeah this is just circular reasoning. You don't go from zero to AWS the same way AWS didn't go from zero to what it is today. They started with a few basic features and built up from there. There are plenty of EU alternatives that have those same basic features AWS had a while ago, but until it makes economic sense to replicate all of it, no EU company is going to do so.

Whether you can switch from AWS to an EU alternative depends solely on how deep down the rabbit hole you are. If you're just looking for basics to host your stuff, you can. If you want to never have to touch Linux but to rely solely on proprietary abstractions on top of Linux, you can't.

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

#219

Post by matt-p » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #25

nubinetwork wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I heard that hetzner was pretty cheap, haven't looked myself though...

Price is probably not the only factor in competitiveness.

They are OK but I would not have them as my /only/ cloud.

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

#220

Post by XorNot » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

moffkalast wrote: post #146

omnimus wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ot…

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 crash…

That's the point though: there was never a particularly compelling reason to move so no one did. 5 years ago "what if America starts making threats?" would've been a ridiculous notion.