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

#321

Post by daneel_w » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:32 PM UTC

smarx007 wrote: post #311

daneel_w wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Hetzner has no managed services except for the S3-compatible object storage. Scaleway is much better in that regard.

The implied question was what OP's idea of "the cloud" is, where they draw the line between "cloud" and server host. It's possible they simply aren't familiar with the Iaas/PaaS terminology.

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

#322

Post by mkl95 » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:33 PM UTC

znnajdla wrote: post #239

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…

My theory is that 80% of workloads on AWS/GCP/Azure are pure waste. They sell complexity-as-a-service. 80% of startups and enterprises could run on a single beefy baremetal server (or two). AWS/GCP/Azure are the result of hype bubbles and VC-funded waste culture, it's not necessary for Europe to recreate that to compete.

This is an uncomfortable truth on this site, because many of us work for a FAANG company or FAANG partner. If the cloud hadn't grown that much in the last decade or so, the software industry would be relatively unpretentious.

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

#323

Post by bborud » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

convolvatron wrote: post #307

mark_l_watson wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

exactly. in HPC we all understood that it was a tradeoff between money and time, and that the curve was exponential. if you wanted to race ahead of todays capabilities, you could, but you couldn't go very far without burning alot of cash. because of the investment story about being first and building a moat, we have companies torching 100s of billions of dollars to see who can climb that exponential the furthest. we…

This kind of reminds me of an old paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9912202

Of course, we are no longer in the clock speed doubling era, but computer does get faster still.

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

#324

Post by vanschelven » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:37 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…

Europe managed the first ~60 years of computing without the cloud just fine, and (as per greybeard HN-style comment) one can in fact wonder how much of the past 15 years of innovation has actually brought us for "your average org".

Also: there may be _a_ chance that the situation will improve, but as the Dutch say "Trust Arrives on Foot, but Leaves on Horseback" and your even given your "even if" the trust thrown away in the past year will take literal decades to repair.

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

#325

Post by csantini » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:37 PM UTC

Aws Gcp Azure have overbuilt, you don't need most of those services to build scalable and reliable infra for large institutions

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

#326

Post by generic92034 » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #260

generic92034 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s a chance that the current situation will start to resolve itself in 3 years and we go back to normal, however that might look. There is almost no chance for that, as lost trust does not return instantly.

In politics things work differently: you have people that "spat on each other" today and tomorrow they'll act like they are brothers and the spitting never happened.

It is a bit more than "spitting on each other" which now is between the USA and its former allies. I seriously doubt that we will just go back to normal the moment there is a US president from the Democratic party. Possibly in some areas of politics and economy, in others (real) trust is more essential.

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

#327

Post by thunfischtoast » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

znnajdla wrote: post #239

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…

My theory is that 80% of workloads on AWS/GCP/Azure are pure waste. They sell complexity-as-a-service. 80% of startups and enterprises could run on a single beefy baremetal server (or two). AWS/GCP/Azure are the result of hype bubbles and VC-funded waste culture, it's not necessary for Europe to recreate that to compete.

I once had a working program, running on a 4 GB RAM virtual server with MongoDB. Everything was fast and testing and deploying a new version took me some minutes usually. Existing users were happy as far as I could tell.

But then some corporate IT guy mandated everything had to be using managed AWS services in some three tier dev-test-production setup, despite having no prior experience with that on either side. Cost went up at least 25-fold, the development sucked, new deployments took 30? minutes minimum (because now everything has to run through some build-system I did not control and I had to manually copy keys around every time). I left the company, but I think the product exists to this day with less than 1000 customers. Nothing my 4 GB VS could handle...

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

#328

Post by smarx007 » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

daneel_w wrote: post #321

smarx007 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner has no managed services except for the S3-compatible object storage. Scaleway is much better in that regard.

The implied question was what OP's idea of "the cloud" is, where they draw the line between "cloud" and server host. It's possible they simply aren't familiar with the Iaas/PaaS terminology.

I posted a link to what most cloud-native developers understand to be "cloud" a few times already. If IaaS is the only offering on the table, it's not cloud.

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

#329

Post by ExoticPearTree » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:41 PM UTC

arter45 wrote: post #267

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

In my book a cloud provider is a provider where you can spin up VMs at scale, offers multiple geographic regions across the world, offers managed complementary services such as S3, CDN, GLB, IAM, Managed Databases, backup & restore, FaaS, container registry, managed K8s or another container orchestration platform, PoPs around the world.

Hetzner has an S3 compatible offering, a VPS offering and that's it. Their core business is renting physical servers. And I see lately they offer a load balancing service.

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

#330

Post by newsclues » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

9dev wrote: post #195

no_op wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of this could be standardized and packaged into a product, a modern take on the 'server appliance.' Unpack some gear, plug it together according to a nice diagram, connect to a management console that feels familiar to anyone who's deployed to the cloud.

That's essentially the bet of https://oxide.computer

Yeah, this seems like a big opportunity for that business model.